In 2023, ChatGPT placed generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the social imagination, sparking cries of both hopeful celebration and anxious concern for the future. While we marvel at its vast potential to transform how we live, work, and interact with each other and with the world. We are also wary of the known and unknown harms that AI will bring and the disruption of life and work that it will cause. Artificial Intelligence also invites us to reexamine many concepts that we have taken for granted. When AI writes novels, plays and poems, when it paints and composes music, artists and society alike are sparked to wonder:
- Whether AI expands the horizon of creativity like photography did for visual arts;
- Whether AI will replace artists or diminish opportunities for artists;
- Whether artists can be more creative with AI as the collaborator;
- Whether AI-created “arts” and human-created arts are different;
- And fundamentally, what artistic creativity, as something that is distinctly human, means.
The University of Michigan Arts Initiative, the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), Arts Research Incubation and Acceleration (ARIA), and the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics (MCAIM) jointly offer this workshop. It brings together writers, poets, visual artists, actors, dancers, musicians and other performing artists alongside scientists, engineers, humanists, philosophers, and other thinkers to investigate the process and products of the collaboration of AI and human artists, to showcase ongoing arts research efforts at the University of Michigan, and to explore research partnerships and other collaborative opportunities going forward.