Reimagining History: AI-Generated Figures in Informal Education

November 15, 10:00-11:30, 8436 (Meeting Room, Dept. of Arts and Media Studies)

Histobots — a term coined for chatbots that blend historical reenactment with generative AI — are emerging as significant tools for informal education in museums and online. This presentation critically reflects on AI portrayals within museums, such as an avatar of Vincent van Gogh in the Musée d’Orsay and representations of Marie Curie on the chatbot applications Hello History and Character.Ai.

"The Eliza Effect vs. The Character Effect: Resisting Anthropomorphization"

September 27, 13:15-14:45, 8436 (Meeting Room, Dept. of Arts and Media Studies)

From both Blade Runner (1982/2017) films over HER (2013) to The Creator (2023): The vast majority of fictional robots and AI representations in film, television, and comic books have profoundly anthropomorphic minds. They are characters in a narratological sense. Many of the respective media texts even seem to make the thematic point that these protagonists have just a different sort of consciousness, capable of genuine, albeit perhaps unconversant emotions; or even that humans should encounter such ‘new minds’ without traditional prejudices. Perhaps powerful as metaphors for all sorts of social (human) ‘Othering,’ such messages and characterizations have little to contribute to our understanding and criticism of ChatGPT, Bard, or Gemini.

The talk approaches this problematic form of anthropomorphization first with a discussion of the well-known ‘Eliza Effect’ (falsely attributing consciousness/sentience to technologies and their interfaces) vs. the narratological ‘Character Effect’ after Mieke Bal (constructing fictional minds – within a frame of make-belief – out of textual cues, most importantly proper names or facial images). While both are at core unrelated, companies on the one hand willingly utilize their entanglements to make voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Azuma Hikari appear more ‘relatable.’ Within fiction, on the other hand, where minimal character traits are usually sufficient to cue audiences in assuming a ‘continuous consciousness frame’ (a character), the Eliza effect seems strangely bypassed when ‘AI protagonists’ can hardly be distinguished from other human and non-human actants (aliens, monsters, intelligent animals). The talk then introduces one of the rare counterexamples in recent media texts, Damon Lindelof’s Peacock-show Mrs. Davis (2023) that deals with the tensions between the Eliza Effect and the Character Effect in extremely smart ways. 

Guest Lecture by Jan-Noël Thon (2024)
 
"Postdigital Aesthetics in AI Imagery" 
 
August 29, 14:00-15:30, 8436 (Meeting Room, Dept. of Arts and Media Studies) 
 
Jan-Noël Thon is Professor and Chair of Media Studies and Media Education at Osnabrück University, Germany. Book publications include From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (co-edited with Daniel Stein, De Gruyter 2013), Storyworlds across Media (co-edited with Marie-Laure Ryan, University of Nebraska Press 2014), Game Studies (co-edited with Klaus Sachs-Hombach, von Halem 2015), Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (University of Nebraska Press 2016), Subjectivity across Media (co-edited with Maike Sarah Reinerth, Routledge 2017), Comicanalyse (co-authored with Stephan Packard, Andreas Rauscher, Véronique Sina, Lukas R.A. Wilde, and Janina Wildfeuer, Metzler 2019), Comics and Videogames (co-edited with Andreas Rauscher and Daniel Stein, Routledge 2021), Comics and Agency (co-edited with Vanessa Ossa and Lukas R.A. Wilde, De Gruyter 2023), Bildmedien (co-edited with Frauke Berndt, De Gruyter 2023), and Metareference and Videogames (co-edited with Theresa Krampe, Routledge 2024). 

“Exploring Generative AI Images and Visual Citizenship”

May 24, 13:00-14:30, 8436 (Meeting Room Dept, of Arts and Media Studies)

AIIM, Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images is based at Aarhus University and focuses specifically on the intersection between AI technology, aesthetics (aesthetic theory from a critical, humanistic perspective), and images/visuality. In this presentation researchers from AIIM present insights from a project that included explorative workshops done in 2023 in collaboration with four different, non-academic domains that face the realities of GAI image practices (the art scene, welfare technology providers, providers of educational material, and the news media). The workshops provided valuable insights into how AI image practices inform visual citizenship and cause (re)distributions of power, agency, and senses of belonging.

