Abstract
As we teach university students to communicate with images as well as words, we need to understand how AI image-making can be incorporated into creative and communicative processes. My study focuses on collaboration and serendipity as two frameworks for understanding how students—and other visual communicators—can understand the role of AI in their work. What does it mean to collaborate with AI when you create a visual composition? In what ways is the collaboration similar to our familiar collaborations with programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, where we rely on preset filters, adjustments, and various other tools as we create digital images? What do AI programs add to the mix and how do they cause us to redefine our approach to collaboration with non-human, algorithmic entities? Can a re-examination of how artists work with physical mediums help us understand collaborations with AI? Serendipity is also an element in image creation with software programs. There can sometimes be the “happy little accidents” made famous by Bob Ross, where a mistake becomes something unexpectedly good, like a smudge on the canvas that becomes a bird: voila, just what the painting needed! The promise of AI is that you can create something unexpectedly beautiful—or at least appropriate for the context—in just a few clicks. Serendipity draws on both randomness and expertise, and so the introduction of AI into the mix invites us to reconsider this aspect of image creation.
Presenters
Madeleine SorapureTeaching Professor/Associate Dean, Writing Program, University of California at Santa Barbara, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
AI, Artificial Intelligence, Collaboration, Serendipity, Pedagogy, Software
