Collaborations between Data Scientists, Digital Humanists and Artists in an Age of AI

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Machine Learning and AI have transformed the way many scientists make discoveries. In my own field of applied mathematics, discovery has long relied on collaboration between mathematicians who develop theoretical models, and experimentalists who bring those theories to life and test them in carefully planned experiments. Over this same period, scientists and artists have been collaborating to bring scientific and technological know-how to the creative artistic process, and also to communicate science to a wider audience through the arts. These interdisciplinary collaborations can be very pragmatic, in which one discipline provides a service to the other, or more transformative, in which both disciplines are transformed by the engagement with the other. Generative AI has presented new challenges and opportunities, with both scientists and artists raising concerns about intellectual property, and copyright as well as veracity and physicalization of results.