Video stills from 21st Century Frankenstein (video portraits of participants and their imagined AI from the Whose AI? workshop series), Carrie Sijia Wang, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Left: Carrie Sijia Wang and the Whose AI? workshop participants at CultureHub’s CoLab Program. Image courtesy of CultureHub.
Right: Carrie Sijia Wang and the Whose AI? workshop participants at Glow Culture Center’s Youth Empowerment Program. Image courtesy of Glow Culture Center.
Whose AI? is a project by artist and educator Carrie Sijia Wang, supported by The Artist Impact Initiative.
Through a series of interactive workshops, this project brings together diverse groups of young people across New York City to critically engage with AI technologies, to play, to learn, to experiment, and to co-construct knowledge about AI’s social implications.
On this website, you can: explore the workshop curriculum—with lesson plans and coding templates for the interactive activities; browse the artistic artifacts from past workshop sessions; or learn more about the project below.
Intention
The development and utilization of Generative AI tools is increasingly affecting our personal lives, social spaces, and work environments. Despite the promises of progress and efficiency among other opportunities, AI presents unique challenges—accelerating the spread of misinformation, automating the creation of biased content, consuming an excessive amount of energy, disrupting the job market, to name a few.
Whose AI? is designed to empower young people from underserved and underrepresented communities to (re)imagine the future of Conversational AI, and engage meaningfully in critical dialogues concerning the risks involved in the development and utilization of AI language models.
This project aims to increase AI literacy, and raise awareness about the need for AI ethics by providing time and space for young people to co-construct a clearer understanding of conversational AI through hands-on experimentation and play.
Method
Whose AI? unfolds through a series of workshops with hands-on, interactive activities focusing on co-constructing both technical and conceptual knowledge about text-based AI. Participants can choose to come to one, or all, or any combo of the workshops, and leave with some new knowledge and/or understanding of AI. For coding activities, easy-to-use templates and clear guidance are provided. No prior experience of programming is required.
In this project, to educate is not to fill the participants with existing facts, but to facilitate vital conversations, between participants themselves, participants and the artist, participants and the tech world, and the society at large.
Progress
As of September, 2024, the artist has run 26 workshop sessions in collaboration with cultural and youth organizations in New York.
Below are a few highlights:
- CultureHub: CoLab, East Village, Manhattan, July, 2024
- NYU’s College & Career Lab: Summer Program for Public School Students, Downtown Brooklyn, July, 2024
- Red Hook Initiative, Red Hook, Brooklyn, May, 2024
- Chatham Square Library, Chinatown, Manhattan, April – June, 2024
- Glow Cultural Center, Flushing, Queens, March, 2024
- Pilot Workshops with More Art, Online, September and December, 2023