30 ACUMEN • SPRING 2024 participate in a contest that addressed the potential benefits of generative AI in education. The winners of the grant were Lyam Gabel, assistant professor of theatre, and Will Lowry, associate professor of theatre. The pair plan to use the funds to cover the cost to travel to a meeting or conference focused on educational innovation or education technology. In their entry, Gabel and Lowry addressed how they could use AI to enhance student learning at Lehigh, specifically proposing a co-taught first-year seminar in the College of Arts and Sciences that explores the intersection between theatre and AI in a pedagogical environment. That course, Can AI Make Art?, is a handson, interdisciplinary approach to exploring the question of not only whether AI can create art, but what role, if any, AI can play in theatre making, media making and storytelling. Throughout this fall semester, students have been creating original theatrical work with generative AI while examining the creative potential and limitations of this technology, as well as considering the ethical implications of this rapidly evolving field along the way. “If you see the class as an experiment, we’re now coming to a place where we can look at the results for how students have engaged,” Lowry said. A New Pedagogy Gabel and Lowry were inspired to respond to the Provost’s contest because both have integrated AI into their coursework before, using platforms like ChatGPT and Midjourney to spur creative development in their students. Their pedagogy is connected to a revised curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences where first-year seminars will have a greater emphasis on asking and answering compelling questions across various fields. The objective behind these Big Question Seminars is to help students develop critical intellectual skills, exploring diverse disciplinary perspectives and tools, and tackling big questions and current challenges from wide-ranging perspectives. The college provided the initial financial support to help the faculty purchase computer equipment and the AI applications. “This is a field that’s moving rapidly, so our own experimentation is helping collaboratively figure out where we can explore and push students to engage in new things with minimal scaffolding,” Lowry said. “This course is both intersecting with how we’ve used it in our own scholarship as well as looking at how you learn using AI and how AI can be used for theatre making.” The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has accelerated rapidly over just the past year. Generative AI algorithms can create images, develop scripts, make music and write poems. In response to the concerns raised by this potentially disruptive technology, Lehigh University Provost Nathan Urban issued a letter inviting anyone in the Lehigh community to Art in the Age of AI STEVE NEUMANN Two theatre professors use a first-year seminar to explore the question of whether artificial intelligence can create art and the potential role it can play in theatre making
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==