# Draft of Eindhoven Research Proposal The aim of this research proposal is to develop an account of how generative AI systems can contribute to human flourishing in creative and intellectual work. On a tradition going back to Aristotle, human flourishing is considered a matter of exercising and developing one's capacities, a view which has been taken up in several recent accounts such as Bradford (2015) and Dennis (2020). The emergence of various generative AI systems early in this decade, however, has put pressure on creatives' and knowledge workers' opportunities to flourish in this way. If Midjourney can produce a finished illustration from a prompt, why train as an illustrator? If ChatGPT 5.5 Pro can improve a known bound on an open problem in number theory, as it recently did, why train as a mathematician? One reason for this is that generative AI systems make certain forms of creation _frictionless_. Not only can an image or a piece of text be produced in moments, but it can be produced with little or no knowledge or effort on the part of the person who wants it. Danaher and Nyholm (2021) have described cases of this kind as opening an _achievement gap_, in which the product of an activity is still produced while the person no longer carries out the part of it that was worth doing; generative AI opens this gap in creative and intellectual work. The effort these systems remove, however, is the exercise of the capacities in which flourishing was said to consist. This reaches even those who decline to use such systems. Once the frictionless route exists, working in the old way becomes a deliberate choice to take the harder road, and such a choice invites the charge that the person is merely placing obstacles in the way of their own creation. Obstacles adopted for their own sake turn an activity into a game (Nguyen 2020), so on that description the person who opts out has not protected their flourishing; they have made their work into a game. The threat cannot be met, then, by keeping the work hard. The difficulty worth keeping has to be told apart from arbitrary obstacle: difficulty internal to the work, met with skill and tied to the person's own purposes, as against difficulty imposed from outside for its own sake. Progress on this issue requires a recognition that generative AI systems are quite different to ordinary artifacts or digital artifacts. First, while a user has complete control over the hammer they are holding, or the word processor they are using, with an LLM or an image generator, this control is only ever incomplete. In previous work, my co author and I have compared such systems to nature, in that they “autonomously generate and dynamically shape things in ways that are so complex and chaotic to appear unpredictable”. Second, due to the very large amount of data (e.g. images, text) that they are trained on, generative AI systems are *potent*: able to produce an extraordinarily wide range of outputs. - The aim of this research proposal is to develop an account of how generative AI systems can contribute to human flourishing in creative and intellectual work. - On a tradition going back to Aristotle, human flourishing is considered a matter of exercising and developing one's capacities, a view which has been taken up in several recent accounts such as Bradford (2015) and Dennis (2020). - The emergence of various generative AI systems early in this decade, however, has put pressure on creatives' and knowledge workers' opportunities to flourish in this way. - - If Midjourney can produce an image that looks like a illustration in moments, why train as an illustrator? - If ChatGPT 5.5 Pro can %%say this more clearly and less jargony, what did accurate news headlines describe it as?%%improve a known bound on an open problem in number theory, as it recently did, why train as a mathematician? - Such advances put pressure on a key aspect of human flourishing: creative and intellectual work. - If Claude Design can create a stunning piece of graphic design, why bother putting in the work required to become a good graphic designer? As LLMs make inroads into mathmatics %%finsoh with recent example%% - Even if a creative decides to ignore generative AI completely and work as they have always done, it...%%something something, about the market convenience, but also just the knowledge that one is deliberately going the long way around (maybe compare explorers vs nowadays)%% - %%The problem of friction-less vs unnecessary obstacles, uncessary obstacles would make creative work literally a game, at least on Nyguyen's account%% - The aim of this project is to %%something something%%A framework for how creatives and intellectuals can use generative AI systems in such a way that contributes to, rather than diminishes, human flourishing. - This project starts from the idea that generative AI systems are a distinct type of artifact. - %%succinct definiition of Midjourney as a dynamic medium which is never in complete control of the creator (ref my paper)%% - Very often, these systems are very data dense %%is there a technical term for what I mean here%%, this leads to them being very *potent*. - The next step is to consider the ways generative artifacts are/can/should be used. --- --- # Actions ---