AI continues to make its way into every facet of society, and one of the nation’s premier schools for arts and design is no different. Starting in the winter quarter, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) will begin offering a Bachelor of Design in Applied AI, along with the option to minor in it.
The move is a touchy subject to say the least; some artists, especially, have been vocal about the dangers AI can present regarding regurgitating their work after being trained on vast amounts of art, copyright issues, and, plainly, having machines take the artmaking process out of art. Fear of job replacement in an already difficult job market doesn’t make the prospect of AI more appealing, either. One Facebook group, “Artists against AI,” has over 5,000 members; another, “Artists Against Generative AI,” boasts over 170,000 members.
The decision to develop and offer this degree comes from a responsibility to send students out into the workforce with a fair chance, said Nye Warburton, SCAD chair of interactive design and game development, and now the steward chair of the applied AI Bachelor of Design. Moreover, art and design jobs are increasingly calling for a workforce adept at utilizing AI to speed up workflows.
“We are always trying to keep lockstep with industry on providing the skills that they seem to be asking for,” Warburton said, adding that concerns are valid. “They’re going to have to talk about them when they move out of SCAD into their careers; they’re going to have to understand how these models work and how the data is used,” he later added.
One third of the program will focus on classes in ethics, civics and — importantly — teaching students how to document their process of using AI. Being aware of intellectual property, data bias and data sets will be crucial for any student looking to major in the field.
“We really hope to integrate into the curriculum that if you’re going to use intelligent systems, you’re going to have to be aware of the social and environmental responsibilities that go along with it,” Warburton said.
Another argument in favor of the institutionalized program? Students are already using AI to complete assignments, draw inspiration, start from more than a blank canvas and everything else in between.
“There’s a lot of ChatGPT use; I see it on screens an awful lot,” Warburton said.
However, the unauthorized use of AI doesn’t necessarily mean students — largely artists and designers — are ready to embrace it without a second thought on an institutional level.
“I think the sentiment across students is that they’re fairly against it in a lot of ways; we had a series of conversations where they were very against image-making, especially the art station,” Warburton said. “We put students in rooms and we talked to them for a while and started talking about things like ‘what if you could control your own data’… and the conversation shifted.”
Faculty, too, has been a part of critical conversations, said Warburton. Every department integrates AI into their respective fields differently — a fact that adds to the challenge of embracing AI where reasonable, but not allowing its use in one instance to justify it in another. One example is the publishing industry, which he said generally has been hesitant to adopt AI. At the same time, others have gone a different way.
“There are other industries which are very aggressively embracing it, and it’s almost hard to keep up,” Warburton said. “So there’s going to be a spectrum of everybody in-between; my approach is to try to understand each department’s needs in the way that we’re architecting this.”
Not a permanent route
Conversations with students and faculty have helped shape the degree as it looks today. With an ever-evolving landscape of AI and capabilities, Warburton acknowledged this will be an iterative process of refining the program for years to come — and maybe even letting it sunset when the time calls for it.
“I feel like if we’re successful, there will not be an Applied AI major,” Warburton said, who wants to see it become integrated into existing and emerging disciplines. “A few years ago there was a computer art major, and from the computer art major evolved visual effects, animation, game development. We all just started as computer art, but now all those art forms have computers in them… I’m hopeful that all these new majors will integrate their approach to AI into the process,” he later added.
For now, AI looks poised to be a part of modern life for the foreseeable future — and that means embracing it as a tool that should be taught to students how to use responsibly.
“AI is not something that’s going away — I think it will be the new form of computing. And that’s sort of the philosophy we are starting with this department,” Warburton said.
