Written by Nao Tokui
Translated by David d'Heilly
Book design: Yurie Hata
Cover graphics: Shoya Dozono

This book is a translated and revised version of my 2021 Japanese book on AI and human creativity. However, it goes beyond that and delves into my personal history and statement as an artist, musician, and founder of AI creative and music companies. It explores my journey of augmenting my limited musical creativity with AI capabilities and my aim to help others with the tools my team and I are currently developing.

In 1997, I encountered an artwork by CG pioneer Karl Sims at a digital art museum in Tokyo. Sims’s installation was based on the concept of evolutionary computing and artificial life. In the accompanying description, Sims stated his lack of understanding regarding the evolution of the virtual life forms in his simulated world: “I had no idea how these virtual creatures evolved, and I cannot design them manually myself.” This one sentence intrigued me a lot. As a junior computer science student at the time, I struggled daily with debugging and managing software behavior. Sims, on the other hand, viewed unexpected behavior as a feature rather than a bug. This realization made me understand that a computer system can be creative and surprise its designer. Since then, my focus has been on creating AI/computer systems that surprise me and others.

Later, I discovered that this is the exact question that AI pioneers like Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace contemplated. While mentioning these historical figures, including arguably the world-first “AI Artist,” Harold Cohen, in the book, I also delve into various topics such as:

- How Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine novelist/poet, provides new perspectives on creativity and AI
- TR-808 and Hatsune Miku on how machine imitation of artistic endeavors failed and yet flourished.
- The intersection of imagination, Japanese tea ceremony, and AI hallucination
- The risk of AI-based optimization and tales of peacock tail
- Why the world's best Flamenco dancer decided to perform with his AI simulacra
- Personal experiences of DJ-ing alongside AI in front of over 15000 people
- What is the lesson surfing gave me on the future of AI and creativity


《From the publisher》

AI is upon us, poised to wreak havoc on virtually every labor sector. Humanity’s saving grace, we are told, is that we’re creative, whereas AI is not. This book, by noted AI Ph.D, and internationally recognized award-winning musician and AI artist, asserts that AI proposes a new creative field of fostering myriad ancillary forms of creativity, and that these forms of “alternative intelligence” propose a creative renaissance and prosperous future.
The book functions as a sort of artist’s notebook, how Tokui came to his understandings from creating using AI, topical examples from AI in creative industries, common mistakes to avoid in understanding the problems before us, fun anecdotal ways for understanding creativity and AI from literature, music, and painting history, and apparent contradictions with how we, as a society, tend to approach creative practices. The book frees us from preconceptions about what we need to do to move forward, creatively, in an age of AI, with specific examples from leading creatives using AI, including detailed explanations based on the author’s own work.

Surfing human creativity with AI — a user’s guide is a fun read, and a gateway to a meta-universe of new meta-universes where each of us can explore and thrive.


— Translated and revised from the 2021 Japanese Book — Winner of the Okawa Publishing Award 2021

《Specifications》

Pages: 174 page
Binding: Paperback
Dimensions: A5 (5.83 x 8.27 in / 148 x 210 mm)