April 10, 18:00, Akrinn (Sverres gate 12, Auditorium A001)

"Oops!... AI did it again!" EiT Lecture Performance 2024! 

Free Entry, Open for Everybody

Is it a bubble, is it a hype…? Are you tired of it already? Does the first person to mention “AI” at a party owe everyone else a drink? Or is this a moment in society and media history, once again and now for real, when everything is about to change…? We don’t know either, but we can at least have a little fun following up on these questions! In this explorative Lecture Performance, NTNU students tackle the creative potentials, dangers, and opportunities of machine learning platforms like DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney or ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini through an exciting stage show of five short, AI-driven presentations, blurring the line between human and non-human actors – and between lecture, theater and game show!
"Oops!... AI did it again!" will be the concluding public performance of the 2024 Experts in Teamworks-class "Told Digitally" from NTNU's Department of Arts and Media Studies, with an interdisciplinary group of NTNU students with little to no prior theater experience: a wild mix of thought-provoking questions, critical experiments, and AI-based spectacle!

Facebook: Oops!... AI did it again!

"AI interfaces and professional illustration"

April 5, 13:00-14:30, 8436 (Meeting Room Dept, of Arts and Media Studies)  

Kilian Wilde lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his training as a media designer for digital and print media in 2009. Since then, he has been working as a freelance comic artist, illustrator, 2D animator, and commercial artist, and he is author and artist of the ongoing webcomic series Tale of Fiction (together with web designer Felix Schittig). He also created many comic book projects as well as comic workshops for high school and university students like “Animate Europe – Drawing Europe’s Future”, supported by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. He is also one of the founding members of the performing arts collective “Kastenwesen e.V.” where he contributes with digital and analogue live drawings, cartoons, and documentary comic strips in performances all over Germany since 2011.

"Presentation of the RHET AI project at Tuebingen University - Center for Rhetorical Science Communication Research on Artificial Intelligence"

March 15, 13:00-14:30,  8436 (Meeting Room Dept, of Arts and Media Studies)  

Under the direction of Prof. Olaf Kramer of the University of Tübingen’s Rhetoric Department, The Center for Rhetorical Science Communication Research on Artificial Intelligence (RHET AI) investigates the structure of discourses and debates on the topic of AI from a rhetorical, linguistic, and media-related perspective within five research units: Which narratives and frames play a role in these contexts? Which topical arguments and emotional reactions prevail? The RHET AI Center is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Involved are the Rhetoric Department and the Institute of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, the Chair of Science Communication with a focus on Linguistics (Department of Science Communication) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, researchers from the Excellence Cluster Machine Learning and Cyber Valley, as well as the practice partner Wissenschaft im Dialog in Berlin.

"Platform Realism: AI Image Synthesis and the Rise of Generic Visual Content"

Event info: February 16, 13:00-14:30, 8436 (Meeting Room Dept, of Arts and Media Studies) as well as over Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/97184415402, Meeting-ID: 971 8441 5402

Roland Meyer is a media and visual culture scholar specializing in the history and theory of networked image cultures. After positions at the UdK Berlin, the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, he is currently a postdoc researcher in the CRC 1567 Virtual Lifeworlds at Ruhr University Bochum. There, his research focuses on virtual image archives, AI image synthesis, and navigable images. His most recent book, Gesichtserkennung (Wagenbach 2021, series Digitale Bildkulturen), explores the cultural and social implications of automated facial recognition. Forthcoming in February 2024 is a guest edited volume of the series Bildwelten des Wissens titled »Bilder unter Verdacht«, focusing on practices of image forensics. 

Guest lecture by Jean Lassègue: "Digitization of Law and Justice: where do we stand today?"

Event info: Wednesday, 13th September, 9:00-10:30, 8436 (Meeting Room Dept, of Arts and Media Studies)

Exploratory Workshop: “Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion: Responses from Media Studies toward a “New Paradigm” of Image Production (13/14 February, 2023)