As artificial intelligence becomes ever more embedded in the creative industries, questions around its role, impact, and potential are top of mind across the cultural sector. At Goldsmiths, University of London - long known for its pioneering approach to arts education - these conversations are not only happening in the classroom but are actively shaping the curriculum, pedagogy, and research.
In this interview - shared in our Luxury Insights Report into Art, AI and the Future of Creativity - we speak to Rachel Falconer, Head of Digital and Arts Computing at Goldsmiths, about how the university is equipping students to navigate the fast-evolving world of AI-driven arts and what it means to be a creative practitioner in the age of AI.
How does Goldsmiths’ teaching body see the AI affecting the arts sectors?
The teaching body at Goldsmiths is comprised of practitioners actively engaged with implementing creative strategies around AI and Machine Learning as part of their professional practice and academic research outputs.
This has been the case for over 15 years, and as many of the academic staff at Goldsmiths continue to work directly with the Creative Industries and arts sectors, a clear line of influence into industry is drawn through Goldsmiths’s innovative and progressive attitude to the potential for AI to expand and augment creative practices across all mediums, including electronic, sonic and musical disciplines, visual arts, poetry and literature, performance and expanded time-based mediums, and generative art practices spanning blockchain and alternative modes of responding to Web 3 and the NFT space.
As AI-driven arts practices become increasingly well supported by the wider art world and its supporting economies, there is a need for a more considered and diverse canonisation and critical positioning of the role of AI and generative technologies as they are placed in dialogue with more traditional creative ecologies.
Goldsmiths is well situated to be a contributing and driving beacon for opening up a set of new and alternative art historically driven contextualisations of these contingencies. Instead of the well-trodden negative narrative of AI technologies having a detrimental effect on creative expression, Goldsmiths conversely champions this technology as a creative collaborator, and the potential for distributed authorship across all creative disciplines is viewed with interest and optimism across the academy.
How has the curriculum responded to advancement of AI within its course offering?
Goldsmiths has always responded to changes, progression, and pattern recognition within artistic and creative practices, and as such has reflected this in the augmentation of critical and historical positioning of the pedagogy around AI and machine learning-driven practices to allow students their own pathway through the appreciation of the generative space.
Technical and computationally driven courses and pedagogy respond to the lightning-quick changes and developments in the area, and both on a pedagogical and research level Goldsmiths offers support to both learn and research around these technological advancements.
We also recognise that the lowering of entry points and relative democratisation of AI technologies offers more equitable access to the modes of creative production, and this is reflected in the courses that we offer students.
However, the fundamental ethical and moral challenges these new technologies imbue are a fundamental part of our teaching and pedagogy and co-exist in equal weight alongside the state-of-the-art technical instruction our university is known for.
Goldsmiths creates the space for healthy and robust debate and critical thinking around how these AI systems will infiltrate and affect society as a whole, and this is a defining feature of how we teach and open space for research around the wider socio-political consequences of using these systems for creative practice. This is most closely reflected in innovative programmes such as BSc Digital Arts Computing and the MA and MFA Programme in Computational Arts delivered by Goldsmiths.
Is this a result of student demand, or rather the demands of the digital sphere?
Both. This is a circular discussion, as Goldsmiths is a research-based university with most lecturers and academic staff actively involved in industry as practitioners. Goldsmiths offers students access to best practice and current creative and computational methodologies, as well as preparing the student for entry into the workplace and the wider ecology of the culture industry and socio-political environments, and as such actively reflects the demands of the digital sphere and expanded technological realities of society.
What are Goldsmiths’ views on the use of AI platforms to enhance (or impede) the human learning experience?
At Goldsmiths we have a nuanced and non-formulaic approach to learning through the collaborative use of AI and associated technologies for transparent and equitable pedagogical and learning enhancement, if the student is clear around how and in what context they have implemented the tool. As a creative practice collaborator, AI can be a challenging and inspiring tool, medium, and methodology to deploy as part of an expanded creative practice.
In the wake of AI threatening jobs that involve the human eye/mind, how is Goldsmiths University preparing its students for the workplace?
Goldsmiths’ approach to any societal, economic, cultural, or political shift in the wider ecology of lived experiences outside the context of the academy is to prepare students from both a practical and critical perspective to adapt, challenge, and be fully prepared for operating within the new contexts in which they find themselves. Clearly, the mass adoption of specific AI and Machine Learning systems and tools and the implementation of these across a number of professional sectors and industries offers unique challenges for professional development.
As such, Goldsmiths communicates and measures the professional challenges students will be encountering by continuing its close and informed dialogue with industry and creating the critical and transformative space for students to increment their learning and application of strategies for countering, acknowledging, and assimilating these very real challenges in labs and expanded classroom settings that reflect professional practice outside the academy.
