AI at CAMD

Data are produced through practices of making, partitioning, compartmentalizing, seeing, representing, etc. An experiential (i.e. practice-based) understanding of how data are created, situated, and used reveals that data are not something given from the world or necessarily indexically connected to it, but are constructed artifacts worth critical investigation.

A core strength of CAMD disciplines is their emphasis on process and practice. By emphasizing the interactive nature of data and AI – understanding data as constructed artifacts situated in human contexts, and engaging with AI as a technology that is actively shaped through our encounters with it and that shapes how we interact with data – CAMD disciplines can privilege a process- and practice-oriented approach that is frequently unaccounted for in other disciplines.

Critical evaluation of AI tools and systems is essential to bypassing the hype and doomsday predictions surrounding AI. As a college focused on critical and creative practice, we approach these tools with an open mind but a critical eye for the ways that technologies may “flatten” human experience and diversity, compromise matters of authority and intellectual property in cultural industries, and unfairly exploit human labor, materials, and artifacts for economic or political advantage.

AI is both one more tool in the long human history of world-making, and a novel set of capacities to be explored. While AI cannot automate creativity, it can be part of creative workflows and aid brainstorming, prototyping and ideating. CAMD faculty experiment with the benefits and limitations of using computational processes in creative and critically reflexive ways.