NAKED AI: Cisco Italia and Logotel’s research on human creativity and artificial intelligence

The pandemic has changed the needs and working habits of both people and companies. Faced with this change, such tools and technological solutions as Artificial Intelligence now seem to better support business and daily work. But what does it mean to collaborate with AI? What impact does it have upon our companies, our organizations and our decisionmaking processes? What possibilities does it offer us and what responsibilities does it impose upon us? These are just some of the questions to which the NAKED AI event, organized by Cisco Italia and Independent Design Company Logotel, sought to jointly answer with its interdisciplinary panel of experts. The debate, forming part of a more extensive research project in which Cisco Italia and Logotel, poses questions on the impact AI is having upon the world of business, ethics, bias (a distorted, subjective interpretation of reality), emotions and the creative process. The docufilm, entitled “NAKED AI: What happens when Artificial Intelligence and human creativity meet?” was screened as at exclusive preview during the meeting. In it, 9 international experts -including scientists, designers and artists- lead us in reflections on how AI and human creativity manage to jointly collaborate and how we, as individuals and organizations, are called upon to make increasingly urgent decisions around living in a fairer and more participative society.

“Artificial Intelligence could be the very genie in the lamp we’ve been seeking in recent years,” says Gianpaolo Barozzi, People & Community Innovation Lead at Cisco Systems. “Our team analyses trends in the future of work, including AI itself, which we wanted to study by first stripping it of any overly technical and esoteric characteristics – as if it were some black box to be accepted without discussion. We’ve partnered with Logotel in working to include a wider design vision and meaning, affording this research an anthropological slant and the form of a documentary film that’s made the topic of AI as popular as possible in order to bring it closer to people and so feed the debate. Because, after all, if AI can indeed be the genie in the lamp then it remains our responsibility to understand what it is that you wish to express.”

“It seems talking about creativity within a context such as the one we’re experiencing begins to come as increasingly urgent,” says Logotel Chief Design Officer & Strategist Cristina Favini, “and Artificial Intelligence can potentially become a coveted ally. Indeed, what does happen when human creativity and AI meet? Here, together with Cisco, it was our wish to offer a response via an free lens, free of prejudice and through a study that seeks out connections – and not man-against-machine in opposition or, by contrast, presenting AI as some cureall remedy. Lending meaning to choices comes with any great ability to design. At Logotel, as independent design company, we felt the need to better come to grips with AI, to render ourselves increasingly aware of how it remains always we, as human beings, who’re behind everything: choosing, directing, designing. True, AI empowers us. Yet it also imposes new responsibilities upon us as designers, as organizations, as people. Because in a context where humankind is more fragile, we even more need to understand our role in the new challenges that await us in the dimensions of ethics, aesthetics and the qualification of people. That’s what we believe in.”

At www.naked-ai.com you can view the full version, for free, of the docufilm NAKED AI: “What happens when Artificial Intelligence and human creativity meet?” while going into further depth on the topics addressed by the research project and various interviewee biographies.