AI’s Silent Partner

The Role of Silence in a Noisy Digital Age

AI produces a lot of information. Information without meaning is noise. Discerning and deriving meaning from that white noise of data is a modern day art form. As time passes we who regularly engage with these platforms build up a skill-set, a fairly modest one in my case, in how to get the systems to work for us. One question there, of course: is it training us in the same way that Google trained us to use search terms and the ghastly Excel software teaches us how to create workarounds for even the simplest of tasks? But that's another article. Today I am thinking that the real trick in this AI-saturated world isn’t what we make it say, but what we let it leave unsaid. Silence is a vital counterpoint to AI-driven noise in fostering creativity.

Modern media can often feel like you are engaging in a battle to get what you want. The war zone is centred on your attention, and all the combatants have a steroid-fuelled megaphones. But unfortunately louder is just louder–not more important, not more relevant, not even deeper.

But as humans we’re wired for pauses. We have to let ideas gestate in the quiet. Silence isn’t dead air—it is where the really interesting ideas come from. We know it instinctively with works of art. The best ones defy analysis or rationalisation or any other kind of mind chatter. They go straight to the depths, re-emerging again and again, giving us pause for reflection and altering our world view in important and valuable ways.

Even in the trenches of entrepreneurial activity, the best pitches don’t drown the audience in data—they give the audience room to think. Being snowed with information leads to cognitive overload that nobody likes. We instinctively know that too much information can conceal more than it reveals.

This is true from my experience of writing these short posts. The background reading was the kind of effort that a farmer puts into tilling the soil. Necessary to provide the right environment for growth but not the growth itself. The information gleaned from reading wasn't the post but its essential antecedent. There was a gap between the collated data and the end result. A silent gap. Very often what I ended up writing was quite different from what I intended. There was a space, an important space, where activity of another kind took place. All I really know it was a quiet almost silent space. But it brought life to data through me in its own way.

Creativity peaks when challenge meets skill. I have noticed that when I am totally engaged with an activity that as deep intrinsic interest to me I lose sense of time and the world does go kind of quiet. There is very little noise in my head. That seems paradoxical but it has been my experience. Creativity may need information, skills, but it also happens somewhere quiet out of our normal sense of time passing.

In their paper, ‘How Does Creativity Happen,’ John Ruscio and Teresa Amabile describe the following steps: “Problem presentation, preparation, response generation, and response validation,” as the creative path. While that is clearly a sound evaluation and description of the necessary steps for creativity it leaves out gestation and reflection. An AI system can follow those four steps faithfully to produce a logical and valid end point. But without rumination and the mysterious combinatorial forces that we know exist but cannot nail down, it is merely computation. If it was only the latter then AI would be the most creative force on the planet, or potentially the Universe.

In the flow experience one doesn't notice time pass. The same is when you are truly silent and quiet, time also seems to disappear. What goes on in this silence is unknown to me, and I have not seen any good explanation elsewhere. We just have to accept, until we know better, that this is how creativity works and give the process its due respect.

Good entrepreneurs and artists get this. AI can churn out a hundred business plans and a dozen graphic representations before breakfast. But if we step back, let the silence do its work, we might unearth something that exists outside of purely logical processing, something real perhaps.