AI, Creativity, and Slop

1 credits · Undergraduate

This course asks whether generative AI can be creative, from historical, theoretical, and scientific perspectives. We trace efforts to mechanize aesthetic creativity from the Renaissance to the present, situating contemporary AI within earlier dreams of automated art and thought. Readings from media theory, philosophy, and AI research (e.g., Kittler, Boden, work on large language models) frame debates about reasoning, cognition, and creativity. Through hands-on experiments and critical analysis of both inventive work and 'SLOP,' students develop criteria for evaluating novelty, insight, and aesthetic value in human–machine creativity.