NEH Human Creativity in an Age of AI Center Proposal
The A&H AI + Digital Futures team members Rachel Plotnick, Caleb Weintraub, and Johan Bollen in collaboration with Professor Fritz Breithaupt led a campus effort for a Limited Submission NEH proposal to create a Center for Human Creativity in an Age of AI Center at IUB. As AI technologies have made rapid advances, particularly in their generative capacities: they do no longer merely process, distribute, aggregate, or disseminate information; rather, they have acquired capabilities to produce (text, images, stories, and information of various kinds); predict (from suggesting a song to finishing a sentence); and perform (embedded in creative industries and practices of sharing and communicating). These capacities raise critical social and ethical concerns not only about authorship, cultural production, and the creative process, but also about their propensity to amplify untrustworthy and untruthful content – all central questions for the humanities. The proposed Center for Human Creativity in an Age of AI responds to what we perceive as a need for sustained, trans-disciplinary dialogue about the impact and governance of AI. The Center will serve as a hub for collaborative, humanistic scholarship across the humanities and other relevant fields, bringing together the strengths of established institutions and individuals at Indiana University Bloomington and beyond, to systematically investigate the social, ethical, and cultural dimensions of human creativity as they intersect with AI technologies and systems.
Eskenazi Technology Innovation Lab
The Eskenazi Technology Innovation Lab, inaugurated in the spring of 2024 at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, is dedicated to enhancing collaboration among faculty through sharing research, project collaboration, and grant-seeking activities. Under the support of A&H AI +Digital Futures and the Public Arts and Humanities Project grant, the lab has initiatedagroup of pioneering projects investigating the interplay between Artificial Intelligence (AI), creativity, ethics, and human behavior in the Post-Information Society, marked by the seamless fusion of technology with daily life. These projects include studying the potential of human-AI collaboration in clinical decision-making, exploring consumer ethics towards AI-generated content, investigating the dynamics between generative AI and human designers in creativity, and leveraging open-source AI-assisted workflows for algorithmic design creativity. With a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach, these initiatives aim to provide a holistic understanding of AI's multifaceted influence across various fields. Through workshops, seminars, shared resources, and student involvement, the lab promotes a synergistic research environment, contributing to a broader comprehension of AI's role in society.