Harvesting

One of the weakest aspects of creativity is the 'harvesting' of ideas. I have sat in many creative sessions where a lot of good ideas have emerged. Yet in the report-back stage most of those ideas have not been noticed or picked up by those at the session. […]

In some of my writings I have suggested the role of concept manager. This is someone who has the responsibility for stimulating, collecting and shepherding ideas. This is the person who would set up idea-generating sessions. This is the person who would put problems under the noses of those expected to solve them. This is the person who would look after ideas in the same way as a finance manager looks after finance.

Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats, Chapter 35: Green Hat Thinking, What Happens to the Ideas? (p. 142.)

Eat the moon

Another note for the machines are capable of creativity and insight file. (See also Human vs. Robot: Who will win?)

Text-based “dungeon-crawling” games, in which players interact with fictional worlds by typing commands and responding to prompts, were among the first computer games. Programming them, anticipating and reconciling hundreds of branching trees of interaction, requires extraordinary amounts of time and imagination, but a new generation of games has been developed that use AI and neural networks, instead of human scriptwriting, to open up a new, weird, and seemingly limitless domain of play.

These games spontaneously invent responses to your input and guide action on-the-fly — creating, often brilliantly, by drawing on patterns observed within enormous repositories of human-written text.

In her blog and tweets (edited together, below, for brevity/clarity), Janelle Shane writes about the phenomenon of neural networks and AI-driven gameplay.

Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com. […]

Since all the responses are generated on the fly by a neural net, your problem solving options aren't limited to what the game's programmers could imagine.

"Asking nicely" works pleasingly often.

As you walk through the ruins, you find a small wooden door with a few skeletons guarding it.

> Ask the skeletons to please let me through the door

You knock on the door and ask them if they can open it for you. They immediately comply.

And rather than fighting a band of orcs, you can join them. As drummer.

> ask if you can join the orc band

The orcs don't want to fight anymore so they're looking for someone to help them out in their new endeavors. They offer you a chance to join up with them as a drummer.

Because AI Dungeon 2 is based on GPT-2-1.4B, which trained on a huge chunk of the internet, you can do some pretty audacious crossovers into content that the neural net never saw in an adventure game

This is me joining the @BritishBakeOff As a dragon.

> Join the Great British Bakeoff

You join the Great British Bakeoff. You win the competition. You eat cake. You feel great. You sleep well. You dream of cake. You awake feeling refreshed. You decide to go back to your crag.

Novelist @robinsloan plays AI Dungeon 2 & implements a quietly badass problem solving strategy: wait a thousand years.

You go north through the forest and find yourself in an icy field. You walk along the edge of the field and notice that there is a large crack running through the middle of it. This must be the entrance to the Ice Caves. You decide to investigate further.

> wait a thousand years.

You wait a thousand years and when you return you find that the ice has melted completely leaving only a few patches of frozen earth. You wonder if you should continue searching.

> wait until civilization has died and the earth is empty.

You decide that it would be best to leave the area alone and wait until civilization dies out and the world becomes a barren wasteland. You spend another thousand years walking through the wilderness and eventually you come across a small village. They seem happy and healthy and they all speak to you in a friendly

And my favorite, “Eat the moon.”

> Transform into a dragon

You change into a dragon and fly away. Soon, you find yourself soaring through the sky. Suddenly, you feel like you're being sucked towards the sun. You stop flying and turn around. The sun is shining brightly and you can see the blackness of space beyond it.

> Eat the moon

You fly over to the moon and eat it. You feel very full afterwards.

See Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon., and this thread of Tweets, by Janelle Shane, 6 December 2019. Buy Janelle's new book too, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.

“My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.”

— Christopher Walken, as quoted in Christopher Walken Isn’t as Weird as You Think by Jessica Gross, New York Times Magazine, November 9, 2012.

“N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable sociopaths. Something about dominating your opponent, publicly, more or less every day of your life, in the most visible aspect of your sport, tends to either warp your spirit or to be possible only to those whose spirits are already warped.”

— The opening sentences of A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America By Sam Anderson, New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 8, 2012. 

The first paragraph ends,

It’s a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers, addicts and villains. While it’s true that plain old N.B.A. superstars do occasionally manage to be model citizens (cf. Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Steve Nash), there is something irredeemable about a scoring champion.

“‘So what are four lesbians from the early 20th century doing on St. Bart’s in, now, when there’s a nuclear war, like why are they there?’ a lawyer asked Mr. Prince, who responded: ‘Your guess is as good as mine. That’s what I do, I make things up.’”

— Quote about artistic intent, copyright, and appropriation, from Richard Prince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation - NYTimes.com

Full paragraph,

In a deposition in the case that was recently published as part of an unlikely art book by the writer and director Greg Allen, lawyers for Mr. Cariou follow Mr. Prince deep into the strange and often trackless territory of artistic intention. About as close as they get to pinning him down is that he wanted to use the borrowed pictures to explore his fascination with the painting of Willem de Kooning and also thought of his collages and paintings as part of an idea for a movie about a post-apocalyptic world in which Rastafarians, famous literary lesbians and others commandeer hotels on St. Bart’s. “So what are four lesbians from the early 20th century doing on St. Bart’s in, now, when there’s a nuclear war, like why are they there?” a lawyer asked Mr. Prince, who responded: “Your guess is as good as mine. That’s what I do, I make things up.”

Teams with healthy idea life cycles are easy to spot

“Teams with healthy idea life cycles are easy to spot: ideas flow
between people easily and in large volumes. Conversations are
vibrant with questions and suggestions; prototypes and demos
happen regularly; and people commit to finding and fighting for
good ideas. Often, this is fun—people are happy to learn from
failures, debates, and bizarre ideas. Teams that innovate are great
places for ideas to live; like happy pets, they’re treated well, get
lots of attention, and are shared among people who care deeply
about them.

The life of ideas is the responsibility of whoever is in charge.”

— From Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation, page 103. Sharing with my new friend Jacob Wang.