AI: Friend or foe to aspiring artists?  

By Clarissa Biener

With the rise of AI in many creative industries, students at Five Towns College gathered to learn more about the impact AI could have on their future careers. The Interactive Media Arts (IMA) Department held a discussion on Machine Learning and the Future of AI in Media Production on February 19th in the library.

Some FTC students have mixed feelings about AI. “I’ve always sort of had some kind of notorious issues and opinions regarding the topic,” said Film and Television major Dean Flynn. This event gave students the opportunity to hear directly from media experts with experience in AI.

Professors Nuri Celikgil and Nick Selvaggio were joined virtually by film and TV industry technologist Gary Adcock, who addressed concerns about AI while also sharing its benefits.

The event opened with a clip of “To Serve Man” from The Twilight Zone. In the episode, society is skeptical of alien technology but eventually accepts it, leading to their downfall. Celikgil drew parallels between the episode’s storyline and the skepticism many people feel towards AI.

Adcock and Selvaggio explained how AI can be used as a tool in media industries. Building a local model of AI using a person’s own work would train models privately without sharing the work with the rest of the internet, and the local AI models do not scrape the internet or use copyrighted content like large AI models do.

Although the job market will inevitably be affected by the use of AI, Adcock and Selvaggio believe that people remain integral to the creative process. AI agents need people to manage them, correct their models when they produce false information, and reject inaccurate AI-generated information and images in the media. Celikgil also echoed those sentiments, explaining how creatives can integrate AI into their workflow while still providing human artistic input, which is essential to the artist-consumer relationship.

Exploring these issues assuaged students’ previously held fears. “It was generally nice to just see, discuss how the industry and how my career by extension is going to go going forward,” said Flynn.

This event brings February’s Library Workshop Series to a close, with March’s schedule right around the corner.