The AI Syllabus

Critical AI Literacies: 

• Analyze how AI is used to generate and refine creative works including its impact on knowledge, experience, and/or perspective. 
• Engage with AI to remix content while critically examining ideas of originality, authorship, and/or bias. 

On this page you will find multimedia sources that explore the breadth of all the ways in which musicians, artists, writers, scientists and other creatives and knowledge workers engage with AI to further their own work and understanding. 

Creating and Knowing 

Sources: 

 

Anadol, R. (2022, December 20). Refik Anadol on AI, algorithms, and the machine as witness. MoMA. 

• In this interview with generative artist Anadol, he discusses his AI-generated digital art exhibit, Unsupervised, which showed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2022 as well as what inspires him, his experience making digital art, and what he finds exciting about the intersection of art and technology. #Practical #Philosophical

 

Eveleth, R. (2023, May 15). The fanfic sex trope that caught a plundering AI red-handed. Wired. 

• This article details how fanfiction writers learned that GPT3 pulled from a popular fanfiction site and was used to train an AI writing assistant when that AI showed “knowledge” and “understanding” of community-created fanfiction tropes. #Practical #Philosophical

 

Frost, N. (2018, February 1). Has artificial intelligence cracked the Voynich manuscript’s mysterious code? Atlas Obscura. 

• This article describes researchers, historians, and scientists’ use of AI to examine the Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century document written in indecipherable code. Additional research on the topic published in the journal of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguisitics. #Practical #Philosophical

 

Gage, J. (2021, December 7). ‘He touched a nerve’. How the first piece of A.I. music was born in 1956. The Guardian. 

• This article describes the introduction of AI to music. #Practical

 

Goodwin, C. AI storytelling: On Ross G’s 1 the Road by Connor Goodwin. (2018, December 14). Bomb Magazine. 

• This article discusses how a data scientist used a GPS unit, a microphone, clock, and camera rigged to the rooftop of a car all of which fed information into a portable AI writing machine to generate a road novel. #Practical

 

Henrickson, L. (2017, August 29). Behold the amazing poetry generating machine. Slate. 

• This article examines the longer history of machine generated verse/machine poetry. #Practical

 

Hester, J. L. (2017, December 12). Robots are here to write poetry. Atlas Obscura. 

• This article evaluates AI generated poetry and mentions the former contest out of Dartmouth University on creating AI generated verse. #Practical #Philosophical

 

How we can bring AI personalities to life. (2019, July). TED. 

• A 15 min TED talk from Mariana Lin, the principal writer for Siri. #Practical #Philosophical

 

Kee, J. and Kuo, M. Deep learning: AI, art history, and the museum. (2023, June 15). MoMa. 

• In this article, Museum of Modern Art curator Kuo and art historian Kee discuss Refik Anadol’s exhibition, Unsupervised (on display at MoMa through Oct. 29, 2023), an installation that was created using AI. #Practical #Philosophical

 

Khan, R. (2023, March 8). Sougwen Chung co-creates and meditates with multi-robotics through biosensors. Designboom. 

• This article highlights the work of digital artist, Sougwen Chung, and their exhibit, Assembly Lines, which includes the artist co-creating paint strokes with a robotic arm who is reading sensors on the artist’s body to anticipate and mimic their movement. The work reimagines robots and automation removed from an industrialized context and reconsidered as a relationship between human and machine that privileges contemplation and collaboration. #Practical #Philosophical

 

Lin, M. (2018, May 2). How to write personalities for the AI around us. The Paris Review. 

• In this article, Lin argues that in order to live in relationship to AI, we must not think of our interactions with AI as strictly transactional but revel in the absurd, pleasurable, and/or transcendent interactions as well. #Philosophical

 

Making the invisible visible: K Allado-McDowell, Derrick Skye, and Refik Anadol in conversation. (2022, October 25). Bomb Magazine. 

