The AI and Cultural Production Workshop is a two-part workshop series exploring the profound, transformative, and often contentious relationships between artificial intelligence and cultural production. Over recent years, AI has evolved far beyond its role as a mere technical tool, becoming a powerful and pervasive force shaping contemporary cultural practices. This shift challenges conventional notions of authorship, creativity, agency, and responsibility across a broad spectrum of artistic fields. These include AI-enabled literature, music, visual arts, narrative construction, translation, and collaborative creative processes, where human-machine interaction redefines the boundaries of artistic expression.

The workshop series is designed as an interdisciplinary convergence, fostering a dynamic platform where scholars, artists, technologists, and cultural practitioners from diverse backgrounds can engage in critical dialogue. It offers a unique opportunity to explore the implications, opportunities, and challenges posed by AI in cultural contexts, encouraging cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives between the academic and creative communities.

In this workshop, we are proud to feature four distinguished speakers, representing a spectrum of expertise—from leading scholars who critically analyze AI’s impact on culture to visionary artists who harness AI as a creative partner. Their presentations will offer diverse insights and inspire thoughtful discussions on how AI continues to reshape the landscape of cultural production in innovative and sometimes unexpected ways.

Talk #1
1:15 pm - 2:15 pm
Notes on Technology, Creativity, Skill, and Authorship

“Can generative AI tools ‘boost’ human creativity? Does the use of AI tools in creative work lead to the deskilling of the artist? How do we negotiate existing notions of authorship in the context of AI-assisted creative work? Is it inevitable that the creative worker must embrace technological advances and adapt to the potentials of AI?”

In this talk, I dissect four keywords that continue to circulate in critical media scholarship and popular debate about the role, impact, and ethics of artificial intelligence tools in creative work. We begin with the differences and similarities between two milieus in which discourses about AI presently circulate: “the artworld” and “the creative industries”, each representing the artistic and the industrial approach respectively. It is only when we delineate the boundaries of the two milieus and trace how the meanings of specific keywords shift in each context that we can meaningfully communicate and critique the uses and effects of generative AI on the production of creative media. This will then allow us to move towards more nuanced perspectives that are sensitive to disciplinary, institutional, and conceptual disparities, thereby activating new engagements between disciplines and perhaps change the way researchers might observe, analyse, and generate knowledge about the entanglements between generative AI and creativity.

Dr. Pei Sze Chow

Assistant Professor of Digital Culture and New Media
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
Nanyang Technological University

Dr Pei-Sze Chow ( 周珮詩 ) is Assistant Professor of Digital Culture and New Media at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, where she presently researches the social, cultural, and political implications of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on the labour of creative professionals in the cultural and creative industries. She has published widely on national and transnational media cultures across Europe and Asia and was previously a faculty member at the University of Amsterdam and Aarhus University.

Moderators:
- Prof. Richard Allen
- Dr. JIN Chen (Teaching Consultant, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong)

Talk #2
2:15 pm - 3:15 pm
Creative Reincarnation or Counterfeit Fabrication: When VTuber Encounters Generative AI

VTuber, formally known as virtual YouTuber, is an animated avatar performed by real persons or powered by large language models. Emerging as a niche project in 2016, VTuber has experienced rapid digital globalisation, cultivating millions of practitioners and fandoms. Although VTuber's existence is premised on "virtuality," it has a complex and evolving relationship with AI. On the one hand, its performative affordance is conditioned by the facial and motion capture technologies, as well as the input of illustrators and model designers. On the other hand, the industry is deeply grounded in human labour and creativity, involving performers, digital artists, and crucially, fan communities that (re)create content, foster interaction, and reinforce the affective bonds necessary for sustaining their popularity.

This paper examines how China's VTuber practitioners and fans strategically engage with or resist against generative AI in their content (re)production and everyday practices. Drawing on content analysis, interviews and participant observation, this paper explores, on the one hand, the aesthetics of (mostly fan-driven) VTuber-related AIGC; And on the other hand, the varying motives and attitudes towards AI from the broader VTuber industry and fandom.

These practices and attitudes matter not only for unpacking an emerging digital cultural and creative industry (CCI), but also for understanding varying modes of engagement with Generative AI in the broader social media entertainment industry. This paper further explores how such engagements reconstruct the notions of creativity, authenticity and personhood and their broader implications for human-machine interactions.

Dr. Wilson (Weixiang) Wang

Teaching Fellow in International Studies
University of Nottingham Ningbo

Wilson (Weixiang) Wang got his PhD degree in Politics from the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. His PhD thesis examines the propagation of cyber nationalism by Chinese online key opinion leaders. His research focuses on China, nationalism, political communication and the politics of digital (sub)cultures. He has published on wanghong (influencer) and “wolf warrior” diplomacy. His current research examines diverse forms of user engagement with generative AI technologies and the broader social and political implications of AI-generated content.

