Every Wednesday starting at 11 a.m, 12 fellows from the Creative Leadership Program at AS220, a nonprofit arts organization located in downtown Providence, gather in Churchill House for “Techno-Cultural Futures” — a yearlong course that explores the role of the artist in an era of Artificial Intelligence.
The format of the class — split into guest lectures and open-ended discussions — is the “easiest entry point” into “academic conversation,” said Assi Coulibaly, director of creative education for AS220.
“We have a lot of different access points,” Coulibaly said. “Some of (our fellows) did not complete high school, some of them did not go to college.”
“Techno-Cultural Futures” is offered by the Department of Africana Studies’s Community Health Informatics Data Lab in tandem with AS220’s Creative Leadership Program, a paid creative job training course targeted at artists who have aged out of or are nearing the end of AS220’s youth program.
Taught by Associate Professor of Africana Studies Kim Gallon, the class’ curriculum is inspired by the dystopian novel “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler. Set in California in the 2020s, the novel takes place in a deteriorating world where people are blind to environmental and social issues.
The experiences of the characters parallel those of artists in the age of AI, Terina Keller, research associate in Africana studies and the assistant director of the course, said. The ways characters are able to persevere through challenges, “speak on their own experiences and share their story” felt applicable to what the instructors wanted students to analyze in the class, Keller said.
Gallon deferred comment about the class to other members of the project.
Class discussions involve how people of color fit into conversation surrounding AI, as the majority of AS220 artists are people of color, according to Sin Seven, creative leadership coordinator and an alum of the program.
“One of the big things that keeps coming up recently is what does being Black look like to AI,” Seven said, noting recent discussions have included posing questions about how AI would envision Black joy.
Creative Leadership fellow Vivian Valdeza has found that these conversations have encouraged her to think about her racial identity more deeply. “I think being in this class gave me the opportunity to think about what Blackness meant to me and how that impacts my day-to-day life,” Valdeza said.
Valdeza added that the lecturers have helped her keep an open mind on AI. While Valdeza said she is often against AI usage, she emphasized that the class has taught her to ask the question, “is that reasonable or is that coming now off a place of fear or irrationality?”
Jamal Lewis, a fellow taking the class, said many of his concerns with AI relate to how AI art “can fall into stereotypes” and spread “misinformation.”
Armani Carew, a fellow in the class, has found the conversations he’s had in Gallon’s course meaningful. “She lets us talk about everything that we want to talk about,” Carew said. “We get off task, but sometimes the off-task is great conversation.”
Gallon and Keller first came up with the idea for the course after identifying a need for digital AI literacy education in Providence. Once they obtained funding from the Annenberg Community Engaged Research Fund, they decided to select artists as the target audience for “Techno-Cultural Futures.”
“We wanted to focus on who really can have a voice for how society is understanding and feeling about AI,” Keller said. “We felt like artists really do have that voice, in a lot of ways.”
The instructors approached AS220 to form a partnership and pilot the AI literacy course, which, according to Coulibaly and Seven, has been an enriching experience for the Creative Leadership fellows. Gallon and Keller “have created a space that feels curious and inquisitive for our fellows, in a way that allows them to safely question, even be hypercritical” of AI, Coulibaly said.
Noliwe Rooks, the Africana studies department chair, said that the course gives community members “a taste of what it is to be in an environment like Brown.”
“This is a great opportunity for us to have a class at Brown and just experiment more and also learn,” Carew said. “Without (this) opportunity of us going to Brown, we wouldn’t be able to have that knowledge that we do.”
