SUMMER2024
CLASS SYLLABUS
DAY/TIME/PLACE
Asynchronous Online
Instructor: Bruce Donald Campbell
Faculty, Continuing Education - RISD
Providence, RI
Visual Analyst, CENIC
Providence, RI
Email: bcampbel01@risd.edu
Prerequisites: None
DESCRIPTION
The arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has captured the attention of the creative industry with its ability to translate a prompt into compelling images—all generated from seemingly thin air! What does this powerful tool mean for the future of art? Get an introduction to how AI programs function and learn how to use this tool in your own creative process. You’ll also examine the cultural, creative and legal implications of AI imaging and what lies ahead.
GRADING
Class participation - 20%
Homework assignments - 40%
Written project - 40%
RESOURCES
Books
There is no specific book associated with this course. Readings are provided as PDF documents and supplemented by website references.
Course Handouts and On-line Readings as identified below and in class.
LINKS
- DALL-E 3
- Stable Diffusion Online
- ChatGPT
- Adobe Firefly
- Aitubo (based on Midjourney)
- Microsoft Co-Pilot
- NightCafe
SYLLABUS
TOPIC1
using artificial intelligence in artistic processes
Goal: To consider how artificial intelligence might inject into an artistic practice using mediated action theory as a lens.
By the end of this week you will:
- have gained some exposure to the history of artificial intelligence methods (including machine learning and deep learning).
- understand how you might interject artificial intelligence into a successful artistic practice.
- have gained a basic understanding of how training by example, attention, transformation, and diffusion work to generate artificial content.
Consider that a key component to genAI strategy implementation is the hardware component called a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). That technology was first researched and pursued from those interested in computer graphics. It has grown to support all kinds of computation where numerical data can be partitioned into pixel-equivalents.
Reading:
- How Text-to-Image Generative AI Is Transforming Mediated Action (PDF)
Examples:
- To be provided
Significance to our course:
In the early 1990s, mediated action theory was offered up by sociologists as a way to think about why and how human beings perform actions. Not surprisingly, coming from sociologists, the theory suggested culture had a big impact on how humans behaved. An explosion of software use has occurred as humans turn to computing tools as a bigger percentage of the tools they use on a regular basis. We begin our course with a first topic that is intended as a level set introduction to artificial intelligence, but offer up an opportunity to use mediated action as a lens by which we think through the cultural ramifications and how they might influence our artistic practice.
Is artificial intelligence just another tool along the lines of other software we've used to help us realize our artistic vision? Or is artificial intelligence more an embedded aspect of the object we hone in on when pursuing an iterative approach to generating it? Let's expand on that even further and ask ourselves how artificial intelligence might be another subject we collaborate with as we might collaborate with another artist to co-produce a satisfying artistic result. Does mediated action help us expand our vision of how we might inject artificial intelligence into our artistic practice?
We will spend our first week of the course working together to explore genAI tools by way of iterating content with the use of them. As you will see in the Assignment page within this topic 1 module, we are going to daisy chain our iterations such that each class participant takes a turn in a round robin process whereby we see what we come up with as a class. As we do so, we'll keep the thoughts we get from the assigned reading on mediated action, provide above, in the forefront of our minds. Hopefully the discussion that ensues will suggest the individual contributions from each of us seem to value more than the sum of contributions.
Perhaps we won't feel satisfied that we've iterated enough. If so, we'll continue iterating as long as we want, while pursuing our individual work in parallel. Hopefully that will provide a satisfying experience for every participant.
Homework:
Participate in the shared class exercise through iterative prompting, adjustment, and graphics tool manipulations as you think within the model of mediated action provided by the paper provided in the week's readings.
The instructions are provided in the demonstration video for topic 1. We are pursuing a daisy-chain ideation process whereby we assess the usefulness of social interplay with other people as part of our mediation with genAI tools.
The goal is for you to have an opinion regarding Midjourney's integration with required Discord channel(s).
Use the topic 1 submission and discussion forum to submit examples of your work with the topic 1.