University of Southampton creatives challenging way we see AI
It's after they hosted an AI Arts Festival yesterday
University of Southampton creatives are challenging the way we see AI and say it could be helping us to learn more about ourselves.
It's after they hosted an AI Arts Festival yesterday which focused around the positive impacts that AI can have on creativity.
Professor Thomas Irvine's telling us the concerns around AI technology from artists is something they're engaged with - but they feel it could, instead, be offering us more opportunities.
He said: "There is clearly a lot of concern out in the world about what AI means for creative expression.
"That's an issue that we are very engaged with in the institute.
"But in our festival, we're actually looking for something different.
"We look for opportunities for people to collaborate with machines, because we believe that we learn more about people when we do that.
"It's not so much about the machines, it's about the people.
"All of this technology, and this is something that's really, really important to the message that we're trying to send.
"Technology is always a thing that people make, it's not just a thing that happens t us.
"It's a thing we made and that we can control how it's used."
He told us he believes it can help us to learn more about ourselves.
Professor Irvine added: "Maybe being a creative person isn't so lonely as people think.
"Every piece of creativity has to do with other people's creativity.
"All that AI does, especially the kind that we're getting used to now in large language models, is that all of that creativity is just a mirror of our own creativity.
"It kind of shows us that we are all collaborating together already and the machines just throw that into sharper focus."
The festival experimented with different types of creatives - from robotics all the way through to photography and music.