Reminder - Workshop on the Study of Commercial Creative AI @ ICCC 2024 - call for participation

[Oliver Bown]

Reminder: second call for participation (submissions due May 17th)

Workshop on the Study of Commercial Creative AI (ComCAI), 2024

Held in association with the 15th International Conference on Computational Creativity, at the University of Jönköping, Sweden, 17th-21st June 2024.

Overview

Since the late 2010s, commercial applications of creative AI (ComCAI) have flourished. This sector has evolved in a way that is largely disconnected from traditional academic research in computational creativity (CC). It emerged in parallel, driven by certain economic, social, and technical-infrastructural conditions, and was then superpowered by a specific series of breakthroughs in deep learning and an associated AI investment boom. This workshop invites longstanding members of the CC community to engage in deep interdisciplinary scoping with researchers from further afield who are newer to creative AI or less familiar with the CC literature.

Building on a longstanding body of theoretical work by the CC community, the workshop asks:

How can we map the technologies, business models, social impacts, and policy positions of the commercial creative AI sector?

• What changes are afoot in digital creative practices as a result of the ComCAI boom and to what extent do they tally with the expectations historically laid out by CC? This may consider the work in the CC literature on human bias against AI creativity, ‘democratisation’, hybrid co-creative workflows, application contexts, and, fundamentally, on the architectures that best support creative work.
• What are the most pressing social issues caused by the rise of commercial creative AI?
• How can we reconcile, integrate, or compare pre-existing theories of CC with current commercial activity and related public debates about AI’s impact on creativity?
• How can the theories, methods and architectures of CC research support public policy, public debate, and creative industries strategies through the impacts of commercial creative AI?
• How should academia-industry collaboration be structured and funded in CC?
• How can interdisciplinarity be leveraged to support academia acting as a trusted critic of the commercial sector?

Organising Committee

• Oliver Bown (chair) (University of New South Wales)
• Georgina Born (University College London)
• Rebecca Fiebrink (University of the Arts London)
• Anna Jordanous (University of Kent)
• Bob Sturm (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
• Simon Colton (Queen Mary University of London)
• Rujing Stacy Huang (University of Hong Kong)

Please contact Oliver Bown (o.b...@unsw.edu.au) with any enquiries.

Scope and Call for Contributing Statements

The workshop will take the form of a structured collaborative mapping session. It will either be a full-day or half-day event.

Participants will contribute a 300-word summary statement addressing one of the workshop issues. All will be welcome. The statements will be compiled into an informal public document for reference.

During the workshop, participants will form collaborative groups around themes. The informal results of the workshop will be published in one or more reports that systematically address the topic (venue TBD). Optionally participants will then go on to self-organise into collaborative teams based on their group work to prepare further publications and consider possible collaborative authorship of a book or special issue.

All ICCC conference attendees will be welcome to attend but those who submit statements by the deadline will be invited to lead discussion. The widest possible range of academic backgrounds will be encouraged.

Timeline

• Submission deadline for 300-word statements (by email to o.b...@unsw.edu.au)*. May 17th 2024.
• Workshop materials sent to participants. June 7th 2024.
• International Conference on Computational Creativity at University of Jönköping, Sweden. June 17th-21st 2024 (the workshop is expected to be on either the 17th or 18th of June, TBC).

* Submission of statements to the workshop does not automatically register you for the conference / workshop. Please follow registration information on the ICCC conference website. Registration fees will apply.