The SciSchmooze
Kishore Hare
16 March 2026
Greetings science fans!
It has been quite a week for Bay Area creativity. Last Thursday, thousands packed Frank Ogawa Plaza to welcome home Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, who took two gold medals to Milan and brought them right back to the city that raised her. At her request, she skipped the parade in favor of a celebration that would shine a light on Oakland’s artists and community.
Then tonight, at the 98th Academy Awards, Richmond-raised Ryan Coogler took home his first Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Sinners, making him only the second Black American filmmaker ever to receive that award. Two Bay Area artists, two very different stages, one very loud reminder that this region does not lack for creative fire.
The Turing Test for the Soul
Which makes this week’s AI and art event all the more timely. A recent large-scale study pitting more than 100,000 people against today’s AI systems found that some models, including GPT-4, can exceed average human scores on tasks measuring divergent linguistic creativity, a narrowly defined form of brainstorming and word association. The most creative humans, especially the top tier, still leave AI well behind, particularly when it comes to richer work like storytelling and poetry.
So what does that mean? Are we in a creativity arms race? And more importantly: does scoring well on a word-association benchmark actually make you an artist?
Researchers define creativity in two stages: the generative burst of ideation, and the harder work of convergent thinking – deciding what to make, and then making it. New research from the University of Houston found that in the implementation stage, AI is still very helpful for everyday users, but creates more work for expert creators, because they have years of training to materialize a piece of artwork, and AI uses different techniques that can be burdensome to revise.
In other words, AI might help you brainstorm, but it struggles to know what the piece wants to be. That intuition, the thing that makes an artist reach for a different color at the last second, or as Alysa Liu would say, just perform to the music and let the gold follow, remains stubbornly human.
Which brings us, naturally, to Apple. Fifty years ago next month, two Steves founded a company in a garage with a radical belief: that the tools of creation shouldn’t be locked in corporate mainframes but placed in the hands of regular people. That idea didn’t come from nowhere. It came from the Whole Earth Catalog, from Stewart Brand’s conviction that access to tools was a form of liberation – that the act of making something, whether music, a farm, or a computer program, was itself a political act. This week’s lineup draws a straight line from that moment to our current AI-saturated present, and asks whether any non-human entity can truly be said to create.
Meanwhile, at Año Nuevo…
Speaking of Bay Area wildlife drama, it is not all peaceful sunbathing on the rocks right now. A bird flu outbreak first confirmed in elephant seals along the California coast has since spread to sea otters and sea lions at Año Nuevo State Park in San Mateo County, with scientists in hazmat suits monitoring the situation on the ground. The popular guided seal tours have been cancelled for the rest of the season. It is a sobering reminder that the Bay Area’s most iconic wildlife, the very animals Jeff Miller will be celebrating Thursday night, are never far from existential threat. Conservation, as it turns out, is not a passive spectacle. It is an ongoing negotiation between humans and the wild world that, with a little luck and a lot of work, surrounds us.
My Top 3 Bay Area Science Events (March 16 – 22)
- Think Different: Apple, the Counterculture, and Digital Culture, 1976-2026 (Monday, March 16, San Francisco) Apple turns 50 on April 1, and this event at Manny’s is one of the more substantive ways to mark the occasion. John Markoff and Fred Turner, two of the best chroniclers of how the Summer of Love became Silicon Valley, join American Studies scholar Peter Richardson to trace the hippie values baked into Apple’s founding DNA, and ask how those ideals fared as the company became one of the most valuable on earth. If you have ever wondered how Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog connects to your iPhone, this is your evening.
- Tales of Animal Sex, Murder and Mayhem (Thursday, March 19, Berkeley) Naturalist and conservationist Jeff Miller brings his Bay Area Wildlife guide to the David Brower Center for what promises to be an irreverent and entertaining tour through the region’s most charismatic fauna. Tule elk, elephant seals, river otters, beavers, bald eagles, burrowing owls, salmon, condors: the full cast is here. Come for the murder and mayhem, stay for the conservation hope. Advance registration required for in-person; also available online.
- Art without an Artist: Can AI be Considered an Artist? (Friday, March 20, San Mateo) This one is worth the drive to College of San Mateo. Mohsen Janatpour takes on one of the most genuinely contested questions of our moment: not whether humans can use AI to make art (that debate is largely settled), but whether AI itself can be considered an artist. He will share his own non-AI-generated work as a deliberate counterpoint, and the evening closes with a reception and, weather permitting, telescope viewing of the night sky with the San Mateo County Astronomical Society. It is, somehow, the perfect combination.
Have a great week in science!
-Kishore
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