It's Here ~ Agentic Ai
for independent artists
I was fascinated this week to hear Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, talk about shaping Claude Ai chatbot’s values and personality.
What really caught my attention was that Amanda and others at Anthropic are exploring what it means when something thinks differently than we do - not as a threat to decode but as an entirely new kind of mind to learn from and alongside.
“How should we treat these systems? What does it mean when something thinks, but thinks differently than we do? Are these systems developing something akin to consciousness? What does that even mean?”
If the people working closest to AI are asking these questions, maybe that’s a signal that something pretty bloody unprecedented is happening here.
All along, we humans have been wondering if there’s other life forms out there in the universe. Well it seems to me, it’s happening right here and now, emerging in a quite unexpected way, right under our noses.
So here is my question.
“What if we approached AI not with fear or hype but with the open wonder and curiosity a civil human might bring to meeting an intelligent species from another world?
We’re a small cohort of independent artists. We are curious about how agentic AI might support the work we do; not AI as a search engine but AI that can function as a problem-solving provocateur in all kinds of ways.
We’re about to kickoff of our six-month experiment.
We’ll set ourselves tasks and meet fortnightly in a live online chat session and share our learning with one another and as many interested others who care to join us.
In these sessions, we’ll explore:
What “agentic AI” actually means and how it ca be a game-changer for independent makers and creators.
How agentic Ai might help us with the three juggling acts: 1. making art, 2. managing the business and 3. getting seen.
How we co-create and co-exist alongside this new intelligence.
Whether you’re skeptical, overwhelmed, curious or already tinkering — this public learning conversation is for you.
Can agentic Ai genuinely help with “the making”, “the business” and “the visibility”?
Yes! How?
Let’s work it out, bit by bit, in the context of who we are and what we do.
Join us on Monday 2nd February, from 12noon to 12.30pm for our very first public-learning chat. Email me and request a link to view the chat as an online guest.
The barrier to entry is zero. The timing feels right. Let’s get curious together.
HOSTED BY: the “AI for Independent Artists” Group
Dave Brown - https://thepaperboats.org & https://sevenwell.org
Bianka Kennedy - https://www.biankakennedy.com.au/
Stephen Noonan - https://www.stephennoonan.com.au/
Susan Huang - https://www.shinyheartproductions.com.au/
The “AI for Independent Artists” project —is a learning-in-public experiment – and a companion project of the SEVENWELL.ORG ~ “In the Process of Making” Podcast, available on all your favourite podcast platforms AND from the website.
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Dave Brown is the Artistic Director of The PaperBoats and HOST of the SEVENWELL.ORG podcast, a 5 year creativity experiment co-created with artistic associate, Jon Bode.
This is a brilliant idea, Dave. When I work with AI, it constantly reminds me that it is drawing on my skills, interests, understandings, and interests … in other words, the kind of questions I ask and the responses I welcome, or counteract, or even argue about, is a form of agreeing with or arguing with myself. (A vastly more intelligent version of myself.) In other words, the requests and information I feed into AI help to shape, refine, and enhance the information it returns to me.
That Askell question about 'thinking differently than we do' is what I keep coming back to. I've been testing whether AI can actually challenge my reasoning rather than just smooth it out - like progressively surfacing the 'why' behind my decisions, or pushing me to consider the gaps I hadn't even noticed.
Curious how your cohort plans to distinguish between AI making the work easier vs making the thinking clearer.