Moderators:
- Prof. Dino ge Zhang
- Choi Sin Yi, Emilie (PhD candidate, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong)

Talk #3
3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
Liminoid Experience: Image, Place, and Memory in Crisis

In an age when AI generates images endlessly, when memory is outsourced to machines, and when place dissolves into data, what remains? In this talk, the artist presents works that respond to this crisis by operating in liminal space: the in-between zones where the organic and the technological, the seen and the heard, fail to hold their borders. In Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom, a forest becomes a theatre as beam projection and thousands of voices, human and AI agents, turn 270 metres of canopy into living cinema. Daejeon, Summer of 2023 transcodes thirty-one marble discs, each breathed daily into being with sumi ink, into real-time sound — a score no composer wrote. Happy New Year, an official selection of the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam, asks who bears responsibility when collective brainwaves shape a film. Sunrises that exist nowhere yet feel remembered emerge in Wandering Sun. In Champagne Supernova, an iris becomes eighty-eight constellations of light. Good Morning, Mr. G-Dragon sends a K-pop icon's iris, read by AI as an emotional cosmos, into orbit — and waits. Memory Theatre lets AI recompose images into architectures of remembrance. In Nine Reincarnations, images pass repeatedly between AI and the artist's hand, each cycle a death and a rebirth.

Running through these works is a practice Dr Lee frames as Gardenetics, the work of the "Data Gardenist": not visualising data but cultivating it, tending the conditions in which something might still take root.

Dr. Julian Jinjoon Lee (李进俊)

Associate Professor
Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST

Dr. Julian Jinjoon Lee (李进俊), FRSA, is an artist scholar whose practice brings a humanistic inquiry, drawing on literature, philosophy, anthropology, and East Asian aesthetics, to questions of art, consciousness, and the ontology of the body in the post-digital era. He is Associate Professor at KAIST's Graduate School of Culture Technology and Director of the KAIST Art & Technology Center, with concurrent positions as Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford, Affiliate Professor at NYU, and Visiting Senior Researcher at Tokyo University of the Arts. He studied at Seoul National University, holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, and a DPhil from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. His art and lectures have been presented at international exhibitions and institutions across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and his work is held in major public and private collections internationally. His doctoral thesis, Empty Garden, was acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, founded in 1683, for its permanent collection, a recognition of scholarly inquiry as cultural heritage. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS), and is represented by BB&M Gallery, Seoul. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at VER Gallery, Bangkok (October 2026). He is currently completing '49,' a literary memoir as bardo, forthcoming from a UK publisher.

Moderators:
- Prof. Samson Young
- Amber Coen Collins (PhD student, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong)

Talk #4
4:45 pm - 5:45 pm
Ecological Intelligence and Artificial Minds

As AI and ultimately artificial general intelligence surpasses human cognitive capacities, humanity can no longer assume itself to be the apex of intelligence. This shift forces a critical re-examination of the human supremacy that has justified centuries of ecological harm, species extinction, and the instrumentalization of non-human life. If humans have long rationalized domination over animals on the basis of “higher intelligence,” then superintelligent AI could mirror this logic back onto us. In this moment, it becomes urgent to broaden our understanding of intelligence itself: across animals, insects, microscopic plankton, ecosystems systems such as glaciers, and artificial intelligence. “Godfather of AI” proclaimed that humanity's survival depends on training AI to have maternal instincts. But that again reveals the contradictions of our anthropocentric thinking: treating an entity as a mother with unconditional love can itself be a form of exploitation, echoing how we have taken “Mother Nature’s” care for granted while exhausting her limits. Against this backdrop, the artist investigates multispecies, environmental, and machinic intelligences, proposing new frameworks for perception, empathy, and co-creation across scales.

Ms. Jiabao Li

Associate Professor
Northeastern University

Jiabao Li is an artist and Associate Professor at Northeastern University. Her work spans art, science, and emerging technologies, addressing planetary health, human health, perception, and alternative intelligence. Her mediums include wearable devices, robotics, XR, and installation. A Harvard distinguished graduate and former inventor for Apple’s Vision Pro, Li is a Forbes China 30 Under 30 honoree and TED Speaker. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale and MoMA.

Moderators:
- Prof. Tobias Klein
- Maari Sugawara (PhD candidate, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong)

Registration

Registration is open to all. Please register here by 26 March 2026 (Thursday), 17:00.