A Novel Framework for Synthetic Intelligence and Synthetic Culture

The research vision is to combine engineering and artistic insight and methods towards a new interdisciplinary research agenda on co-creation between humans and AI. The specific ambition is to design and develop AI systems which can complement and combine with human reasoning, intuition and creativity, through what we term 'artist-in-the-loop AI'. To support this vision, we propose a framework for 'synthetic intelligence and synthetic cult ure' to account for the ways in which generative AI shapes and is shaped by human customs, arts, institutions, and achievements. Due to the move to data-driven systems and increased complexity of algorithms, the new AI tools are black boxed and opaque to human understanding, offering limited scope for human intervention and agency, or for holding these systems to account. The pilot study will surface strategies, questions and methods from engineering and the arts to respond to the challenge of the inscrutability of current AI, and the consequences for co-creation. The output will be an approach and methodology to support usability, agency and accountability, and to bridge between the probabilistic reasoning of current AI, and intuitive, symbolic and causal reasoning.