Creative Work & Artificial Intelligence

AI can now perform a wide variety of creative tasks, often with ingenuity and speed that surpass the creative power of human beings. This is useful for designers, artists, and engineers who wish to enhance their capacity to be creative in their work: AI can brainstorm new creative approaches to problems, edit and streamline ideas generated by humans, and has even offered strikingly original solutions to technical challenges that were previously considered unsolvable. Nevertheless, these abilities raise urgent philosophical and ethical questions.

This course will focus on the ethics of using AI for creative work, while also investigating the nature and value of creativity for human beings more generally. We will ask: How should we respond to the (seemingly) creative capabilities of AI? Should we take these creative capabilities seriously? What ethical issues must be dealt with if we use AI creatively? What is the ethical value of human creativity? Does AI have anything to teach us about human creativity or what it means to be a human being? If so, what can we learn from it?

Students will gain comprehensive insights into the key ethical problems that using AI creatively requires us to grapple with, including the value of originality in creative work, the dangers of deskilling and plagiarism, the impact of AI on human freedom and justice at work, and the disruptive transformation of creative industries. The ethical stakes are high. The creative use of AI stands to transform the working lives of designers, engineers, and artists, but the challenges of deploying this technology responsibly are poorly understood.

The course will primarily be taught by the Responsible Teacher with guest lectures from P&E staff, visits from creative professionals who use generative AI, group work on an applied topic, and in-person interactive exercises.

After this course, students are able to:

1. Explain the concept of creativity and describe the ethical challenges AI poses to creative work and the creative industries.
2. Apply philosophical understanding of creativity to how designers, engineers, and designers use generative AI.
3. Identify and analyze the ethical challenges of using AI for creative work.
4. Evaluate current ethical solutions to using AI in design, engineering, and analyze the potential impact on professional workflows in the creative industries.
5. Apply the principles of ethics on creativity to evaluate real-life case studies and develop ethical solutions collaboratively.
6. Evaluate the ethical and philosophical challenges posed by artificial intelligence in designing, engineering, and the creative industries,
7. Synthesize arguments that reflect a deep understanding of the ethical and philosophical challenges posed by artificial intelligence in designing, engineering, and the creative industries.

You must meet the following requirements

• Registered for a degree programme other than
• HBO-TOP Applied Physics, Pre-Master

• Articles and other materials will be available via Canvas