ENGLISH 18SC: Black Mirror: AI, Art, Social Action

Course Description

Freaked out, excited, overwhelmed or even secretly a little bored with all the breathless hype and handwringing over artificial intelligence? Wondering what it all means - if anything - for you? Our class takes a playful but serious look at AI in terms of your own life, studies, and eventually career. Whether your current interests lean towards STEM or the humanities, this seminar draws on both theory and practice to explore how AI is impacting nearly all aspects of our public and private lives. We will be exploring intersections of STEM, arts and humanities scholarship and practice that engage with these exponentially impactful technologies. Of special interest are the social ethical and artistic implications of artificial intelligence systems with an emphasis on aesthetics, civic society and racial justice, including scholarship on decolonial AI, indigenous AI, disability activism AI, feminist AI and the future of work for creative industries. So just what has art got to do with it? Cultural narratives shape the public imagination about these exponentially sophisticated technologies, the rapid development of which is already outpacing traditional ethical and governance protocols. Storytelling impacts, implicitly or explicitly, everything from product design to public policy, influencing how people understand identity (racial, sexual, even what counts as "human"), how they interact socially (or not), and how they think a healthcare or justice system should work (e.g. issues with AI chatbots in therapeutic and clinical settings, privacy and data scraping, copyright, name-image-likeness compensation, facial recognition bias, predictive sentencing, et al.). Too often contemporary narratives about technology range in tenor from the apocalyptic (The Doomsday Argument) to the salvific (To Save Everything. Click Here). Yet there are so many more ways of seeing and experiencing the world beyond the sometimes very limited perspectives of mid-20th century science fiction that inform many technologists' visions. Engaging with arts theorists and practitioners from disciplines, backgrounds, and time periods, our class together explores some fresh plotlines, images, tropes, identity formations, historiographies and speculative futurities. We will examine both AI-generated art as well as arts' take on AI. Art may challenge the Silicon Valley start-up mentality of "size, speed, scale, quantification" but AI is also challenging the professional art world status quo, challenging aesthetic norms and valuation (what counts as 'art,' what counts as 'good' art? Even who/what can make art?) What is the impact of art on health and well-being, the new neuroscience about the "brain on art"? We will bring the study and practice of the arts in the broadest sense (literature, theatre, performance, film, music, media, visual and graphic art) to advance our understanding of the 'human' in human-centered AI... (see complete course description at soco.stanford.edu.)