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THE AI REPORTAGE WEBSITE
This online archive is a curated collection of articles about generative AI that appeared in popular and specialized media from June 2023 to May 2024. Its aim is to comprehensively identify and document trends, responses, uses, speculation, and explanations during that crucial year of generative AI’s emergence. This website is intended as a resource for anyone interested in: how generative AI was understood, promoted, and applied; how public discourse about its potential evolved; and how its emergence can serve as a case study of disruptive technological change.
The archive was collected in real time and continues to be expanded retrospectively with a focus on the ways generative AI challenged established norms and practices of design and visual culture. The website is a resource for those who want to understand how attitudes toward, understanding of, and engagement with a novel and controversial technology rapidly formed, shifted, and evolved in both surprising and typical ways.
Visitors to the site can access and sort the full database of articles using a set of fifteen keywords or weekly date ranges. We hope this resource will be used by experts and well as those who are casually curious to enhance our collective awareness of the fickle, anxious, enthused, and often misguided character of the public reception of generative AI.
THE SI DESIGN RESEARCH PROJECT
This archive is a component of the Synthetic Imagination (SI) design research collaborative initiated by Mark Linder and Emily Pellicano at Syracuse University. We define SI as a convergence of human and machine intelligences in which the two interact as equal, real-time collaborators. We focus on the potential of SI to devise new design practices and products. Our ambition is to devise systematic, flexible, multimodal, and updatable AI-intensive design procedures. We believe SI marks a paradigm shift in creative practices which integrates computational technologies with human imagination in ways that fundamentally alter our identities and aesthetic concepts. The interplay of two distinct forms of intelligence poses many risks but also promises great potential.
We are searching for ways to do SI with AI.
From machine vision to novel image generation using neural networks, SI is as much an adventure in computational potential as research into the latent and potential capacities of our brains to process information and to assemble operative images. SI design procedures operate as a biological and technological neural feedback loop between human imaging capacities and the imaging potential of machine processing and calculation.
How can we collaborate with intelligent machines to productively and speculatively, practically and skeptically, knowingly and enthusiastically, imagine, design, construct, challenge, and alter past, present, and future realities?
THE PEOPLE
- Mark Linder is a professor at Syracuse University School of
Architecture. His research explores design theory and history since 1950
considered in a transdisciplinary framework. His modus operandi is speculative contrarian progressive, with
a deep commitment to the robust potential of architecture as an intellectual
enterprise that actually matters in ways that are endemic, obvious, wonderful,
subtle, powerful, and inescapable, but hardly understood and rarely activated
by architects.
Emily Pellicano is a perpetually discontent utopian who is happiest at the thresholds between disciplines, convinced that there are always other ways to engage, image, represent, or model the world around us in order to effect changes in cognition, consciousness, and construction. Emily’s work attempts to diversify the authorship of imagination, to shift perceptions, and open the doors for alternative realities.
Casey Kelley is our primary Web Designer and a student at the Syracuse University School of Architecture.
Quinn Daly is our primary Data Manager and a student at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.
Ashley Kao and Runfeng Franklin Wang were our primary real-time AI reportage collectors in 2023-2024.