Art Meets AI in a New Stanford Course and Website
Recent advances in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) have highlighted questions about the place of AI in education. Can AI be a tool for or a threat to creativity? Can it be integrated into humanities pedagogy? With design support and grant funding from the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), Doctor Gerui Wang, lecturer at the Center for East Asian Studies, engaged with these issues in a unique class where students worked to combine historical art forms with AI generated art works.
Wang developed EASTASN 254A/ARTHIST 254A: Art Meets AI: Algorithmic Bodies in East Asia centered on questions of art forms, creativity, and technology. After discussing and refining the course design at the CTL Course Design Institute in September 2024, Wang ran the course in Autumn Quarter 2024. Delving into new practices and tools, students engaged in projects that combined their learning about historical Asian art forms with contemporary technology.
The students developed exhibits and AI-generated videos to ponder what happens when humanities clash with the automatic and generative. With funding support from a CTL Teaching Advancement Grant and the Stanford Center for East Asian Studies, their projects were published on a course website: Storytelling with AI. This project is now available and searchable through the Stanford Libraries. For their final project, students also used AI tools to co-create short films reinterpreting East Asian classics. These films were featured in Stanford Library's Love Data Week exhibitions in February 2025.
Storytelling with AI poses these challenges:
Can we use AI to tell innovative yet touching stories of history and humanity? Can we use AI to challenge temporal, geographical, and cultural boundaries? Can we as learners and educators develop more responsible and inclusive AI that does not diminish but augment human capacity to think and to care?
Visitors to the site can explore how the coursework addressed these prompts, browsing sections exhibiting AI art and a collection of AI-generated films. For example, in “Japanese Tea Ceremony” Isabella Garza, Josephine Kim, and Maika Jones collected historical and contemporary visualizations of the Japanese tea house and composed AI image prompts to examine if AI can capture the wabi-sabi aesthetic, critically engaging with tradition and machine-generated designs to open the question of how technology can re-imagine tradition. By generating AI videos based on significant historical works, across topics from Korean art; Chinese classical literature, propaganda posters, and science fiction; and African American heritage, students investigated how AI can offer a route to reinterpretation of these works and explored questions of ideology and identity.
ChatGPT-4o, Alcove of Refined Simplicity Embracing Wabi-Sabi Aesthetics, 2024, from Japanese Tea Ceremony: Isabella Garza, Josephine Kim, and Maika Jones
Students worked on their projects using AI video and image creation tools sourced for the class, integrating AI-generated elements including images, film, and 3-D modeling. The materials and the topics students investigated encompass significant works in literature, painting, printmaking, posters, and architecture. The class included students from frosh to PhD students. Student feedback was highly positive. Students reported “meaningful” and “fascinating” learning experience from lectures, discussions, field trips, and assignments, and reported a broadened holistic understanding of the positive and negative aspects of AI, while developing critical thinking and analysis skills to engage in dialogues around AI, art, and society.
As an experiment in adapting AI tools into humanities storytelling and pedagogy, the results point to a way that AI can become a tool for creativity and learning, while acknowledging and critiquing its limitations. Wang plans to explore opportunities for workshops or panel discussions around AI, art, creativity, and humanities, and develop another digital humanities project on art and ecology this spring.
Learn more
Gerui Wang will be presenting, along with other instructors, at the April 28 share-out of the Teaching with AI Community Share-out events, running April–May, 2025.
To learn more about the share-outs and related resources, visit AI Meets Education at Stanford (AImES). AImES is an Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) effort to catalyze and support critical engagement with generative AI in Stanford teaching and learning contexts, coordinated by CTL.
