Spring Symposium | Creativity in the Age of AI

Overview    Speakers    Resources

AI & the Future of the Creative Industry 

Is AI simply a powerful assistive tool--similar to a pen,  paintbrush, or photography--that it is “blitzscaling” creativity and, moreover, putatively democratizing access to creative expression? Many are skeptical, cautioning that industry applications of generative AI raise a hornet’s nest of ethical and aesthetic concerns, among them that it automates a reductive notion of both the creative process and of the learning process; that it normalizes extractive and exploitative approaches to creators and their work; that it amplifies biases of every kind; and that it exacerbates already-urgent educational and national security concerns around deep fakes, plagiarism, copyright, privacy, creator compensation, and more.  In this panel–comprised of three pairings of people with diverse perspectives–we examine, in particular, issues of privacy, copyright, and aesthetic value and consider what this all might mean for the future of work in creative industries.

Panel II: The “Human” at the Center of Human-Centered AI

Art & language are pinnacles of human expressive achievement. This panel offers conversations between artists and technologists about intersections in their work. How might their AI-aesthetic experiments in poetry, movement, performance, and music, for example, change and challenge traditional ideas about both art and tech? How might arts informed by disability studies invite questions about the medical model of the human informing AI assistive tech and our thinking about human “optimization” and performance?

Artist Spotlight: AI, Art, & the Seneca Creation Story

How are the arts engaging with the world-making possibilities of AI? How might indigenous or global perspectives on AI propose alternative technological visions for the future? This spotlight takes us well beyond the familiar extremes of utopian techno-solutionist or techno-apocalyptic thinking to consider indigenous epistemologies and new models for AI.

AI & The Future of the Creative Industry 

Leaders in the field discuss where, from their unique vantage points, they see future directions, hopes, and concerns for the arts in relation to AI.