Our Reflections

Davis Allred:

    This website, Artistic Intelligence, is the product of a college English project. Throughout the entire semester, we maintained a focus on artificial intelligence. More specifically, we (each student) selected an AI that was relevant to our planned career. My planned career is graphic design, or something related, so I chose to research AI in the field of art.

    As someone who already had an interest in and solid understanding of AI, the research I performed in this class did not significantly contribute to my perspective on AI. However, I was able to reinforce what I knew and grow more confident in my ability to accurately share the information. This confidence allowed me to be more comfortable in our final project: the creation and publication of a blog/e-magazine.

    In this project, we worked in small groups to revise and adapt work we had completed in the class into a digital publication. For this, I selected my informational essay to revise and some of the discussion posts to adapt. The essay had plenty of interesting information and I feel that it wasn’t too technical, which means potential readers won’t get lost on it. The discussion posts were already in the somewhat casual voice I wanted for the blog, but they were lacking in content. I decided to take the most informative discussions and rewrite them to include more information and a more personal voice. I also decided to bring some interactivity into it by tossing in a couple links to short videos or articles and inviting the reader to invest more of their time into the topic.

    At first, I was unsure of the group aspect of this project (I have never had a good experience with group assignments in school). I’ll admit right now that I would have preferred to work solo. However, I can happily say that this is the first group project I have enjoyed. My partner, Hailey, was very helpful and responsive. Not to mention, she was eager to make sure our workloads were as equal as possible. Communicating with her was easy, which allowed us to figure out our plan of action very early on in the project.

    All in all, this project was a surprisingly fun and insightful experience. It not only brought a nice ending to a hectic semester but helped me find something I didn’t know I was passionate about: sharing what I know with others. I’m proud of what Hailey and I have created, and I hope that at least a few people will find our blog and learn something from it.

Hailey Warden:

    This website, Artistic Intelligence, is the product of a college English project. Throughout the entire semester, we maintained a focus on artificial intelligence. More specifically, we (each student) selected an AI that was relevant to our planned career. We were assigned a partner to complete the project with, combining our semester's work into one blog post. My planned career involves a double major, part of which will be in Illustration, and my partner is going into graphic design, so composing our project about AI in Art seemed like the most conducive to our interests and knowledge-base.

    I had very little knowledge of AI before entering this class. Over the semester I looked more specifically at the other half of my double major, which involved the sciences. With the culmination of the year's work, and the development of those pieces into a blog about AI in art, I greatly broadened my understanding about AI in: art, science, and as a general component of our world today. I learned how to navigate and create a blog, which was also something I had no prior experience in.

    I chose to begin with my narrative essay. I felt that it contained the most general information on AI, and I was able to easily format it to fit in well with our theme that leaned more closely on artwork AI systems. I then used two discussion posts in tandem to combine into one post to evaluate some of the dangers of AI, and some of the considerations that should be made in any field when looking at AI systems. These posts, again, provided a broad enough perspective that I was able to fine tune with more research to make it more conductive towards our overall blog. The last post I made that wasn't a collaborative effort with my partner was mainly outside research about the question of the validity of artwork AI's generation of "Art." I wanted to make sure there was a lot of different variety in our blog posts, viewing AI in the art world from many different perspectives. It was interesting to view the transition of my essays and discussions posts from being science-centered to art-centered. A lot of the logic and concerns carried over, and it was a surprisingly easy process to revise and edit my writing to work better with our blog.

    My partner and I also chose to both adapt the same discussion post. We felt this added more depth to our collaborative effort, and made it possible to exhibit more perspectives in our blog. The post we chose was once again because of its discussion of general aspects about AI that could be easily translated into their relation to the art world.

    I was a little nervous when I first saw that this project was a collaborative effort. So far I have not had the best experience with group projects in other classes, but I was pleasantly surprised with this partner experience. I think it was well designed by our teacher, to assign us partners who had similar performance in the class over the course of the semester. My partner was always responsive, and demonstrated a great work ethic. He was a fantastic communicator, and due to his graphic design background, extremely helpful in creating our blog. It was a very positive experience, and I am very happy with how our work turned out.

    This project, and class, as a whole were great learning experiences. I was able to approach a subject I never would have learned about on my own from many different perspectives. I really liked being able to use our writing from the year, and not being required to create entirely new information. I had a lot of positive experiences throughout the process of creating our final project, and feel that it demonstrates very well the hard work we put in all semester.

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