Ethical AI, Creativity and Language (In-Person)

What do ethical uses of AI technologies look like? Can AI support creative practice and the development of new knowledge about language and/or creativity? And if so, how?

Join international guest researcher Dr Karin Christiansen (VIA University College, Denmark), visual artist and researcher Kim Percy, and La Trobe researchers Dr Lauren Gawne and Thanh Anh Thu Nguyen for three short talks that will open up this conversation in new and exciting ways, followed by an interactive workshop.

Short talks on:

• AI, Art and Neurodivergence
• AI-assisted Gesture Research
• wrAIte: AI-assisted Writing for Adult Learners
  

Interactive workshop: Imagining Desirable Futures for Creativity in a Time of AI

Following afternoon tea, we invite you to join us in an interactive workshop to further explore these vital questions and concerns together.

"we call for prospective theorizing, which we define as a future-oriented approach ... that is concerned with imagining desirable futures" - Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2024

Taking inspiration from the ideas of proactive theorising (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2024) and the dignity lens (Ruster, Oliva-Altamirano & Daniell, 2023), we will seek common ground between the diverse experiences of, and perspectives on, AI in creative practice by imagining desirable futures together. Throughout, we will be guided by three questions:

1. As writers, readers and creative practice researchers, what would most help our work to flourish?
2. Are there any forms of AI (existing or imagined) that could meet those needs while avoiding known harms?
3. What might the best possible world look like for creative practice in a future with AI?

Important information

This is a free event but registration is essential as places are limited. Session registration includes afternoon tea.

To participate online, please register for the Virtual event instead. Virtual attendees are kindly asked to note that online attendance is only available for the short talks and the Q&A session following the talks. Talks will be recorded and made accessible to registered participants after the event.

We look forward to seeing you at the La Trobe University City Campus for a thought-provoking afternoon of talks and conversations.

References:
Lorenn P. Ruster, Paola Oliva-Altamirano, and Katherine A. Daniell. 2023. Centring dignity in algorithm development: testing a Dignity Lens. In Proceedings of the 34th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (OzCHI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3572921.3572938

Gümüsay, A. A., & Reinecke, J. (2024). Imagining Desirable Futures: A call for prospective theorizing with speculative rigour. Organization Theory, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877241235939 (Original work published 2024)

Info: Art and neurodiversity both disrupt the dominance of “standard” language, revealing it as both a barrier and a creative catalyst. For neurodivergents and artists, AI’s associative and translational capacities mirror non-linear, visual ways of thinking, acting less as an understander and more as a collaborator and provocateur. This presentation explores whether AI might represent the next cognitive difference, reshaping how we create, communicate, and think.

Info: This interdisciplinary project will explore how computer vision approaches such as Transformers and MediaPipe can support gesture researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences by automatically detecting, labelling, and annotating gesture images and videos for downstream analysis. By automating the labour-intensive work of processing gesture data, computer vision methods can accelerate research on the diversity of human communicative gestures, adding to the store of human knowledge on how and why we gesture as we do.

Info: The EU-wrAIte project investigates the potential and limitations of AI-assisted creative writing in fostering human self-expression, creativity, and empowerment in adult education. Research show, that a renegotiation of roles among AI agents, students, and educators is currently taking place in the humanities, while educators and researchers struggle to comprehend the complex moral, existential, psychological, social, and pedagogical implications of these developments. In this talk, I will present a range of perspectives on the double-edged nature of employing AI tools such as ChatGPT in creative writing. Drawing on insights from artists, researchers, and educators, the presentation will focus on ethical and psychological dilemmas that arise in this evolving landscape.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

La Trobe University City Campus, 360 Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia