Week 11: AI Arts & Aesthetics

Project 4: Creative Challenges in AI Art (15 %)

Due: Week 13 | Nov 17  |  | Group website section + collective essay

Overview

In this final collaborative project, your group will explore one challenge in creating art with AI. Each group will choose a key issue—such as bias, slop, authorship, or originality—and build a short web section for our class exhibition that explains and illustrates the challenge with examples.

The goal is not to praise or condemn AI but to understand its creative limits and possibilities. You will show how artists, designers, or musicians are working with or against the “machine logic” of AI—turning problems into creative discoveries.

Part 1: Choose a Challenge

Select one challenge from the list below—or propose one of your own with instructor approval. Your section will explain what this challenge is, why it matters, and how artists are responding to it.

• Slop / Homogenization: The tendency toward over-smooth, over-trained, or “average” aesthetics. What happens when the machine’s search for coherence erases surprise, texture, or individuality—and how do artists work against that flattening?
• Bias and Perspective: Every dataset has a worldview. How do aesthetic patterns of race, gender, culture, and class emerge in AI imagery—and how can artists expose or subvert these hidden biases as part of the artwork?
• Error / Glitch / Hallucination: When generative systems misfire or hallucinate, they reveal their inner logic. How can error become a style, and how do artists use misrecognition as an expressive or poetic device?
• Hybrid Authorship: When human and machine collaborate, where does intention live? How do we define authorship, agency, and co-creation when part of the “artist” is a model trained on millions of others?
• Remix and Originality: If AI art is made from remixed data, can originality still exist? Or does AI force us to rethink creativity as recombination, pattern recognition, or curation rather than invention?
• Prompt Aesthetics: The language of creation—the prompt itself—becomes an artistic medium. How do wording, iteration, and ambiguity shape the aesthetics of output? Is the art in the image, the prompt, or the process?
• Data Ethics: What is the moral and aesthetic weight of a dataset? How do questions of consent, ownership, and transparency alter how we value or interpret AI-generated art?
• Emotion and Simulation: AI can mimic sentiment, but can it feel? How do we respond emotionally to machine-generated expression, and what does that say about human empathy, projection, and meaning-making?
• Labor, Access, and Scale: Behind generative art lies vast computational and human labor. How do issues of access, privilege, and ecological cost shape the aesthetics and politics of AI creation?
• Human Trace: What happens when touch, imperfection, or embodiment return to the digital image? How do artists hybridize hand-made and machine-made processes to reinsert presence, care, or craft into AI art?
• Machine Perception: How does an algorithm “see,” “hear,” or “imagine”? What new visual grammars or aesthetics arise from the difference between human and machine perception?
• Temporal Flow / Iteration: Generative systems evolve through loops and versions. How does this continuous becoming alter our sense of composition, completion, or authorship over time?

Part 2: Group Exhibition Section

Working together, create a web section (part of our class online exhibition) that introduces your challenge to a general audience. Use clear text and visuals, and accessible examples. Think like curators: your section should both inform and inspire.

• Design: Simple, consistent layout and navigation with other groups.
• Media: Include 3–5 visual, sound, and/or video examples—either found or created by your team—that illustrate the challenge.
• Captions: 50–70-word texts explaining how each example shows the issue or turns it into an opportunity. Use figure and figcaption.

Part 3: Group Essay (2,000–3,000 words)

Write a multimodal group essay that explains your chosen challenge and why it matters for the future of creative work. Include images, screenshots, or video stills that support your points.

• Define the challenge: What does it look like in practice? Where do we see it in current AI art?
• Show examples: Compare weak and strong uses of AI—where it falls short vs. where artists make it work.
• Reflect critically: What can humans learn from this challenge about creativity, technology, or collaboration?

Part 4: Ethics and Transparency

• Create an About page with a short statment about human vs. AI contribution.
• Include essential chat urls.
• Include short notes on tools and models used (e.g., DALL·E 3, Runway ML, ChatGPT, Udio, etc.).
• Add alt text for all media and a short “prompt log” showing one or two example prompts per work.

Part 5: Individual Mini-Essay & Artwork

Alongside the group section, each student will create an individual mini-essay and artwork for the final exhibition site (another project). These personal works can connect to the group theme but should express your own creative exploration.

Evaluation Criteria

• Clarity and insight in defining and exploring the chosen challenge.
• Quality and originality of examples and captions.
• Design and usability of the exhibition section.
• Collaboration and balanced participation within the group.
• Transparency and ethical reflection (prompt logs, alt text, sources).