AI Webinar Series

Panelists: Christine Tran, John Wihbey, Seo Eun “Sunny” Yang

Moderator: Nora Suren

Description: Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the creator economy and influencer culture at lightning speed. From hyper-real virtual influencers to AI-generated video content that’s populating TikTok and Instagram, AI influencers erase the distinction between human imagination, machine automation, and promotion.

This webinar explores how synthetic content creators are redefining authenticity, labor, and identity online. With critical and creative lenses, we’ll explore how these trends unveil deeper questions regarding gender, race, and power in the generative media era—who gets represented, who gets erased, and how algorithmic aesthetics are globalizing new forms of digital labor and desire.

Panelists: Carrie Sijia Wang, Casper Harteveld, and Celia Pearce

Description: This webinar will examine the ethical and emotional dimensions of artificial intelligence within game design and interactive storytelling. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives in design, media, and performance, the discussion will bridge academic theory and creative practice to ask: Can AI help games become a site of ethical reflection rather than escapism?

The session will include a conversation and a live interactive playtest inspired by the artist’s projects, culminating in an open reflection and publication of annotated design notes as an archival artifact.

Panelists: Shaun Foster, Jen Gradecki, Derek Curry

Moderator: Sutanuka Jashu

Description: Artificial intelligence is reshaping creative industries, including animation, game development, music, design, and storytelling, by changing how ideas are imagined, developed, and shared. This webinar explores AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as a collaborator that transforms artistic workflows, redefines authorship, and challenges our understanding of originality and craft. Moving between theory and practice, we will examine how AI tools are being used across creative disciplines, from motion generation and generative design to sound and visual composition, while considering the ethical, cultural, and educational implications of this rapidly evolving landscape.

Through dialogue among artists, technologists, and educators, the event invites participants to reflect on how creative practice can remain both innovative and deeply human in an AI augmented world, where imagination and computation increasingly intertwine.

Panelists: Gerard Goggin, Vance Ricks, and Laura Forlano

Moderator: Adriana de Souza e Silva

Description: Artificial intelligence is often discussed as a technical achievement—algorithms, datasets, and computational power. But what happens when we shift our perspective and treat AI not just as a tool, but as a medium itself?

This webinar explores AI as a cultural and social force that shapes how we communicate, create meaning, and experience the world. Just as television and the internet became mediums that transformed society beyond their technical specifications, AI is emerging as something that mediates our relationships, structures our information environments, and influences how stories are told and consumed.

By understanding AI as media rather than merely tools, we can better grasp its implications for democracy, policy, and culture, moving beyond technical capabilities to critical questions about who controls these systems, whose voices they amplify, and how they’re reshaping communication itself.