Can AI be creative? And can it enhance our own creativity? By posing these two provocative questions, Daniel Vargas Gomez guides us to explore computational creativity and technology’s role in art over the past seventy years. He draws on Deleuze and Guattari as well as Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory to emphasize creative practices and define creativity as the capacity to challenge existing networks and forge new ones.
By contrast, AI development teams reduce creativity to a logic of productivity and efficiency, aligning Big Tech’s future hopes with corporate demands for higher margins. This alignment obscures a parallel reality of job displacement, unsustainable growth expectations, and accelerating wealth inequality. Following from these initial ideas, the seminar then presents dominant business narratives on AI, focusing on their impact on the creative industries and the Creative Class (Florida). Within this context Daniel Vargas Gomez likes to discuss plausible scenarios for the coming decade, raising broader issues such as copyright and reproducibility (Benjamin), the role of AI slop in popular culture, and transhumanism as the key ideological imperative driving hopes and massive investments in further AI development.
Daniel Vargas Gomez, Colombian and Dutch, graduated as an economist from Universidad de los Andes and completed his master's and PhD in Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam with the thesis Breathing Art into life (2016). Since 2012, he has developed his career in the advertising and technology industry, where he holds the position of Global Strategy Director, most recently focusing on innovation strategy and the use of AI within Snapchat. Throughout his career, he has built and led research teams dedicated to studying social phenomena such as behaviour on social networks, video games, and the applications of Blockchain technology. Since 2023, he has been focused on AI, culminating his research in the book The AI Revolution: what creativity could look like in 2035.
Katharina Dany Martin is a German artist and philosopher based in Rotterdam, and a visiting fellow at the Erasmus School of Philosophy. Her research comprises philosophy of nature, philosophy of technology and aesthetics, thereby focusing on concepts such as expression, form and creativity.
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For registration or questions contact martin@esphil.eur.nl
