PERSON
Keith Sawyer
American psychologist, creativity researcher, and former AI engineer (b. 1960) whose unique trajectory — from building the first AI application deployed by a major bank to thirty years studying group creativity — positions him as the rare scholar who has worked on both sides of the human-machine intelligence question.
Keith Sawyer (b. 1960) is an American psychologist and creativity researcher whose career trajectory — from MIT-trained AI engineer to doctoral student at the University of Chicago under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to faculty positions at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — makes him one of the few scholars who has worked on both sides of the human-machine intelligence question. His 1984 expert system for Citibank was the first AI application deployed by a major money-center bank. He left technology in the late 1980s to study jazz ensembles and improv troupes, producing the empirical research that established group flow, group genius, and distributed creativity as foundational concepts in creativity science. His acknowledgment in a 2025 essay that AI-generated jazz had fooled him marks a specific moment in his ongoing engagement with the question his entire career has circled.
