Creative industries – from scriptwriting to music production – are being rapidly transformed by AI. To keep the pace, the University of Florida’s College of the Arts has launched a new AI and the Arts Certificate – a 12-credit undergraduate program that prepares students to navigate the ever-evolving art world and ultimately excel in their future careers.
“All artistic fields, and their respective development pipelines, are going to be disrupted by AI,” said Heidi Boisvert, Ph.D., associate professor of AI and the Arts – Immersive Performance Technologies. “It's important for students to be equipped with AI literacy tools and skills, as well as conversant in the ethical conversations surrounding extractive/biased data, environmental consumption, civil liberties, and legal considerations with regards to copyright and authenticity. Upskilling is going to be key.”
Students in the certificate program will learn how to use AI tools to assist their creative process in any discipline. They will be able to combine their creative practice in dance, theatre, music, and visual or digital arts and design with the latest tools and techniques in AI to develop hands-on computation skills, while building a critical foundation in aesthetics and ethics.
“The field of AI is highly interdisciplinary, so it’s critical for students and faculty to disrupt rigid academic silos and experiment with diverse modes of expression,” said Boisvert, who has always stayed abreast of current technology and collaborated with other disciplines in her artistic practice. “Co-creation involves a unique way of thinking across art, science, technology and social change.”
There are 10 courses in the certificate program, including two new gateway classes.
“Topics & Perspectives: AI, Art & Society,” for example, will examine the promises and perils of AI through the lens of media studies and critical theory, as well as look at case studies of artists who use AI and other emerging technologies in unconventional and subversive ways to catalyze discourse.
“Algorithmic Creativity” will introduce students to code as a creative medium, providing them with basic concepts of machine-generated art. Topics in the course include formal grammars, Markov chains, probabilistic automata and artificial neural networks. Students will use these techniques to analyze and generate digital art, music and performances using open-source tools for experimenting with algorithms.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and associate professor of AI and the arts at the Digital Worlds Institute, argues that the start-up ethos around artists creates a “let’s just make this work” attitude, which is important for research and education collaboration. By teaching the technical and creative aspects of coding, Winger-Bearskin instructs her students to focus on innovation at the intersection of art and technology.
“Art is good at creative problem solving,” Winger-Bearskin said.
While the arts may not always come to mind when people think about AI at a research university, Angelos Barmpoutis, Ph.D., professor of digital arts and sciences, argues that the creative processes inherent in art and design are beneficial to other disciplines, especially as students explore the uses of AI.
“The arts are community facing – a vehicle to inform the public about AI,” Barmpoutis said. “With initiatives like [UF’s AI Initiative], the arts will always help the university communicate the importance of being an AI university.”
For more information about the courses or to apply for the program, contact Heidi Boisvert, Ph.D., at hboisvert@ufl.edu or visit admissions.ufl.edu/register/CertCEApp.
