Virginia Tech hosts national summit on creativity, empathy, and AI
More than 70 experts in the arts and technology convened in the D.C. area to discuss and share their usage of artificial intelligence in the arts.
Virginia Tech's Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) convened experts and practitioners at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), creativity, and empathy earlier this month.
Scholars, researchers, and industry professionals representing more than 20 universities, seven arts and humanities organizations, and six companies gathered in Alexandria and Washington, D.C., for Creativity, Empathy and AI: A National Summit on the Human-AI Creative Partnership.
“I think this summit is special because of the secret sauce of the right people at the right time,” said Diana Ayton-Shenker, chief executive officer of Leonardo, the International Society of Arts, Sciences, and Technology. “One of the things that's exciting to me about this national summit on AI, empathy, and creativity is how it fits into a global community of gatherings.”
Hosted at the Torpedo Factory Art Center and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the event was a collaboration led by ICAT with Penn State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities.
It featured more than 70 professionals – ranging from deans and professors to executives and policymakers – discussing the utilization of AI in the visual arts and design, performing arts and music, and creative writing.
“We gathered experts nationwide to discuss arts and artificial intelligence. The conversation around this topic is usually focused on science and technology,” said Ben Knapp, founder and executive director of ICAT. “But with this summit, we are one of the first, if not the very first, to organize a summit where arts integration researchers and artists could converge and discuss the future of their fields and professions.”
ICAT initiated the summit and brought together experts from as far away as Wisconsin, Texas, Florida, and Nevada. It also incorporated non-experts with an interest in broadening their understanding on the subject.
“I'm not an artificial intelligence expert at all. I'm not going to be an artificial intelligence expert, nor do I want to become one.” said Mallika Bose, associate dean for research, creative activity, and graduate studies in the College of Arts in Architecture at Penn State University. “AI represents the dominance of the dominant (class), not the (global) majority. I want to know enough about it so I know how to wrap my head around it and see how it can influence us or already influences us without us even knowing it.”
Integrating AI in creative practices was explored, highlighting its role in enhancing various artistic domains and raising ethical and cultural considerations.
“This summit brings not only researchers but also performers, musicians, video artists, industry, academia, everyone together, and they all have different perspectives and they all share their voices here,” said Yan Wu, opinion graphics reporter at The Washington Post.
Patrick Sargent, a printmaker and professor at George Mason University, was one of several people representing both artists and academia. He hosted a printmaking session and used AI to create the image that the participants printed.
“I put the attendee list for this conference and their titles and the mission statement for the organization into ChatGPT and asked it to write me a prompt for an AI image generator,” Sargent said. “Then I put that prompt into Midjourney to generate this image.”
The societal impact of AI development was a key topic, with the need for a democratic distribution of tools and the inclusion of diverse voices in its development an overarching theme.
Discussions also included the collaboration between humans and AI, emphasizing the need for thoughtful policy, regulation, and ethical use of artificial intelligence and large-language models.
“Moving forward, we plan to make some of the material from the summit available to the public for posterity. This summit is intended to be a time capsule on artificial intelligence and creativity,” Knapp said. “We will be publishing the outputs across multiple platforms.”
