Looking through Textile Practices and Digital Craftsmanship for New Opportunities in Creativity and AI

With generative artificial intelligence (AI) extending its influence to the creative industries, there is an urgency to reflect on ways of working with AI in different creative practices. Long-standing traditions of textile craftsmanship, such as knitting and weaving, are highly embodied and directed by the physicalities of material and fabrication machines. Such craftsmanship traditions are centred on implicit and embodied knowledge, which still lacks appropriate and satisfying translations into the digital world, posing a challenge for connecting practices to the possibilities of future creative AI. This chapter explores AI engagements with textile creation processes through open-ended textile exploration. The chapter takes a craftsmanship-centred approach, focusing mainly on the field of Digital Craftsmanship, where textile machinery and digital systems work together for creative purposes. This forms an opportunity to creatively include AI into human/machine craftsmanship. The chapter reveals forms of knowledge and interaction within creative textile craft processes and their AI potentials. Seeing AI as a set of versatile agents that might join the human-machine-material collaboration, this chapter suggests that a craftsmanship-centred approach will bring implementations and imaginations of possible AI systems that extend human creativity rather than delegating it to generative algorithms, which is urgent for the AI and creativity debate.