This weekend I went to see The Dog Man Musical. It was a live performance. Throughout the show, I felt really impressed how the actors moved through different roles, scenes, and moods. They accomplished this all with simple props, voice changes, and accesories. For example, one character was both L’il Petey, a tiny cute kitten, a nurse, plus other minor characters and scenery. To switch between the nurse and kitten, she put on an orange hat with ears or a nurse’s hat. When she was the kitten, she unrolled her orange shirt sleeves which had black stripes on them. The point is, the actors did a few small things and my imagination filled in the gaps. This demonstrates the magic of live performance and the power of our own internal creativity.
During the show, the main set remained the same, inside of a treehouse. However, similar to the actors changing roles, the treehouse transformed into many different scenes. Again, this was accomplished with simple prop changes, most of the which the actors moved on and off themselves as part of the action. For example, during the two hospital scenes, the patient lay on a desk in the treehouse. Then one of the actors held up a sheet so we didn’t actually “see” the action, but got a strong idea of what was happening anyway. After, the sheet was removed and we saw the end result. Again, our imaginations taking care of some steps.
With the introduction of generative, and now agentic AI, on the scene, I feel concerned about our imaginations. Sometimes too much automation and technology isn’t beneficial for our development. The other week I read an article in the NYTimes, “What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity.” In short, the results were not good. Based on the analysis, the essays submitted post-AI demonstrated less variety and range of original, different ideas. Basically, the use of AI was resulting in a more limited number of ideas. This is presumably because AI is based on prediction derived from what happened previously. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for something new, innovative, and totally different.
Sometimes less is more when it comes to developing and cutlivating our imaginative powers.