Apothecary Shed

(crossposted to BIML)

I was honored to be asked to present a talk on my thesis work in Nancy at the Automatic Type Design 3 conference. Though I certainly loved working on Letter Spirit, my thesis with Doug Hofstadter at Indiana University, in the years since I have been helping to establish the field of software security and working to make machine learning security a reality. So when I was asked to speak at a leading typography and design conference organized by Atelier national de recherche typographique / École nationale supérieure d’art et de design de Nancy, it came as a delightful surprise and an honor.

Scott Kim shows an illustration of the gridfont microdomain.

Here is the abstract I ginned up:

ML/AI, Typographic Design, and the Four “I”s

During this talk I will touch on Intuition, Insight, and Inspiration. First I will set the context by introducing the Letter Spirit project and its microdomain — work I published exactly 30 years ago as a Ph.D. student of Doug Hofstadter’s. I will spend some time discussing the role of roles (and other mental structures) in creativity and human perception. Then I’ll take a quick run through the current state of “AI” (really ML) so we get a feeling of how LLMs actually work. We will talk about WHAT MACHINES and relate them to human cognition. Finally, just as I get around to intuition, insight, and inspiration, I will run out of time.

As you may already know, intuition, insight, and inspiration are all deeply human things missing from current AI/ML models. Thirty years ago, we were trying to move toward a theory of design and creativity steeped in a cognitive model of concepts that would exhibit all three. Needless to say, there is plenty of work to be done even thirty years later. The good news is that human designers have nothing to fear. Yet, anyway.