This paper examines a use of AI in creative practice as an interpretive sounding board for human-generated material, rather than the more familiar pattern of AI generation followed by human curation. Through the lens of resonance as theorized by Hartmut Rosa, I present a first-person case study of songwriting from July 2025 to March 2026, drawing on 16 original pieces in English, French, and other languages along with piano solos. I describe a configuration in which resonance is not located between user and model, but in the author's deepening contact with their own material, mediated through the model. This kind of resonance was supported rather than inhibited by AI when sounding-board behavior was cultivated through sustained calibration by the user. Two failure modes appeared when calibration was absent: sycophantic drift and magical overinterpretation. This account suggests both the potential and the risks of AI as an interpretive partner in creative practice.
Ahmed M. Abuzuraiq, Philippe Pasquiercs.HC cs.AI cs.LG cs.MM
Explainable AI (XAI) in creative practice can be less about technocentric explanation and more about enabling artists to inspect modify and debug models as part of making Yet largescale texttoimage diffusion systems are typically presented as opaque endtoend tools limiting this kind of material engagement We argue that even large models can function as creative materials when their internal structure is made visible and manipulable To support this we propose a handson approach to explainability centred on experimentation and intervention We instantiate this approach with a model bending and an interactive (inspection) interface integrated into ComfyUIs nodebased workflow including interactive layer selection and intervention controls Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of bending interventions in Stable Diffusion 15 we show how manipulating specific components of a diffusion pipeline produces relatively consistent families of visual effects allowing artists to build practical layerlevel intuition about how different parts of the model shape generated images