Sam Steele - AI and Creativity

Podcast

Intro

Hello Sam Steele. It is an honour to meet you today. We are very interested and excited about you and your career,. Thank you for giving us your time. We are here to interview you and find out more about how you can help us to do what Graham Fink says we should - which is to - think differently. Let’s go

Hello Sam Steele. I would like to ask you if it is was hard for you to start your career, as you described your career as a “squiggly “ career? We wonder what you mean by this?

Our second question is to do with what is it like being at the centre of creativity of AI and do you like what you do everyday?

Our third question is - I agree with you about us being the creative ones, as human beings, but how does an iPhone (other phones are available) or a laptop help us become more creative?

Our fourth question is what learning did you take from working in both radio and TV and we see that you helped your husband in his restaurant chain - so we wonder how all these links make sense to you?

What is it about AI and creativity that inspires you, and how do we as children stay safe with AI?

I would like to ask you is being nosy or curious about everything, good or bad as I am always taught by my Mum to not be nosy?

I always wondered if being creative is about being different. What do you think about this Sam and who inspires you to stay creative?

How do you organise your ideas and train yourself to spot an opportunity to be creative?

Do you think schools will ever be the same again after AI takes over? What do you think we should do next as a media team to embrace and work with AI?

Q10

What do you do to help someone who isn't showing themselves as finding creativity as a natural and easy thing to do? How do you help others to be creative?

Q11

If you could work with us on one project - linked to AI - what would this be and how could we help you do so?

Outro

Sam - this was incredible. We have learnt so much about both creativity and how AI has helped make your career interesting. We thank you for your time and we hope to work on a project with you in the future. please remember us, because, Together we can...

Sam Steele, Managing Director at the Centre for Creativity enabled by AI

Background

I have had a very scattered career – and my career path is much more likely to be one that the students will experience themselves. It is what might be called a “squiggly” career path, in that it is not a straight progression in a single field. There is, however, one clear thread that runs through my disparate experiences.

Currently, I am the managing director of the Centre for Creativity enabled by AI. It is a research centre at City St George’s University of London, that was set up 4 years ago. We wanted to explore how computers, particularly the new large language models we call AI, could help business-people to think more creatively.

Now I don’t know much about coding or algorithms, but I do know about business and creativity and, most importantly, how to communicate new ideas to different audiences. And so, I thought that this might be quite an interesting job to do.

I have always been driven by doing things that I found interesting. When I left school, I was interested in music and going to see bands play live. I thought to myself how can I get to do more of listening to music and going to gigs? And, by doing lots of junior jobs like making the tea and answering the phones, I finally managed to get myself a job as a music journalist, writing about pop bands in the 1990s.

I then worked on music TV shows and at BBC Radio 1. The thing that writing and making TV and radio programmes all have in common is that they are about communicating ideas and putting things into context in interesting and engaging ways.

I loved working in radio, but my husband was in trouble, and I wanted to help him. My husband is an entrepreneur. He had started a restaurant chain selling good quality burgers. He was struggling, because he is very good at finance, but not so good at communicating his ideas and his vision. I had lots of experience communicating ideas, and I applied what I knew about music to food and to the customers we wanted to get to eat our food, and most importantly of all, to the people who worked in our business.

After building our business into a very successful company, we sold it for a decent amount of money. I decided that having left school at 18, now I was ready to go to university and learn some new and interesting things.

I took a master’s degree in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership at Bayes Business School in London. After I graduated, there was a research team being set up to explore AI and businesses creativity. I thought that sounded interesting and so I applied to help run the centre and organise what it worked on.

Now, I don’t know much about computers, but I was interested to learn more. And what I have learnt over the past 4 years that I’ve worked with AI is this; whatever the powerful new computers can do, and whether or not we will have robots and driverless cars in a fully automated sci-fi future, human beings are uniquely able to think creatively in a way that no computer code can.

Creativity relies on Imagination and Attitude to come up with unexpected and new ways of doing things. Imagination and Attitude require you to be interested and inquisitive about your surroundings. Humans ask questions and are nosey. We explore and make wild connections that have helped us to come up with all sorts of tools – from the very first sticks we used to break open fruits and generate fire to the brilliant technology that we have today. We can look around us and see things that need doing or think of different ways of doing things we already do.

Creativity is our human super-power, and at the end of the day, computers are just a tool that we use to help us do our work more effectively. No computer could have predicted my career path. I just went where my nose led me, doing things that I found personally interesting and challenging. And I am very glad I did!