Will AI technologies really kill creativity, as some critics suggest? Certainly not metacreativity, at least according to Eduardo Navas in his new book, The Rise of Metacreativity: AI Aesthetics After Remix (2022). This must-read text for all those interested in the emerging relationship between AI and art has the merit of not considering the development of these technologies as a phenomenon that has suddenly turned the tables but instead placing it within a historical and theoretical framework rooted in our cultural, political, and economic past. The aim of the book, the author states, is to demonstrate and reflect on “how an advanced state of creativity has emerged and is connected to human history.” It is precisely this advanced state that he calls metacreativity.
The science of invisibility remains largely theoretical and abstract. It is in the literature that the field comes alive, and Gbur may be the world’s leading expert on invisibility fiction. His book includes both a bibliography and an invisibibliography that despite running several dozen entries long is, as Gbur cheerfully admits, incomplete, “considering how many stories I found through a cursory browsing of old pulp fiction magazines.” Gbur’s interest in invisibility fiction is chiefly scientific in nature. He is more concerned with descriptions of fictional invisibility mechanisms than in the ways authors use the concept to examine themes of free will, desire and fear of the unknown. But it seems worth noting that the dominant tone of invisibility literature is abject terror.
Somehow, one forgives the madder moments for the sheer brio of the writing, the sting of the jokes and the razor-edge of the historical insights. When it is good, it is really that good.