Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling Reflection
-In the reading for Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling I learned a lot about creative writing. Although it is just the basics, and largely centered around scripts/ screenplay writing, it was very valuable and good to remind myself of these aspects of storytelling. Into the woods a five-act journey into story by John Yorke was a great read and very good at outlining what elements stories need. This, in turn, informed some of the final edits to the play I wrote ‘It’s All In Your Head’ as I wanted to make sure it was as compelling as I could make it. This course helped my play slightly, both in terms of creative writing story elements and also additions and contemplation about AI ethics (as in the intensive there was a short discussion about the ethics of AI — including its capacity to write/be creative, copyright, jobs, and the issue of training it and who really does that work — which built upon what we explored in Ethical Data Futures).
This programme was not exactly what I expected, especially during the intensive, as we spent a lot of time learning about Language Learning Models and how they work. Although this was valuable knowledge, it wasn’t directly relevant or useful to the assignment and the other work in the programme.
In this programme, I learned that AI is not easy to direct and not good at writing fiction (at least not in the format we used it/ the model we used). I did learn how to give it better prompts, and built slightly on my coding knowledge, as well as play with images in AI along with text.
The best part of the intensives, and of the programme, were when we created our own stories and characters (with the help of the AI), then melded them together in groups to make a bigger story, and then attempted to combine all of these into a class story. We then presented our group’s story to the class with visual aids. This allowed us more creative freedom and challenged us to blend and fit our stories together.
I did however build on my presentation and writing skills in this module, although also learned how difficult AI is to work with to write literature or even to generate ideas, especially when there are a lot of restrictions.
This knowledge and the skills I built on this programme will most likely inform my futures project, especially in the creative writing aspect.
