The Center for Teaching and Learning is pleased to host Dr. Erin Reilly for our December Image/Text/Code event.
In the Moody College of Communication, Dr. Erin Reilly guides faculty and students in imagining where innovation meets entrepreneurship. She has designed and launched a new specialization, Texas Immersive, to teach courses on the future of media and entertainment, and builds university-wide initiatives and fosters relationships with other academic institutions and industry partners. She has authored both academic and industry publications including Headspace VR on Medium, Fan Favorites in Strategy + Business, T is for Transmedia: Learning through Transmedia Play, and co-author of the book, Reading in a Participatory Culture.
In this session, Dr. Reilly will give us a guided discussion of a book chapter, "Remix Culture in the Age of AI," that she is completing this semester, following up with a discussion around the ways in which AI are transforming the work of a diverse range of creative industries. In this presentation, Dr. Reilly will also offer hands-on pedagogical suggestsion for integrating generative AI tools into instructional contexts.
Below, you will find an excerpt from the chapter.
>> Please click this link to register (University of Texas at Austin attendees)
>> Please click this link to register (non-University of Texas at Austin attendees)
"Remix is a creative process of rearranging, altering, or combining pre-existing media (audio, visual, etc.) to create a new work of art. For example, in music, a remix typically involves taking an original song and incorporating additional elements such as different vocals, beats, or rhythms. Remix exists now across varied media such as music, writing, film, fine arts, and other creative mediums in both the physical and digital spaces. When done well, artists who employ the practice of remix give a nod to historical works while adding their own creative touch in a fresh and unique way.
"The emergence and adoption of tools that utilize Artificial Intelligence are changing the landscape of remix by producing exciting new techniques and forms and pushing the boundaries of remix as a practice. These developments are both constructive yet potentially problematic and merit exploration. In doing so, we can better understand the implications of AI on remix and discover the best paths forward in this new landscape.
"In some ways, we can argue that AI has enhanced creativity by empowering artists to explore new means of remixing works. The Human Artistry Campaign promotes responsible and critical engagement with AI tools and has a list of 7 principles to navigate the emergence of AI in the creative fields. The first rule is that “technology has long empowered human expression, and AI will be no different.” We already see creatives benefiting from these tools in their creative process. For example, in Runway-ML, a video editing software that utilizes AI, users can generate video backgrounds using text prompts and reference images. While the form is different, creatives can produce a substitute for what would otherwise require a film production set and vast financial backing. In another case, The Crow by Glenn Marshall won the 2022 Cannes Short Film Festival with his use of OpenAI’s CLIP, an AI tool that visually painted and morphed an original recording of a female dancer into a crow, constituting a new artistic form. In these cases, and many others, we can see how AI applications open new opportunities and forms of remix.
"While emerging AI tools offer new possibilities, they also bring with them new concerns that creatives and stakeholders should engage with. For example, datasets that are not representative of the total population can be analysed and reinterpreted in ways that skew the outputs, such as racially profiling different groups. There is also the legal side of remix. As of 2023, the legal debate around authorship and ownership, as well as the use of name or likeness, is ongoing with lawsuits against OpenAI (and other companies using AI) for copyright infringement. Then, we have the well-founded fear that AI tools will take away jobs and replace creatives. This fear is exemplified by the Hollywood Writers’ Strike in 2023. This concern is further multiplied when we take a step back and examine the more existential worry of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which, unlike the current capabilities of specific AI, will be able to outperform humans in virtually every goal-oriented task.
"These new emerging AI-based tools are shaping the future of remix. While AI tools have produced exciting new creative techniques and forms, there are substantial risks that creatives, stakeholders, and academics should engage with. By exploring case studies of emergent creative tools that utilize AI in the process of remix, we can better understand the creative potential and risks involved. Furthermore, we can begin to piece together some guidelines for how creatives can approach and engage with these new tools in a critical and thoughtful way."