We believe the current trajectory of AI is not predetermined and that creative communities should play a role in shaping their future. To that end, we are motivated to bring more transparency to the ways AI affects creative communities and to use that common ground to help shape what comes next. We do that through three core activities: building coalitions, conducting research, and running experiments that shed light on the AI.
Coalition Building
Our event series connects artists, technologists, and scholars through panels, workshops, and talks exploring ethical impacts and creative potential.
2026 Symposium
This symposium, F(r)iction: Creative Work in an Age of AI, gathers practitioners and scholars to consider AI's impact on creative practices, fields, and futures.
Film Screenings
Screenings that address important topics related to AI development. For example, Welcome to Jankspace, Babes, by Daniel Felstead with Jenn
Leung, and distributed by DIS, unpacks the addictive mix of influencers, algorithms, biohacking, and AI overload.
AI Book Club
A series of gathering where participants discuss a book that relates to how artificial intelligence shapes economies, societies, and our most intimate human experiences.
Exhibitions
We look for ways to show critical enquiry into the development of AI. In this exhibition, Future AI Artifacts, participants developed creative artifacts to express future scenarios driven by AI.
Ethical Edges of Creative AI
Workshop series where enthusiasts, skeptics, and the curious explore the increasing role that AI plays in our creative futures.
Pedagogical Workshops
Engaging educators at Parsons School of Design about some of the key considerations regarding the use of AI in our curriculum and classrooms.
Research
We research three interconnected questions: how AI is reshaping the conditions and power structures of creative work, how it's changing what it means to develop a creative identity and practice, and how legal frameworks can protect the rights of human creators without stifling what comes next.
AI Reader
The Lab's curated collection of readings is organized around three interlinked themes that can support critical examination of technical, AI work.
Thinking the Unthinkable in AI
In her paper, "Thinking the Unthinkable in AI: Four Hegemonic Ways of Seeing AI and Five Majority World Ways to Move Beyond Them," Sareeta Amrute, challenges dominant narratives of AI by examining how the majority of people worldwide actually experience it, moving beyond both utopian and apocalyptic frameworks to surface different problems worth solving.
Trust Issues: An Anthology
Sareeta Amrute contributed as an editor to this collection of essays, published by Data & Society, that reframes the relationship between trust and technology, moving away from whether a technology is "trustworthy" toward understanding how trust is constructed, broken, and maintained in digital systems.
AI + Creative Friction
We authored this guide with Dean Jeongki Lim to support faculty adapt to the growing use of AI in their classroom. AI should enhance human work, and creative friction results from a deliberate mix of methods that aim to help us deepen our criticality, creativity, and growth. It supports treating AI like spice that adds depth but never dominates.
Experimentation
We create tools that help creative professionals assess AI's ethical impacts on labor, culture, and artistic agency, providing insights and case studies to support responsible AI adoption. One tool, Creative AI Magnifier, supports students' basic ethical understanding of AI issues
Equipping creative communities to investigate and shape AI
Andrew Shea
andrewshea@newschool.edu
Sareeta Amrute
sareeta@newschool.edu