Join us for a celebration of projects that explore the use of AI for mediated storytelling produced with the support of AIMS funding over the last year. From 4–5 p.m., we’ll present a series of short demos, followed by keynote talks and conversation featuring Louise Matsakis and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. The conversation will address critical perspectives on AI in relation to storytelling and journalism. RSVP here.

Two PhD students from the Interdivisional Media Arts + Practice Program offered a glimpse into their process, outcomes, insights, and expressions - Luke Fischbeck on exploring patient interfaces with medical technologies via generated imagery (w/ custom datasets); Sarah Ciston on recent book project Coding Care: Guidebooks for Intersectional AI, via their creative-critical code projects.

This combined demo-conversation-brainstorming session included an overview of Assistive AI-for-Journalism, laying the groundwork by looking at recent research and nascent startups, and then focused in by critically engaging with and constructively iterating on one such system proposed by USC Viterbi’s Alexander Spangher as part of his dissertation work. We discussed the ethical and political complexities of designing such a system, and the kinds of tasks that it tries to solve, and how such a prototype connects to broader media systems.

At the inaugural AIMS Grad Student Reading Group meeting, we discussed Wendy Brown's Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber, in which she argues that we might navigate difficult times by better engaging with different ways of knowing, representing, and transforming worlds -- a dynamic that's key to so much of (generative) AI.

AIMS hosted a reception to share updates about the Spark Award recipients and their projects that explore generative AI for media and storytelling.

Dr. Robert Gorwa, visiting scholar at USC Annenberg, delivered a talk about governing the model marketplace. He discussed recent research exploring the growing ecosystem of various AI hosting intermediaries, their political economic context, their social and technical affordances, and underlying business models. He further discussed the emerging governance issues that these platforms are currently grappling with, with a focus on the slow development of community guidelines and moderation practices in the image-generation model platform space. In the face of increasing public and private scrutiny, how are these new companies responding? And how might these platforms better mobilize resources to act as a careful, fair, and proportionate regulatory access point?

Benjamin Bratton, Director of Antikythera and Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at the University of California, San Diego, discussed the topic of Recursive Simulations, a research theme exploring the emergence of simulation as an epistemological technology, from scientific simulation to VR/AR. The reception and lecture were co-sponsored by the USC Center on Generative AI & Society, and Antikythera, a think tank reorienting planetary computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force, housed within the Berggruen Institute.

Professor Mike Ananny hosted a panel discussion about the role that Generative AI could – or should – play in newsrooms.

Graduate students from the School of Cinematic Arts and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism interested in Generative AI gathered to connect, share their research, and brainstorm ideas for further collaborations and reflective practice.

Professor Holly Willis offered a hands-on faculty workshop on the use of Midjourney for text-to-image generation, within a broader discussion of Generative AI.

We kicked off the academic year by hosting a workshop with 50+ faculty from SCA and Annenberg to explore storytelling and its relationship to Generative AI.