Motivated by the idea that stories and cultures shape each other – and that each era’s storytelling reflects its technologies – AIMS is collaboration between USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism committed to experimenting with, inventing, studying, teaching, and debating the power of artificial intelligence for media and storytelling.
Anna Higgie
"How We're Using AI" - AI and Journalism Series at Columbia Journalism Review
How do leading journalists actually think about, use, or resist AI? Check out this new feature with the Columbia Journalism Review: "How We’re Using AI".
With support from AIMS and the Columbia Journalism Review, Mike Ananny and Matt Pearce (Director of Policy at Rebuild Local News, recently Los Angeles Times & Media Guild of the West) worked with 18 leading journalists to author short, first-person perspectives on AI.
We wanted to hear from leading, thoughtful journalists themselves on AI -- how they use it or reject it, what its limits are, why it's something to embrace or avoid, and who they think they are as professionals in an uncertain age of synthetic journalism.
It's an amazing mix of short, honest, teachable perspectives from data journalists, beat reporters, industry executives, visual storytellers, field organizers, senior editors, columnists and commentators.
AIMS Undergraduate Research Award
AIMS co-founders Mike Ananny and Holly Willis were awarded funding through USC’s Undergraduate Research Associates Program to bring a team of undergraduate students into the programming and planning for Flux Festival in fall 2024. Thanks to this funding, students are collaborating with the Flux curatorial team to explore a range of specific questions related to storytelling and AI such as:
1) How can storytelling professionals better understand and shape the promise and limitations of Generative AI?
2) How can professionals and their industries better invent, adapt, resist, and reshape Generative AI tools?
3) What new communities – of scholars, students, practitioners, technologists, and audiences – need to form to ensure that Generative AI stories are imaginative, creative, provocative, ethical, authentic, accountable, and in the public interest?
Student research outcomes will include a student-designed newsletter on AI and storytelling; a gallery exhibition and screening of AI short form videos; social media posts sharing questions regarding the role of AI in storytelling; and scholarly essays, profiles, and interviews.
AIMS Interdisciplinary Teaching Grant
Ananny and Willis also received an Interdisciplinary Teaching Grant to co-lead a new undergraduate course titled AI for Media & Storytelling, scheduled for Spring 2025, that will bring together students from Annenberg and SCA to investigate artificial intelligence’s power to create media and structure storytelling. Rather than seeing these industries and fields as separate, participants will trace their foundations and examine how their communities of practice engage with AI. Through hands-on exercises, experimental prototyping, collaborative making, system deployments, field trips, and guest speakers, the course is designed to help students create their own AI practices, discovering and developing for themselves ways to critically make AI media and stories that illustrate their own relationships to power, social justice, and collective life. This course is guided by the idea that the way to escape being caught in cycles of AI doom and hype is to know, from as many perspectives as possible, what media and stories are, what they do, and what they could be – and to use this clarity to shape AI futures.
Saturday, April 5, 2025,Thursday, April 10, 2025, Friday, May 16, 2025, Tuesday, May 20th, 2025, Saturday May 24th, 2025
AIMS community members are participating in a project run by Mozilla Foundation and the Berggruen Institute called "Imaginative Intelligences", organized by AIMS Associate Director, Ziyaad Bhorat
Imaginative Intelligences invites a select group of artists, executives, creators, and technologists to go back to basics and really rewire our understand of the future of creativity at this moment in AI. The assemblies in total will bring together voices from music, film/TV, new media, and tech to foster social cohesion and dialogue around the key challenges and opportunities facing creatives in the face of technological transformation. Gabriel Kahan (Creative Practitioner, Technologist and Berggruen Fellow), will guide participants through his unique methodology, which was developed at MIT, and perfected in LA.
With so much technology created without artist consent or involvement, this is an opportunity for creatives to meet technologists and address the key challenges facing their industries through direct participation.
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