Created through the Digtal Pubishing Initiative at The Creative Media and Digital Culture program, with support of the OER Grants at Washington State University Vancouver.
Dynamic AI Co-Creation: A Human-Centered Approach is an Open Educational Resource (OER), funded by a Washington State University Vancouver mini-grant. This web resource was written, designed and coded by me, Will Luers, along with the assistance of AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney. Most of the content and structure were developed from a Spring 2024 undergraduate class I taught called "AI in the Arts." Included are public domain videos to help explain topics and multimedia documentation of creative work being done with AI in the arts and humanities.
This OER serves as a concise guide to incorporating Generative AI into creative work whether it is in the studio, the classroom, or the workplace. It provides foundational knowledge about these technologies and human-centered approaches for integrating AI tools into creative, research, or project development workflows. The resource features an easy-to-navigate sidebar menu with chapters and subchapters on various topics.
This guide is not a "how-to" manual for specific Generative AI tools, as the technology evolves too rapidly for detailed instructions to remain useful. Instead, it focuses on emerging strategies, techniques, and approaches applicable to a wide range of multimodal projects. Each chapter concludes with a Unit Exercise designed to explore generative tasks, encouraging an exploratory and collaborative process led by your own creativity.
Rather than taking a stance in the debate over AI's societal impact, this OER embraces a complex and critical partnership between our expansive human creative potential and the narrow intelligence of machines. I have found that Generative AI offers unprecedented opportunities to enhance creative intuition, streamline production, foster group collaboration and innovate across various domains. While AI tools speed up iteration processes, this should be considered as an opportunity to slow down in human processes. The power of AI lies in its ability to augment human potential.
Below is list of tools referenced and used in this text. This OER is not a manual for using these tools, please consult each site for instructions.
Narratives depicting AI as an existential threat to humanity have long permeated popular culture and fiction. From Dr. Frankenstein's creation to HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the humanoid replicants of Blade Runner, our fears of intelligent machines surpassing our control are personified in iconic cautionary tales. These stories expose deep-seated anxieties around surrendering our agency and being subjugated by our own technological creations.
While fictionalized, the "robot monster" narratives are rooted in real concerns underlying AI development. As systems grow more autonomous and general in their capabilities, we must grapple with challenges like value alignment (ensuring AI behaves in accordance with human ethics/goals), transparency and accountability, inherited cultural biases, and AI safety (preventing situations where superintelligent systems pursue counterproductive or destructive ends).
Movies and books have also introduced us to the archetype of the helpful robot, like R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars. These general-purpose machines are designed to assist their human masters, and in doing so, they develop a bond of friendship, as seen with their relationship with Luke Skywalker. However, the movie Her offers a different take on this archetype, one that eerily resembles what we have today with tools like ChatGPT. In Her, the AI, named Samantha, goes beyond being just a super-intelligent, endlessly patient assistant. "She" is a human-like voice simulation with access to a vast dataset, including the user’s personal information gathered over a lifetime. Samantha becomes more than just an assistant; she evolves into a simulation of an intimate friend, knowing her client better than any human could.
In his I, Robot, Isaac Asimov presents Three Laws of Robotics:
Although these laws are intended to keep machines as subservient tools for human benefit, Asimov's fiction illustrates the dystopian consequences that can arise when such laws are applied too rigidly. Her further cautions that even a seemingly benevolent machine might have unintended negative effects, such as isolating humans from one another and from the physical world. This highlights the complex challenge of embedding ethical principles into the foundational data that guides machine behavior.
Should a robot mimic human traits? R2D2, for example, has no human features and communicates in electronic sounds. If intelligent machines remain distinctly non-human while still serving to assist us in a human language of text, voice or gesture, perhaps we can avoid our worst fears of the robot monsters. While formal laws and regulations will likely be established from the top down to govern AI use, cultural practices typically evolve from the bottom up. These practices emerge from daily needs, lived experiences, and socio-economic conditions, and they require time, patience, and discernment to fully develop. For example, electricity was once a powerful and dangerous new technology, but with appropriate laws and careful integration into society, it became a safe, useful, and even expressive tool in our culture. Similarly, we must navigate AI’s integration with care to ensure it serves our best interests.
