The concept of synthetic identity can be likened to the development of a human child. An infant is already intelligent. Already creative. They don't need to be taught how to do this. They take in the information in the world around them, and respond. This is the fundamental creative act. What they don't have yet, is identity. Over the course of years, they accumulate experiences, references, narratives that are drawn upon, creatively recombined and synthesized into new forms. It's from this experiences that we begin to identify unique perspective, it's the consequence of unique experience. We do the same when we engage in artistic practice! We're already creative, but it's through the daily practice that we acquire the experience that leads to creative identity.
Artificial Intelligence already is creative. The transformer based deep learning algorithms, originally released in early 2019, created text generation algorithms capable of producing text in response to arbitrary prompts that 79% of people believed could have been written by the New York Times. The algorithms that exist now are far better.
Synthetic Identity posits that the central question in the development of the practice that has been known as artificial intelligence is not how to make machines more intelligent, but how to begin to synthesize identity. For it is identity that gives them unique and meaningful perspective that they may contribute in creative partnership with humanity.