ARTS 36
Art and AI: Generative Art Making Winter 2025

AI art is here and the media narrative is alarmist – artists will lose their jobs to machines, AI will replace human creativity. A more optimistic future imagines a world where artists can harness the power of AI to expand their palette, boost their productivity, and experiment with new forms. In this course, students will learn the basic skills of generative art making through hands-on learning using AI tools to produce works from concept to completion while engaging in critical thinking to examine the ethical considerations of AI through instructor-led discussions and tutorials. Students will create original still images (drawings, paintings, photographs) and use generative AI to apply dynamic motion to the image resulting in a cinematic rendering of the original still image. Students will be equipped with an understanding of how images are recreated and imagined by artificial intelligence. Students will write a description of their process, why they chose the particular image, what it made them think about critically from an artistic and art history perspective. At the end of the session students will present their work in a group exhibition. The final artworks will be edited together for exhibition on a digital screen and students can also consider prototyping installation concepts that merge digital and physical elements.