AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS)

Interested in exploring media & storytelling in the age of Generative AI? 

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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.

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