Launching the Institute for Creativity and AI

Yesterday, I spent a really interesting evening at Bayes Business School for the launch of City St George’s Institute for Creativity and AI. And what they'r doing is having up to be exciting.

While, yes, you might say “You work for City St George’s, Adam, you're bound to say that”, that's only half true. I work for them for half the week, and I'm under zero obligation to post anything here. This is, after all, the home of the other half of my work.

So, I went along not out of employee duty, but a genuine interest. That's the same reason I'm writing about it now. I do think that AI has the potential to be a truly transformative technology. Not necessarily as a series of AI-centric products, but as the underlying plumbing for the next wave of digital tools. And so any serious effort to look at it seriously, both in an academic and in a practical sense seems like a good investment of time — and money.

So, this institute is made up of academics from across the institution coming together to explore this emergent technology, including several from my own department: journalism.

My colleague Dr Lea Hellmueller was on stage as part of a panel, representing the journalism and School of Communication and Creativity side of things. The presentations and discussions were a really interesting corrective to much of the techbro hype around AI . They sought to balance the creative possibilities of AI with the fact that there’s literal decades of prior art in this field that should inform where we go next, as Professor Neil Maiden pointed out. And, indeed, some serious questions around ethics.

But most of all, it is a much-needed effort to do serious investigation into this technology as it rolls out, rather than after it is ubiquitous. Early days yet, but I intend to pay a very close eye on where this Institute goes — and the collaborations it's planning on building.

You can learn more about it here:

The Institute for Creativity and AI | City, University of London

The Institute for Creativity and AI (ICAI) at City St George’s explores AI’s impact on creativity through interdisciplinary research and partnerships with schools, businesses, and funding bodies.

City, University of London