AI and the Arts

The Ohio State University has recently committed to an ambitious goal of ensuring that every student, beginning with the class of 2029, will be AI-fluent upon graduation—fluency here being understood as a deep comprehension of how AI might impact and be applied to the student’s specific field of study. The office of the vice provost for the arts hopes to place a special emphasis on the potential the arts hold within this broader initiative. We believe the arts (and their sister fields in the humanities) have a significant role to play in critiquing the biases imbedded in predictive and generative AI models; in testing the accuracy of outputs; and in querying the nature of human intelligence. We also believe that the unbridled, open-ended experimentation that is endemic to the arts will lead to more novel and varied outcomes than engineering alone can provide. If non-textual, multimodal and time-based media represent the next horizons in AI research, as we believe they do, then surely the arts can and ought to have important roles to play in this speculative inquiry. Through the arts, we seek to lean into hallucination, risk, fabulation, uncertainty and complexity, and to embrace creativity and interdisciplinarity as significant (human-centric) means through which new models and ideas for AI research will arise.