{"id":69835,"date":"2020-12-21T11:10:24","date_gmt":"2020-12-21T16:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=69835"},"modified":"2026-06-19T18:39:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T22:39:50","slug":"students-explore-fiction-reality-of-artificial-intelligence-with-new-electronic-publication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2020\/12\/students-explore-fiction-reality-of-artificial-intelligence-with-new-electronic-publication\/","title":{"rendered":"Students explore fiction, reality of artificial intelligence with new electronic publication"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fiction and reality of artificial intelligence (AI) came together for students this semester.<\/p>\n

In addition to using science fiction to explore how AI intersects with culture, society, and justice, students in Interactive Arts and Science course IASC 1F01 Foundations of Interactive Arts and Science got hands-on experience creating some AI of their own.<\/p>\n

Using a wide variety of source texts, from ancient poems like Beowulf<\/em> to an episode of South Park<\/em>, students trained algorithms to write a collection of poems titled Robopoetics<\/a>, now available as an electronic publication (EPUB).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

AJ Sylver, a first-year student in IASC 1F01, says the experience of training an algorithm to write poetry gave him insight into how technology can learn and modify itself.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cMachine learning is adaptable to poetry because constraints on making meaning are more open ended,\u201d says Aaron Mauro, Assistant Professor with the Centre for Digital Humanities and the course\u2019s instructor.<\/p>\n

Many of the course\u2019s students had never coded before. In addition to course materials, they used online documentation and videos, and worked with their classmates to learn the Python programming language and TensorFlow machine learning platform.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt looked intimidating at first, but our professor helped us all the way along, so it wasn\u2019t as difficult as it seemed,\u201d says first-year student Maisyn Kwinecki.<\/p>\n

To create the new poetry, students wrote customized algorithms , which processed the input text \u00a0several hundred times. The AI then replaced each word with a unique number, called a token, and then looked for relationships between tokens.<\/p>\n

When the process is complete, the tokens are recombined, and turned back into words that make up a new poem.<\/p>\n

The students discovered that finding the right source material was sometimes a challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur source material was on the Project Gutenberg<\/a> website, so if you didn\u2019t choose a long enough text it would include the licensing agreement\u201d says student AJ Sylver, who initially tried training his algorithm on Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s poem \u201cThe Raven\u201d before switching to \u201cThe Fall of the House of Usher.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sylver found that using a long text to start, and having \u00a0the algorithm process it the maximum number of times his computer could handle, produced the best new poems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe algorithm is going through the text so many times, and when I got a poem that started to make sense I thought, \u2018I can\u2019t believe I did this!\u2019,\u201d says Kwinecki. \u201cYou get a completely different poem each time. The poem I chose flowed so nicely, I really loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The AI-written poetry also raised questions of authorship and authorial intention for students.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is basically taking things as a token and looking for patterns, so there\u2019s not a lot of emotional meaning but there is a logical meaning,\u201d says Sylver. \u201cThere\u2019s something profound in the poems but it\u2019s not intentional.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exploring the complexities of AI through a combination of literature and films as well as hands-on experience helped demystify what it is and what it can do.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve learned so much about AI from this course,\u201d says Kwinecki. \u201cIt gave me the perspective of what AI really is and that it\u2019s already here. The course showed me that there\u2019s a lot of control of AI from the human side.\u201d<\/p>\n

While humans can\u2019t see the operation of algorithms or perceive the data flowing through the system, these algorithms have a very real impact on people. AI is currently being used for everything from video conferencing and home assistants to self-driving cars and probationary courts in the US.<\/p>\n

The well-known example of Clearview AI, a facial recognition program used by police units in the US and Canada, highlights some of the important questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are real problems with it, in that there could be false positives, but what if you could identify a serial killer on the loose? What safeguards do you want in place to use the technology responsibly?\u201d says Mauro. \u201cThese are ideas students need to be thinking about as future leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fiction and reality of artificial intelligence (AI) came together for students in an Interactive Arts and Science course this semester.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":69832,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,37,1],"tags":[8542,15138,263,30,123],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69835"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69835"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110526,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69835\/revisions\/110526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}