AI, Ethics, and Aesthetics

A consortium of faculty from the University of Georgia will interrogate the relationship between artificial intelligence, aesthetics, and ethics. The discussion will focus largely on the possibility that AI, most notably in the form of machine-learning recommender systems, causes unintended aesthetic harm by degrading our aesthetic capacities and biasing our aesthetic choices. Panelists include Anna Abraham, Educational Psychology; David Saltz, Theater and Film Studies;  Aaron Meskin, Philosophy and AI; Rosanna Smith, Marketing; and Isabelle Wallace, School of Art. 

This event is in-person and at the Athenaeum (287 West Broad Street)

Anna Abraham, Ph.D. is the E. Paul Torrance Professor at the Department of Educational Psychology and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development at UGA's Mary Frances Early College of Education. She is a psychologist and neuroscientist who investigates the cognitive and brain mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, and mental state reasoning. She is the author of numerous publications including the book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (2018, Cambridge University Press), and the edited multidisciplinary volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (2020).

Aaron Meskin is the head of the Philosophy Department at UGA. Prior to this role, he was a Professor of Philosophical Aesthetics at the University of Leeds in Leeds, England. And from 1999-2005 I taught at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The primary focus of his research is in the fields of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He has published extensively on aesthetic testimony, authorship, the definition of art, emotional responses to fiction, the epistemology of photography, style, and the philosophical questions raised by the arts of comics, dance, short stories, theatre, and videogames. 

David Saltz is Head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, and Executive Director of Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE). His primary research focuses have been performance philosophy and the interaction between live performance and digital media. He was Principal Investigator of Virtual Vaudeville, a large-scale research project funded by the National Science Foundation to simulate a nineteenth-century vaudeville performance on the computer. He established the Interactive Performance Laboratory at UGA, has directed a series of productions incorporating real-time interactive digital media, and has created interactive sculptural installations that have been exhibited nationally. He is co-author (with Sarah Bay-Cheng and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck) of Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (University of Michigan Press, 2015), co-editor (with David Krasner) of the book Staging Philosophy: Intersections between Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and books.

Rosanna K. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on understanding how the concept of authenticity is used in marketing and consumer contexts. Currently, her research primarily focuses on the intersection between authenticity and aesthetics. Her work has been featured in both top marketing and psychology journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

Isabelle Loring Wallace is Interim Co-Director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, as well as Associate Professor of Contemporary Art. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle and Paul Pfeiffer, and the co-editor of two anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennifer Hirsh (Routledge, 2016) and Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility co-edited with Nora Wendl (Routledge, 2016). Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon, 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she is working on a new project that considers recurring intersections between new media art and assorted Judeo-Christian themes.