Эксперты призвали сохранить человеческое творчество в эпоху искусственного интеллекта

In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Penelope is the seemingly abandoned wife of Odysseus, holding off her suitors by weaving a magnificent funeral shroud for her father-in-law by day and unraveling her progress by night. That image of Penelope at her loom—creative, resourceful, resolute—came to mind as I sat in the audience at the Times Center in New York City for the second annual Shared Futures conference on June 17. I was listening to Amandeep Singh Gill, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies. “Artificial Intelligence is giving us an extraordinary loom,” Gill told the attendees. “A loom of power that can discern patterns—weave patterns, images, music, stories at astonishing speed. But even the most advanced loom does not decide what story is woven. It does not decide which threads matter most. That remains the work of human beings.” That call for creative agency in an age of AI returned again and again throughout the day’s program. The featured speakers—artists, scientists, technologists and storytellers—all related how they are using this powerful new tool and grappling with its implications for the future. They spoke of their excitement and trepidation in equal measure. And if one didn’t come away with definite answers, the questions that were raised were just as important. Shared Futures, sponsored by Aspen Digital and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, has a mission to “explore how AI is reshaping the way we live, create, connect, and evolve,” in a one-day forum that, “goes into the heart of what it means to imagine in an age of intelligent machines.” The program was a mix of demonstrations, panels and interviews. Commentary followed performance, with presenters often referencing what they and the audience had just experienced in real time. Opening a door to new futures Kelly Boesch was the first artist of the day. She projected her signature animations—AI generated sequences of surreal imagery touched with human longing. And she shared how AI has transformed her career from graphic designer to multi-disciplinary artist. “Here’s what happened since I began working at the intersection of art and AI,” said Boesch. “A mainstage TED Talk, a solo exhibition at W1 Curates in London, an installation of photographs in Stockholm, inclusion in a show at the Busan Museum in South Korea, here standing with you, and—this next one still stops me—a record deal with Network Music Group.” She then continued, “AI didn’t take opportunities from me. It created ones that had no prior path. The door to a record deal for an artist like me didn’t exist a few years ago. It opened because I stayed in the room.” Individual artists can choose, like Kelly Boesch, to embrace AI as a tool. But where do creators stand as an industry and community? That was addressed by Ted Tremper, writer, producer and interim executive director of the Creators Coalition on AI, in a conversation with storyteller, producer and podcaster Baratunde Thurston. In an age where the dominant Silicon Valley ethos has been to “move fast and break things,” Tremper and the Creators Coalition advocate for a more deliberate approach, where artists across every discipline come together to set ground rules for the use of their works and intellectual property in AI models. As a rejoinder to feeling powerless at the hands of big tech, Tremper reminded the audience of creators that they always have a say. “The beginning of the solution is quite simple,” he advised. “It begins with us rejecting the narrative that the future is inevitable. The future is not inevitable. We decide.” Will it be easy? Will tech companies voluntarily give artists their due? Tremper is a realist. But, as he pointed out, a recent poll found public approval of AI lower than that of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). There is an opportunity here for tech to get it right. Keeping the human body in the loop Sougwen Chung, artist and researcher, and founder of Studio Scilicet, and Dr. Catie Cuan, dancer and roboticist, and founder/CEO of ART Lab, spoke right before lunch and introduced embodied movement to the discussion in a pair of talks titled “Extensions of Ourselves.” Chung began with a warning. “AI produces an optimization at the risk of understanding,” she said. “It decouples artifact from process, results from labor. It removes the body.” Her work, which she calls “Embodied Collaboration,” blends machine and human action. Agency and risk go hand-in-hand in her performances, whether it’s with a pair of robotic arms made of metal and wire, or silk proteins from the Bombyx mori moth cocoon. Both Chung and Cuan called back 100 years to the birth of the word “robot,” a derivation of the Czech “robota,” which means forced labor. It was popularized by Karel Čapek’s 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, a dystopian drama where human beings are overwhelmed and eventually replaced by their artificial servants. In her presentation, “Dancing Robots,” Cuan argued for a more affirming way to live and interact with machines. One of the leading figures in the new field of choreorobotics, Cuan combines her deep understanding of human movement from her years as a professional dancer with a scientist’s knowledge of AI and mechanical engineering. “My mission is to make these nascent technologies like AI and robots more whimsical, humanistic and widely accessible. I do this through business research and art. To me, it’s all the same thing,” said Cuan. This expresses itself through her new company, ART Lab, that aims to humanize robotics—and by helping the next generation rethink the traditional barriers separating art and tech. To spontaneous applause, Cuan informed us that, “I teach the first cross-listed class [at Stanford University] between computer science, theater arts and performance studies. It’s called Robots in the Arts.” Mindful learning and the deep fake of competence But what can we do right now? Returning to the theme of personal and collective agency, Dr. Poppy Crum, neuroscientist and technologist, demonstrated the way our brains respond to working with AI. We experience friction and cognitive load every time we learn, she explained. And that’s good for us. But with chatbots and prompting, there is a danger that we will favor efficiency over effort. “Germane cognitive load is where your brain is working,” said Crum. “Without germane cognitive load, you do not learn things as deeply. You cannot abstract it. I call it the deep fake of competence.” Ultimately, the choice is ours to make. Do we use AI for insight—investigating huge datasets and finding hidden relationships—or do we use it for efficiency? Neither is good or bad. What Crum asked of everyone, was to be intentional. “Be your own neural architect,” she said. “AI is changing you with or without your agency.” Investing in people, no matter what As the day wound to a close, Vivian Schiller, Vice President and Executive Director of Aspen Digital, took the stage with Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO of The New York Times Company. Schiller began the conversation by asking Levien how The New York Times, celebrating its 175th birthday this year, is incorporating AI into its operations. Levien responded by first making clear that a company that has survived and thrived as long as The New York Times has, by necessity, needed to stay current with technology—whether that was print, digital or artificial intelligence. Levien described how the newspaper is using AI as a tool for journalists to report stories that would otherwise be impossible to cover. A light-hearted example she cited was having machine learning interpret aerial photographs to determine how many tennis courts have been changed to pickle ball courts, while a more serious use case was their recent analysis of the more than three million pages of Epstein documents released on a Friday evening and written about just hours later. But Levien made an explicit distinction between using AI as a tool and having it replace the intention and meaning making of human journalists. That is a point of pride for her. “The story of a successful New York Times in 2026 is the story of a company that said, in good times and bad, everything else be damned, the most important thing we can do is keep investing in journalism and journalists and the creative people who produce that journalism,” she said. A time of apprehension and desire It was a full day. In addition to the 10 presenters mentioned in this article, there were another 15 who shared their joy, fears and hope around creating with AI. Nearly four years out from the public release of ChatGPT, with artificial intelligence dominating the news in arts, academia and business, the current outlook is neither wholly positive or negative. That nuanced appraisal was evident with every speaker and performer. I imagine a similar nervous excitement greeted the first years of the printing press in the mid-15th century or the invention of photography in the early-19th. That the presenters and hosts of Shared Futures 2026 embraced the complexity of our time was, I believe, welcomed by everyone in attendance. Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, addressed this tension in his opening remarks, setting the stage for a conference of remarkable honesty and value. “What do we do when we’re uncertain?” asked Dhar. “We sing. We write poetry. We create art. We come together to express ourselves—to put structure around fear, to turn confusion into rhythm, to build beauty that brings us together and turns loneliness into community.”