PNWS members gathered in Wayne Bunker’s inviting back yard in Southeast Portland, full of plants and beautiful ceramics sculptures, for our July meeting. We sat in a circle under an outside awning and listened to a presentation by Wayne’s daughter, Karin Davenport, a marketing executive at Cigna Healthcare.
Karin is a recent graduate of a six-month global program designed to keep creativity at the heart of business and society. Much focus of the program was on how to honor creativity in the world of AI. For those of you who were not present, you can imagine that her presentation initiated a lively conversation.
Karin noted that one of the largest threats of AI was the proliferation of mediocrity. Karin noted that unlike the majority of people in the circle, the next generation does not feel compelled to use AI. She said they are suspect of anything that AI touches.
Topics of the discussion included ethics and morals in AI systems, the job hunt in the age of AI (dependent on networking), and the need to provide people with a memory anchor to cut through today’s bombardment of information. A memory anchor, according to Karin, is a something you would share with a participant or a customer to help them remember the moment that he or she encountered your art. As an example, Karin offered each person a bookmark that she and her kids had made for the event as a way to remember the discussion we had.
According to Karin, artists have a natural advantage in the world of AI because our work is real and it can be touched. She encouraged people to embrace AI for the tasks that require no creativity, such as creating a calendar of events, so the artists could free up more time for making art.
