The School of Digital Arts examines storytelling and AI with a new symposium series

On Thu 29 Jun, Manchester Met’s School of Digital Arts presents Storytelling in the Age of AI, the first free symposium in the Storytellers and Machines series, a fascinating and timely programme of talks which consider the unstable relationships between AI generative media and the artists – ‘storytellers’ – who adopt them. By uniting a diverse set of voices from the arts, industry and academia, the series aims to unpick the threads between the growing storytelling cultures related to generative AI and emerging philosophical concerns regarding its future.

Running from 10am-4pm, the opening symposium explores ‘synthetic histories’ and their trajectories; academics, storytellers, curators, artists and experts gather to contemplate a future in which generative tools – in particular, virtual production – simultaneously are and are not limited by human history. While the imaginative scope and creative potential of generative AI may be hamstrung by the limitations of the digital archives upon which it relies, the advancing power and capability of generative production methods may disrupt and ‘permeate’ historical narratives, blurring the boundaries between authentic and synthetic, as history itself becomes difficult to trust.

Following registration and introductions, Serpentine Galleries’ Eva Jäger delivers the keynote speech Creative AI Lab Tooling: Modes of Engagement with Machine Intelligences at 10.15am, before a panel featuring speakers from SODA alongside experts from media and the arts gather to discuss the new voices using AI to tell stories differently at 11am.

At 1.15pm, the panel reconvenes to examine to the rapidly shifting creative relationship between artists and generative AI tools, with particular focus on new, radical emergent creative methods, as well as ways in which the arts and their audiences process shifts in authorship and how practice ‘under the gaze of the machine’ alters narratives regarding art and creative output.

At 2.45pm, Columbia University’s Lance Weiler hosts a keynote on The Future of Storytelling with Artificial Intelligences, followed by a networking session from 3.30pm until close.

For more information and to book your free ticket, head to the SODA website.