What are Creative Collaborations?

Many people from different countries and fields, from art to science, pooling their knowledge and experience to create something together. The book *Plurality* describes how online collaboration tools and AI that generates text and images widen its reach, while warning against homogenization and monopoly.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia built by strangers all over the world, each adding a little. No single genius wrote it. Creative Collaborations are efforts like this, in which many people create something together. The book ⿻ Plurality argues that online tools and AI can widen their reach still further.

In short

Creative collaboration means many people from different countries and fields, in anything from art to science, pooling their knowledge and experience to create something together. The book's chapter summary puts it this way: "'Creative collaboration' allows people to work together on projects ranging from art to science, blending their intelligence and experience" [1].

The book describes how online collaboration tools and AI that generates text, images and sound (in the book's terms, generative foundation models, or GFMs) greatly widen its reach. At the same time, it warns against "homogenization", where everyone ends up making similar things, and against monopoly by a few companies [1][2].

For example

The Vesuvius Challenge (2023–24). A prize competition to virtually "unroll" and read, from scanned images, ancient scrolls carbonized in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD [3].

To counter information siloing, the organizers introduced smaller "progress prizes", awarded every two months, that required participants to publish their code or research as open source. The published results built on one another: a tool for tracing the surface of the scrolls, the identification of a "crackle" pattern forming letters, and a technique for adapting AI to a different kind of data [3].

The Grand Prize of $700,000, announced on February 5, 2024, went to a team of Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old college student; Youssef Nader, a doctoral student in Berlin; and Julian Schilliger, a recent graduate of a Swiss university. They went beyond what was asked, recovering an additional 11 columns of text containing more than 2,000 characters [3].

The Netflix Prize (2009). The streaming company Netflix offered a million dollars to the team that could beat its own movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. According to the book, the competition "dragged on for more than two and a half years and only succeeded in the end when the leading teams gave up working alone, but instead combined with diverse other teams and their diverse algorithms" [4].

This book itself. Plurality was written by many people across continents, using GitHub, a platform for collaborative software development, as its main writing space. It is published in a form anyone can freely use (CC0). In the book's words, "we have blended voice samples of many participants to create an audio version read in our common voice" [5][6][7]. → Plural Management Protocol

In more detail

Cocreation is old, but it was slow and expensive

The book writes that "the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita and the Homerian epics were all almost certainly written by many hands over generations." Scientific collaboration required massive shared facilities like Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was developed [6].

According to the book, artistic expression such as music, visual art, theater, architecture, film and cooking is among the strongest foundations shaping a group's culture. It is not as intense as experiences that share every sense, but it reaches much further [2].

Online tools have already changed things

The book lists collaboration tools that grew up on the internet: Slack for chat, Notion and Google Docs for documents, GitHub, Wikipedia, Hugging Face for developing AI together, online courses, Kickstarter for crowdfunding, and others. These, the book writes, have transformed how people create together [6]. → The Lost Dao

In a 2020 opinion piece, Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl pointed out that the value of collaborative work is hard to see. Search engines would be worth much less without Wikipedia, which people made, they argued; yet Wikipedia is a poor nonprofit, while search engines have become among the most valuable assets there are [8].

Different people working together win

The Netflix Prize story is told following the argument of Scott Page's book The Diversity Bonus: that diverse groups reach better answers [4].

The book goes further and writes that "One might even use this conception to reimagine neural networks as social networks, simulating diversity and disputes between people with diverse perspectives." Simulating many perspectives at once may be what accounts for AI's strength across a wide range of tasks, it suggests [4]. → collaboration across social difference, supermodularity

Practices of tomorrow

The book names four emerging practices [7]:

Synthetic instruments and generative art. The musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have used AI to sing in the voices of historical figures, and to let others sing in their voices.
Cross-cultural collaboration. AI translates not just languages but cultural styles.
"Alien art". Instead of mimicking people, AI takes our thought in directions people are unlikely to find. The book cites research showing that interacting with the strategies of a Go-playing AI trained only against copies of itself increased the novelty and diversity of human players' moves.
Digital twins. Simulated social networks populated by AI agents that behave like people are used to test ways of ranking posts and see how they affect conflict and the splitting of opinion.

Further out, the book sketches creative exchange that does not go through words, collaboration with dolphins and octopuses, and even collaboration with minds of the past and future [9]. → Post-Symbolic Communication

What is debated

The book itself, citing Dave Eggers's novel The Circle, lists several dangers [10]:

Loss of privacy and autonomy. The constant demand for openness stifles individual creativity.
Homogenization of creativity. Systems meant to help collaboration smooth over unusual perspectives and unconventional ideas "in favor of consensus and algorithmic predictability". The book calls for AI designed to bridge ideas and communities that rarely connect.
Over-reliance on technology, and gaps between those who can use it and those who cannot.
Exploitation by companies. Work is taken over on corporate platforms and used for surveillance and manipulation. The book writes that by reducing the incentive for creativity, such traps "risk killing the goose of creativity and diversity that lays the golden eggs of training GFMs in the first place."
Erosion of cultural diversity. Global platforms overshadow local expression and minority voices, ending in a single culture.

As remedies, the book names open-source technology and ⿻ principles. It describes how artists such as Herndon and the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt champion designs that harness AI while ensuring creators are credited and paid [11]. → data dignity

The book also writes that to prevent homogenization by a single medium, "we must bolster the space for the even deeper intimate connections and reflection on which creativity depends", which the more intimate technologies can support [11].

Where it fits in Plurality

Part 5 of the book sets out seven forms of collaboration, and Creative Collaborations is the third. It comes after Immersive Shared Reality and before Augmented Deliberation [1].

Chapter 5-6, "⿻ Voting", writes that collective decisions only take on meaning in the context of creative collaboration, deliberation, imagination and administration [12].

Sources

Plurality, chapter summaries (Chapter 5-3) — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/blob/86158859464aee75633acd854c656928121a7fd8/contents/english/8-blurb.md ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-3, introduction after the break following the opening — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-3, first three paragraphs — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-3, section "Creative collaboration tomorrow", paragraphs 1–2 — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-0, opening — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-3, section "Cocreation today" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-3, section "Creative collaboration tomorrow", bulleted list — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl, "AI is An Ideology, Not A Technology" (WIRED, 2020) — https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ai-is-an-ideology-not-a-technology/
Plurality, 5-3, section "Frontiers of creative collaboration" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-3, section "Limits of creative collaboration" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Same, last two paragraphs — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-6, section "Limits of ⿻ voting" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］

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