Lesley STEAM offered the pre-college Creative AI & Design course for the second consecutive summer. We recognize the importance of creativity that, fundamentally, requires having or showing one’s ability to produce new and valuable things. With the proliferation of generative AI or GenAI, more and more creative people are using machines as tools to interrogate AI and make art. With this in mind, we worked closely with Cambridge Youth Programs (CYP) to recruit Cambridge, MA youth to explore and go beyond the fundamentals of creative AI, which refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of generating novel and original content, such as art, music, writing, and design.
Students were introduced to artists such as Stephanie Dinkins who creates art about AI as it intersects race, gender, and history. They saw the designs of Norman Teague, whose Adobe Firefly-generated works offer a reinterpretation of design history.
Dinkins programmed the generative art to prioritize (more diverse) worldviews and figures. She did so by fine-tuning different AI models, programs that recognize patterns through datasets. Dinkins and her team of developers fed the models images by the Black photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured photos of Black people in Harlem. They also programmed it using African American Vernacular English so that the models would learn to recognize its tonality and better generate images based on the stories of people who use it. —Melissa Hellman via The Guardian
Norman Teague used Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative AI models, to imagine a world where iconic objects in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) design collection were created by a more diverse chorus of voices. Teague, and his assistant designer Daniel Overbey used Firefly to revisit 15 pieces in MoMA’s collection from the perspective of Black history and inspiration.
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