Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The announcement of a new Artificial Intelligence known as Chat Gpt-3 has sparked debates in academic and pedagogical circles mostly about new forms of plagiarism and ways to prevent them. As an alternative to this negative agenda, it is possible to take a different approach and exploit this new technology as a potential pedagogical tool, especially for courses on culture and art. This paper will present a case study on the use and outcomes of the available AI technology in an undergraduate course on popular culture. Accordingly, this study relies on samples of student projects that employ Chat Gpt-3 to create fictional texts with various mediums of artistic objects (painting, photography, sculpture, and so on) in genres and modern historical periods of their choosing. The projects involve report-writing by critically and editorially reflecting on the creative capacities along with data-related prejudices of the AI, and revision/rewriting of the short piece based on the report. Hence, within the purview of these projects, university students will develop better notion of popular culture by engaging with an AI as active agents rather than passive receivers of information; test the strengths, limitations, and prejudices of this new technology regarding its tacit understanding and representations of the cultural atmospheres in different periods; use artworks of various mediums critically and creatively. This study contributes to future studies on the relationship between algorithms and art.