Title: 

Praxis GenAI: balancing creative skills with the generative accuracy (or not) of Generative AI in music and embroidery

 

Abstract: 

Many generative AI (GenAI) tools can produce high quality content from simple text prompts. For many creative practitioners this makes such tools unusable and uninteresting for their creative practice. Instead there is an opportunity to explore GenAI tools which better support the praxis of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) rather than attempting to create the most accurate or complete GenAI renderings of ICH. I refer to this as ICH praxis oriented GenAI, or praxis GenAI for short. I purposefully place emphasis on the praxis of ICH before GenAI to foreground that in this approach ICH is more important than GenAI, not the other way around as is often the case in technocentric approaches to ICH. Praxis GenAI relies on a pragmatic balance between ICH lived practice and creative skills with the generative accuracy (or not) of GenAI. Praxis GenAI’s role then is the generation of content that is close enough to a practitioner’s style and yet flexible enough to be useful in their creative practice. Thinking of praxis GenAI as supporting and responding to lived practice in this way also offers pathways to explore, probe, and better understand ICH rather than seeing GenAI as leading ICH innovation. I illustrate my talk with examples from current research including my own research on music and embroidery with GenAI, highlighting how small, lightweight GenAI models offer opportunities for creative expression and reflection, creative agency, and the responsible use of AI. 

 

Bio​​: 

 

Link to the online session: https://upf-edu.zoom.us/j/94354379156 

 

 

Activity supported by:

Cátedra UPF-BMAT en Inteligencia Artificial y Música (TSI-100929-2023-1). Project funded by Secretaría de Estado de Digitalización e Inteligencia Artificial, the European Union-Next Generation EU, and by BMAT Music Innovators, the Music Operating System