The rapid development and implementation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the 2020s promises increased productivity but comes with a lack of transparency: Despite all the recent breakthroughs in GenAI research, we know very little about how or why a GenAI returns a specific output to a prompt (Hayles 2022; Bajohr 2022). This means that we can now produce incredible amounts of humanlike text and other cultural expressions without understanding the mechanism that produced it. In turn, GenAI changes the conditions for personal, collective, and aesthetic expression by engulfing parts of the process of creating expressive artefacts (be they texts or otherwise) into a largely obscure apparatus of massive scale.
These developments are often presented as a dichotomy of GenAI-powered automation vs. human craftiness. However, artists, designers, and indeed anyone engaged in communication may be better off searching for new modes of human-AI collaboration that augment rather than simply automate their creative competencies.
HAIC-III offers an analytical, theoretical, and practical interventionist perspective on GenAI as a cultural and creative interface. Through analytical understanding, critical scrutiny, and a series of art and design interventions, HAIC-III develops new and deep understandings of the impact of GenAI to digital culture while also devising an innovative set of practice-based tactics to work with GenAI creatively.
HAIC-III instantiates new collaborations between leading research environments in Denmark, innovative digital practitioners, and an external partner in the public library sector that is currently being affected by the rapid implementation of GenAI. Through this collaborative framework, HAIC-III will harness academic rigour, artistic creativity, and designerly construction to develop models for reading and comprehending GenAI output, empower artists and creators, and enhance human-machine collaboration.
As a concrete example of our expected impact, HAIC-III will ensure that public libraries have the necessary skills to engage with and effectively disseminate GenAI technologies in ways that strengthen citizens’ critical comprehension of GenAI’s role in contemporary culture, building on and extending previous work in this area (Erslev and Pold Forthcoming).
The project is funded by the Danish Independent Research Foundation.
