Bristol’s Living Lab, Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), is an arts & digital organisation who’ve been working with people for more than 20 years harnessing the power of arts and digital technologies to create positive social change; applying methods of innovative co-creation. KWMC has been exploring the hopes, fears, myths, and controversies of AI with communities, researchers and artists – particularly its propensity to amplify biases, perpetuate stereotypes and increase power imbalances. The prevalent narratives about AI either pit humans against machines – with AI threatening to take jobs, role and purpose from humans – or AI is found to be failing because it remains all too human, limited by fallible and bias programmers.
This workshop seeks to take a step back and ask what it means to be human, what it means to be machine and how we can creatively and meaningfully combine and collaborate. Through a range of prototyping exercises and the creation of your own chatbot the workshop will explore the potential for ‘creative disruption’ in a range of living lab contexts. Let’s explore – what humans and AI can do differently and better together, and how this can be an open participative process embedded in real communities and addressing everyday issues.