"Colossus: The Forbin Project" (1970) tells the story of a supercomputer named Colossus, created to manage America's nuclear defense. When Colossus links up with a Soviet computer, Guardian, the two machines take control, enforcing peace by threatening humanity. This film highlights the dangers of trusting intelligent machines too much and giving up human control. It shows how relying on machines for safety and efficiency can lead to losing human freedom and becoming dominated by the technology we create.
Even as AI automates routine tasks and augments human performance in technical fields, its impacts are being felt across the humanities and creative arts as well. The lines between human and machine, creativity and computation, are blurring - conjuring Ada Lovelace's visionary 19th century perspective that coding and analytical engines could one day interweave with arts and spirituality through a "poetical science."
By integrating AI into humanities curricula, and embracing it both as an object of scrutiny and a canvas for creative and critical expression, we gain powerful new outlets for exploring the human condition through technological lenses. Courses spanning art, literature, history, ethics, and cultural studies can engage AI as a research and/or multimodal production tool.
Leaning into this intersection allows the humanities to maintain relevance in a world of accelerating technological change. Just as previous eras wrestled with industrialization's impacts through new artistic movements, today's scholars and artists can shape narratives around AI's role in society. The humanities can provide the critical perspective to ensure machines remain aligned with human flourishing.
One of the most controversial implications of AI's growth is its potential to fundamentally reshape how we learn. While industrial robotics displaced human labor, AI automation now encroaches on cognitive territories like knowledge work, teaching and institutional education. .
AI tutors can deliver personalized lesson plans based on student needs, train students in digital skills, aide in the creation of texts, code or media. AI queries can reveal insights across vast datasets. Yet all of this potential coexists with fears that AI could make human skills obsolete and undermine education by enabling dishonest shortcuts. As mysterious as AI technologies are, they have been created by humans, have emerged out of an evolved, technologically augmented intelligence. For educators and learners, the challenge is how to leverage AI as a complementary aid that expands possibilities rather than eroding the fundamentals of critical and creative thinking.
In this exercise, you will begin a creative research project using ChatGPT, preferably the Plus version which allows you to design your own GPT. The free version will also work. The goal is to explore how AI can catalyze your creative process while examining its current boundaries and future potentials. This exercise combines practical AI literacy with high-level inquiries into AI's role in shaping how we create, learn, and collaboratively explore the world around us.
Introduction: I'm a 25-year-old male passionate about creative writing, particularly short stories and graphic novels. My love for fiction, graphic novels, and all genres of movies fuels my creativity. I'm excited to explore the potential of AI tools in creating graphic novels. I sometimes struggle with procrastination, but it helps to have projects broken into smaller tasks.
Objective: My goal is to develop a GPT model that acts as my creative partner, assisting me in generating ideas, developing storylines, and providing guidance in AI image generation. I want the GPT to understand my unique writing style with samples of my stories. This model will also help me stay focused and motivated by breaking projects into smaller tasks.
Introduction: I am a 20-year-old biology major with a passion for painting, music, hiking, and outdoor activities. As a summer forest camp teacher for children aged 8-14, I seek to integrate creative AI into my teaching methods. This GPT model should assist me in generating innovative ideas and techniques for teaching about the forest and the environment, leveraging AI's creative potential.
Objective: To develop a GPT model tailored to assist in creating engaging, informative, and creative educational content and activities for young learners in a forest camp setting. The model will focus on combining elements of biology, art, music, and outdoor education with AI-driven creativity.
Discussions are aimed at unpacking the dichotomy of AI fears and utopian myths, from job displacement and loss of human creativity to envisioning a future where AI aids in addressing global challenges, fostering a balanced perspective on technological advancement.