Curious Experimentation

Adults don't play.

This is sad. These thoughts passed through my mind as I watched a group of grown-ups chase one another around my daughter's high school band practice room. Several grown adults, primarily strangers, pretending to be different animals playing a game of tag in the character of an animal was the improv game that started this chain of thinking and has had me wondering about why we forgo the ability to embrace silliness and fun-for-the-sake-of-it once we become "adults." You can sign up for an improv class in your hometown to experience a moment of awareness like I did firsthand.

When people get together to solve a shared problem or follow the loose rules of an improvisational theater game, the results are impactful. The more we let our guard down and release our defensiveness, the better the result. Simply put, we need the opportunity to explore creative thinking simply for the sake of it. Creative thinking is an adult man figuring out how to make his body look like an elephant or a kangaroo whilst being "it" in a game of tag. Creativity is also my brilliant niece, who is well on her way to her PhD, creating novel gel mediums in her lab. Creativity is cooking a multi-step meal for your family to celebrate a religious holiday (Chag Sameach! — to my Jewish friends today). Creativity is putting a banger outfit together before your keynote speech, not to mention the keynote speech!

Yet, we put our creative hat away further and deeper into the recesses of our lives as the years progress. Creativity gets bucketed into a domain of people who exist within the realm of arts and entertainment, with a bit of design and innovation on the side.

No, creativity is not a skill reserved for a select few. It's the natural state of human beings, a state of creative flow. Our ability to think across domains, collaborate with others, explore novel ideas, fail, and try again with often ridiculous levels of determination, is our innate human creativity. It's what has propelled us from the primordial soup to the top of the animal kingdom.

A Novel Tool for A Novel Time

One major obstacle that hinders our creative flow is the fear of doing things wrong. We all grapple with the fear of failure, which can block us from being open to the flow of creative thinking. Fear acts like a chastity belt for our brains—no good in or out. Forgive the analogy, but old troupes from the patriarchy are ripe for reclaiming.

This is why I created an app. Is this a random interjection of a sales pitch? No.

But I am so excited to talk about the fruition of almost two years of mental labor (of love)❤️. Conceived as an idea but only born now, my app is in private beta testing.

You can gain access to TheFaceOfAI by attending one of my and Julia Coit's workshops, such as Women & AI, which we ran today. If you would like access to the private beta but cannot attend a workshop, fill out this short survey, and I will add you to the next private beta testing group, which will open in two weeks.

I loved the result of today's workshop. In the app, you are given access to various AI models by way of interfaces that guide you in prompt generation. An interface is simply the part of an application that the user interacts with. I love building interfaces. It is interactive world-building at its best, but even when the solution is incredibly practical, there is nothing better than shaving off hours of repetitive tasks or annoying button clicking; the power of an excellent interface is in these moments.

TheFaceOfAI is an interface tool for AI. I am just getting started, but here are some of the ways you can work with AI through the app:

1. Design an empowering avatar as a reminder of how unstoppable you are.

2. Generate ideas for your personal or professional life with high-level specificity in a single prompt.

3. Generate perfect prompts you can reuse within TheFaceOfAI or elsewhere in other AI tools.

4. Learn about AI through the interactive learning tool, print, and share your lessons with your team.

5. Generate task-specific templates and getting-started documents for anything you can think of, then visualize the idea!

6. Change your thinking or flip it upside down. With TheFaceOfAI, you can work from images to text in your ideation process and flip back and forth, whatever works for you. The name of the game with AI is finding how you can leverage the power of this technology stack most beneficially. That may seem daunting, which is one of the reasons I built TheFaceOfAI.

In our workshop today, our audience created empowering avatars for themselves. Here are some of the ones they shared after creating in TheFaceOfAI.

If you are wondering what is happening with the deodorant application in one of these images, my fabulous friend Esther made these. She owns an incredible skincare company, Ujjayi, which you should check out and support here.

I wanted to create a place that feels inclusive, intriguing, and functional. By guiding you through prompt generation (no typing required!), I am providing creative guardrails for one of the biggest hurdles AI presents as a generalist tool: where to start.

Build Your Ideal

I have been coding with AI as I build out TheFaceOfAI, and this is just another area where AI can give an advantage to a seasoned programmer and an entry point for someone just getting started. The same tool functions differently based on what you bring to the table. No other technology has acted as a mirror to our humanity. AI is biased and imperfect, but we improve technology by being participants and leaders.

For those of us who get left out of the tech conversation— like everyone who isn't a young guy living in the valley — AI is democratizing access to tech. We are at the tip of the iceberg with AI regarding its potential and use cases. We have a long way to go before more apps are built with inclusivity and accessibility at their core. I know human interaction is the secret sauce to defining the result, and that is why I am focused on the interface in TheFaceOfAI. Let the tool be your medium for exploring ideas you bring to life with creativity.

The journey of building TheFaceOfAI has been one of merging technology with human experience.

TheFaceOfAI offers a way to explore ideas, solve problems, and create with ease—reminding us that creativity isn't just for pop stars, art museums, and primary school but the core of why we are human and how we create our best work.

This app is a way to help each of us reconnect with our creative instincts, which we often forget. AI is not a replacement for our ideas but a partner that helps bring those ideas to life. So with that, I hope you are excited to try the tool when it is live and, more importantly, that you feel a bit more empowered and a lot more curious because my ask for you is that you embrace curious experimentation as a way of being in your interactions with technology, new (and old) opinions, and anything else life throws your way. You can join the waitlist for the next private beta here, and until next week, be kind to yourself and someone else.

—Cheers, your resident technologist and creative maven, Sonia a.k.a superSonic. 🐝

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