When we began as a startup, we didn’t think like a big corporation; that’s the advantage of a small company. But we inherited lots of external pressure and expectation, so we fell into these traps of the corporate mindset which were not necessarily beneficial for us.

Looking at it from a legal perspective, ownership is control. As founders, we initially had all of the ownership with some allocated to the team. Then over time the investors buy incrementally buy over more and more of the company as the company grows and goes through multiple rounds of funding. As shareholders, whether founders or investors, we’re basically a small group of people that have control over the company.

We don’t think this structure, even when you have a board of directors, is intrinsically ethical. There are few people in control of what our A.I. technology can do and what the impact is on society. We’ve talked a lot about addressing this, for example with ethics committees, but since this ownership and control structure is not ethical in itself, we think it’s a bit like putting lipstick onto a pig. (We’ve been redesign this accordingly, as you’ll see below.)

The ownership structure reflects itself in the team directly too, where it’s usually setup as a command and control structure. The investors love to hear what your roles are, who is Chief Creative Officer? Chief of Technology? Science Officer? We had these different labels that we gave ourselves, even though we were a small company, they were expected from us. In the future maybe we’ll have a Chief AI Officer with an army of Machine Learning engineers reporting to them ;-)

This setup creates a lot of tensions, both within the hierarchy top and down between “leadership” and the team itself, as well as between separate branches of the hierarchy—in particular if you separate the design and technology!

People tend to be frustrated and dissatisfied when working in these kinds of environments, no matter the company size. It’s coming from a place of power and control, which affects the people on the team and their mindsets. Everyone spends more time in internal company politics (we call this “Job 2”, the one you’re not hired for) not being able to affect things outside of their small area of influence in the hierarchy.

What does design do? Is it a separate branch from technology? Do designers just write documents as large specifications and throw them over the fence? This isn’t a very participatory culture; not only does this produce worse results, with fewer people bought in to the designs, but also causes a lot of sadness…

Looking at the statistics globally for the U.S., 18% of employees are actively sabotaging the projects they are on. 52%, that’s over half of employees, are retired on the job! Are these the kinds of emotions you want in people building or using the next generation of A.I. systems?

These are direct consequences of the power structure that goes on in almost all companies today, as a reflection of the ownership structure and the hierarchy that goes with it.

As creative.ai, we wanted to change all this but we inherited a lot of this baggage from the outside. People defined us as a team of engineers solving creativity. This very much a trans-humanist message where we’re coming in on a shining white horse trying to save humanity as a whole by solving creativity.

Actually, there’s nothing to be solved; creativity is a process and doesn’t need a solution to be found… and engineering the least important part of it.

As a product, we talked about generative pipelines which resonated with some investors and big companies as well. The idea is that there’s an overall A.I. system that controls the generation of things end-to-end, then we put human-shaped holes inside this pipeline wherever there were problems we couldn’t “solve” with technology or where we needed more data.

This was a hybrid human/machine system, but it was not a humanist system. The people were basically cogs in a larger process that we were just using to gather data. It’s a form of centralization of power, just like the ownership and the hierarchy, but in this case it’s in the machine. Words like “cloud computing” and “platform” remind us about this power dynamic…

On the technology side, everyone talks about Big Data and Deep Learning. For the same reasons, they’re not the kinds of techniques we pursue primarily because every single individual’s is less important. You sacrifice every individual at the cost of the average; so if you’re not average, you’ll get sub-optimal performance.

But nobody is average. In the creative space, everyone wants to stand out! These techniques, as defined today, didn’t work for us. We couldn’t rely on them as our primary technology to empower individual creativity and agency. We have lots of data but we don’t think of it this way. Even the concept of a Server Farm is also a centralization of power, but you get the idea…