AI Area 49 Use Case: Using AI Creatively in Graduate Research
AI Area 49 Use Case: Using AI Creatively in Graduate Research
Beth Caruso
As a librarian in Area 49, the library’s collection of innovation and creation spaces, I facilitated a workshop called Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: Approaches for Transforming Graduate Research, as part of the Center for Graduate Life and Learning’s STEM communication program.
The goal was to help graduate students explore the creative potential of AI in their research. This workshop was open to graduate students with all AI and technology experience levels.
As an introduction to the activity, I showed inventive uses of AI tools in a variety of fields of study to show how AI could impact research and the future of those fields and others. After the introduction, I encouraged students to choose their own engagement style. They could work alone, with a group, or as an observer. They could use their own brain or a tool of their choice. They could think of a project they completed in the past, something they were currently working on, or even a future project.
I hoped to give them freedom of choice in how they engaged here, particularly since this was a workshop, rather than a class, and students may be at drastically different points in their writing and research processes or may have been in between projects.
I presented the group with numerous categories of brainstorming options with nearly 30 questions that they could use during the workshop and for future research scenarios. These themes included:
- Addressing challenges in research
- Simulating hypothetical scenarios
- Identifying outliers or anomalies
- Suggesting new areas of inquiry based on data
- Considering overlooked ethical issues
- Designing more sustainable experiments
- Suggesting alternative tools
- Identifying limitations before beginning research
The questions were designed, not to be a one-size-fits-all brainstorming activity, but instead to be applicable for a number of situations in which they might be applying AI to a project.
While some students chose to work alone and use the brainstorming questions for a current project, others chose to join a discussion group and consider how the questions might apply to research overall, their current thinking on AI, and course assignments.
There was a fairly large discussion group that mulled over how they’ve approached creativity in AI in their own projects, ethics, and the ways in which they could approach each of these together in the future. Toward the end, we also heard from those who decided to work on their own, understanding more about their projects, as well as the ways in which they used the brainstorming questions and their choice of AI program to continue the evolution of their research.
This workshop demonstrated how AI can serve as both a research tool and a catalyst for creative thinking, and many students expressed interest in applying these strategies beyond their current projects. While this workshop was specifically for graduate students working on research, the content can be adapted to any level and any subject area. Future iterations or adaptations by others could explore discipline-specific applications and case studies, hands-on demonstrations of incorporating these concepts within an AI tool, or even how the approaches here could be applied outside of a research process and to broader concepts and work.