• This article features three artists discussing the creation of an opera using artificial intelligence. #Practical

 

Michigan Institute for Data Science. (2023, May 3). MIDAS data and AI in society forum series: Generative AI, composition, and creativity [Video]. Youtube.

• In this 66 minute panel discussion, a group of experts examine the complex issues that artists and musicians face when using AI to compose music and create art, how AI tools work, and the opportunities and challenges they pose for music and composition. #Practical #Philosophical

 

The Museum of Modern Art. (2023, March 15). AI art: How artists are using and confronting machine learning [Video]. Youtube. 

• This 15 minute video explores the work of three different artists using and/or commenting on AI in their art including Refik Anadol who uses unsupervised machine learning to generate a dynamic abstract moving image trained on all of the data in the MoMA archive, Trevor Paglen who has created a compilation of images and videos used as training data for GenAI to unpack meaning and problematize classification, and Kate Crawford (author of Atlas of AI) who has mapped the life cycle from raw materials extraction to everyday home use of an Amazon Echo (Alexa). Features interviews with each artist. #Philosophical #Practical

 

Traverso, V. (2017, December 15). Found: An eighth planet orbiting a far flung star. Atlas Obscura. 

• This article shows how deep learning and data mining through AI helped scientists discover Kepler-90i. #Practical

 

 

KNOWING: 

Many contemporary artists, including authors, poets, and musicians, are experimenting with AI as a creative partner, exploring new possibilities in co-creation. While AI-generated content may seem novel, remixing and collaborating with machines have long been part of artistic and knowledge-making traditions. However, AI also influences how we create and interpret knowledge, raising important questions about authorship, bias, and ethical responsibility.

To critically engage with AI and creative processes, it's important to: 

• Examine the role of AI in remixing and co-creation within the broader history of human-machine collaboration. 
• Analyze how AI shapes knowledge creation and interpretation, influencing originality, perspective, and meaning. 
• Assess issues of authorship, bias, and ethics in AI-generated works.
• Engage with AI as a partner to explore new possibilities in acts of creating and knowing.

DOING: 

• Drawing inspiration from Linda Dounia Rebeiz, Refik Anadol, Sougwen Chung, or another artist of your choosing, imagine creating an aesthetic project derived from a data set. What form might this artwork take? How would you approach the data artistically, transform it, and engage with it? Why would you choose this approach? If you can, include examples of the data, sketches of your idea, or a video walk through of your ideas.
• Choose an artist using, thinking, or approaching generative AI or AI and machine learning in their work. What does their work tell us about creativity? Showcase a portrait or portfolio of their work. What do we learn about AI from their work? Create and name an AI literacy that derives from their work (i.e. what do they teach us about learning and creating with AI?).
• Look into a specific genre or medium of art - whether visual, music, dance, etc. - and examine how AI is shaping the genre? What are the limits, opportunities, and ethical questions around AI and that particular genre or medium of artistic expression? 
• Look at historical artifacts of artistic manifestos - for example, Andre Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto  or Mina Loy’s 1914 Feminist Manifesto - what would you write as an AI manifesto for the arts? Would it be an embrace? A rejection? How do you think the arts should approach AI and creativity?  What would AI write or create as an AI Manifesto.
• AI is a site of creative (and sometimes comedic performance): What new memes (creative, comedic, performative) have come out of the discussion of AI (ex. Gordon Ramsey; But make it bigger, etc.). What does it tell us about generative AI? What does it tell us about how we use generative AI? What does the meme tell us about ourselves?

FEELING: 

How do you feel about AI as a creative collaborator? Write a few words that describe your immediate response (excited, skeptical, curious, etc.) 

Using the sources on this page, choose one creative work to explore further. Write down your immediate reactions. Does it feel creative? Original? Meaningful? 

Consider the following reflective questions:

• What might have influenced the AI's creation?
• Whose perspectives are included and whose are missing?
• Does this challenge or change your understanding of creativity? Why or why not?