Julie Goldstein, Associate Professor in the Department of Visual & Media Arts at Grand Valley University, was the first presenter of the new year at our weekly Enrichment Series. Her work focuses primarily on film and video production. Generative AI (artificial intelligence) is a relevant topic in that it is an evolving technology impacting the creative process and contributing to dialogue around many aspects of our daily lives.
In an interactive presentation, she explained the concept of how an image or text can be generated using general language prompts through a system such as Chat GPT. It creates new content based on patterns in data. The concept raised many questions and concerns over where the information comes from such as, “how do we respect someone’s copyright? or Is there a built-in bias? How is my information being used to show me someone who looks like me? Is someone of another race going to get a picture of someone who looks like them?” The conversation was ongoing and interesting.
There are many exciting and creative uses for this new technology, but also many challenges, risks, and the potential for misuse. As Julie stressed, we must remember that when asking questions and receiving back a human-like response in a chat, you are not talking to a real human being. Those of us who have been around before all of this technology and remember life without it, should remind the younger generation that we must retain our own brain capabilities, our own human creativeness, and remember what it is like to be human.
We’ve only scratched the very surface of this topic and we have already decided that we must have Julie back again. This talk marks the second time we’ve had Julie at our speaker series. Last year she joined us with a fascinating presentation on animation.
