Semester:
Offered:
Philippe Cluzel (Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology & Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)
First-Year Seminar 52U 4 credits
How might AI be used in the future to enable creative work in the arts and sciences? Our goal will be to evaluate the power and the limitation of AI in creating what we call “original” work. During the first weeks, each student will identify and propose a creative project whose development will rely essentially on the use of a current AI platform. To cite a few examples, students may propose a new musical piece, a set of drawings, a fictional monograph, or a computer modeling of physical and mathematical systems; they may design plans for engineering artefacts or use AI to assist discoveries in medical sciences.
The organization of the seminar will alternate between tutorials and hands-on experimentation. Short tutorials aimed at a general audience will introduce the key underlying technology behind AI. We will watch recorded lectures and read articles before class and then engage in discussion during class (sometimes outside experts will join that discussion). Through this hands-on process, students should experience and reflect on the power, the limitations, and the future of AI in domains that touch upon human creativity. Collective reflection, external consultations, and collaboration between students across disciplines are strongly encouraged, and should be reported in the final writeup documenting the computer-aided creative process. During the semester, students will introduce their projects to the rest of the class to receive feedback and answer questions; they will also document in an online notebook the different technical steps that constitute the development of their projects.