We need to embrace AI's humanity to unlock its creative promise

As we consider AI's power, we seem to forget one central, indisputable fact: AI is a product of human interactions. You'd never guess this from reading the frequent headlines on the subject. Commentators see future AI as a kind of Skynet-style artificial general intelligence (AGI), where computer systems will not just beat someone at Go but will become the next Picasso or Drake or merciless cyber-overlords. Even Stanford's admirable attempt to bridge disciplinary gaps in the field of machine learning and computer intelligence, its new Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, plays subtly into this fallacy that humans are somehow tangential to AI. Yet there can be no data without humans. There can be no training of models or analysis of results without humans.