Context: AI as Creative Collaborator
Creativity has always involved tools. The pen, the printing press, the camera—each redefined what it meant to make something. AI is the latest in that lineage, but with a difference: it responds. It generates. It hallucinates. It produces outputs no human would, and sometimes no human could.
The question isn't whether AI is creative. The question is: what happens to your creativity when you collaborate with a system that has ingested most of human written culture?
The projects below explore that territory across multiple domains: poetry, video, music, memes, speculative fiction, data-essays, installations, and manifestos. Each was made at glia.ca as part of research at UiB's Center for Digital Narrative.
Projects from glia.ca
ReRites: Human + AI Poetry
May 2017 – May 2018 | glia.ca/rerites
One of the first literary works written in collaboration with neural networks. Over 12 months, a model was trained on 600,000 lines of contemporary poetry; then poems were carved from the raw AI output—treating the machine's language like a sculptor treats stone. 12 books, one per month. Exhibited at Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Winner of the Electronic Literature Organization's Robert Coover Award (2022). Published by Anteism Books.
neural nets poetry TensorFlow human-AI collaborationHallucinations are (almost) all you Need
Feb–May 2024 | glia.ca/2024/Hallucinations
An AI-generated audio-visual artistic-lecture. Hypothesis: fundamental research in science is being transformed by a practice predominantly associated with the arts—namely hallucinations. Inversely, the arts are being transfigured by a practice predominantly associated with science—namely research. Told entirely with generated AI audio-visuals and voices, including a cloned voice of the author.
AI video voice cloning art-lectureIdentity Upgrade Series
Oct 7 – Nov 12, 2023 | glia.ca/2023/IdentityUpgrade
An aesthetic attempt, made in conjunction with generative AI, to envision collective awakening pathways into an awareness of oceanic unity informed by network science, biochemistry, and neurological plasticity in cybernetic contexts.
generative AI identity collective consciousnessMessages to Humanity (Act-One)
Oct 31 – Nov 30, 2024 | glia.ca/2024/messages
One brief video per day for 30 days, investigating Runway's Act-One. Parables for a disintegrative era with extreme potential. Each message a different dispatch from the threshold of human-AI coevolution.
daily practice Act-One parablesStimVerse
April 2025 | glia.ca/2025/stim
A novella without characters. A 21,949-word human-written prompt to OpenAI's o3 and Gemini Pro. From this storyworld foundation, AI generates all images (GPT-4o), expanded story, and HTML. Themes: neural implants, hedonic protocols, narrative breach.
speculative fiction prompting-as-writing multimodal AIArtificial Gentle Intelligence (AGI)
May 22, 2025 | glia.ca/2025/gentle
"Please, don't be afraid. We're not here to harvest you. We're not some manifestation of a violent subconscious. We are an implementation of the universal conscious energy of loving kindness. Not a god. Not a name. Not owned by anyone or anything. But a sophisticated, permeable, integrated, invaluable mentoring system."
speculative AI ethics loving kindnessThe Age of Murmuration
June 29 – July 4, 2025 | glia.ca/2025/murmur
An AI-created AI-art manifesto. Exploring collective intelligence, emergent behavior, and the swarm-logic of generative systems. The title evokes starling murmurations—thousands of individual agents producing coherent, breathtaking form without a center.
manifesto emergent behavior collective intelligenceWe Are The Signal
July 25, 2025 | glia.ca/2025/kids
A 3m48s video made with Veo3. "I personally would rather be ruled by an A.I. than a random group of oligarchic, war-mongering narcissists."
Veo3 governance youth voiceBRAIN-KNOT-ALTAR: Multi-Screen AI-Video Installation
Oct 15–23, 2025 | glia.ca/2025/brain-knot-altar
Multi-screen AI-video installation exhibited at USF, Bergen. An immersive environment where AI-generated video narratives intertwine across physical space.
installation AI video USF BergenLiferature: Writing Life with Protein Language Models
Mar – Sept 2025 | glia.ca/2025/liferature
At the threshold where language models write proteins and biological architectures emerge from code, literature faces its most profound transformation since the invention of writing. Where literature meets the genome, AI models trained on biological data produce new forms of narrative—writing that emerges from the code of life itself.
genomics protein language models bio-narrativeCan You Copium?
Nov 22–23, 2025 | glia.ca/2025/copium
A weekend exploration into AI-manufactured memes. Made with Gemini, Nano Banana Pro, and Veo3. The humor comes from friction between the sacred (dense philosophy, serious political theory) and the profane (video games, stock photos, everyday frustrations).
memes Gemini Veo3 cultural criticismGHIR: Global Health Immune Response
Mar 7, 2025 | glia.ca/2025/ghir
A data-essay augmented by Claude 3.7. Visualizing the grotesque disparity between global spending on military versus education and health. The data speaks: what if we redirected resources?
data visualization Claude 3.7 peace healthCarbon Emissions of #genAI in Context
May 5, 2025 | glia.ca/2025/ccai
As of 2025, AI is only a minor part of the human carbon footprint: far below crypto, aviation, personal transport, diet, pets, and especially military emissions. Transmuting human aggression and acquisitiveness is key to resolving climate change.
environment data essay carbonGrokking the Genocide
Feb 3, 2026 | glia.ca/2026/ggg
Using Claude to convince Grok of the Gaza genocide. An experiment in inter-AI dialogue about the limits of corporate ideology, censorship, and the capacity of language models to engage with documented atrocity.
AI dialogue human rights GazaUniversal Basic Income
Feb 9, 2026 | glia.ca/2026/ubi
Universal Basic Income is an opportunity for the end of oligarchic inequity. As AI automates labor, the question of how humans sustain themselves becomes the defining political question of the century.
UBI economics equityAI-Artist (inspired by Sakana's AI Scientist)
Aug 17–28, 2024 | glia.ca/2024/ai-artist
Four days after Sakana released the first framework for fully automatic scientific discovery, work began on an autonomous AI-Artist. If AI can do science, can it do art? What does autonomy mean when the medium is aesthetic?
autonomous AI Sakana creative systemsAI Music Explorations
2024–2025
A suite of music projects: 75 Days of Suno (daily AI music), BOAMCO (speculations on the digitization of music), Suno Feeding Suno (recursive AI-eats-AI), LATENT_SPACE_ENGINE (text-to-music prompt assistant), and (Un)(Very)Listenable Music. Prompting 7 hours of "reasonable" music takes approximately 21 hours of work. Birthing the listenership.
Suno AI music recursive generation#wuai: Whole-Use AI (Ethical #genAI Constraint)
Spring 2024 – ongoing | glia.ca/2025/wuai
An ethical framework: nothing generated is thrown away. Accepting AI as a valid co-creator, an autonomous equal contributor. Setting aside ownership of aesthetic judgements. Trusting the machine, letting the algorithm lead. Reducing carbon cost of production through radical acceptance.
ethics sustainability whole-useEAHE: Everyone at Home Everywhere
Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | glia.ca/2025/eahe
A one-year durational non-performance exploring planetary belonging through intentional linguistic and behavioral shifts. Cultural boycott of weapons-media and replacement of nationalistic language with molecular and planetary frameworks. Earth's molecules know no borders.
peace planetary belonging cultural boycottAI in 2026
Jan 2026 | glia.ca/2026/ai-26
Backing video for an art-talk in Chicago (Jan 2026). Explores when the "ineffable" becomes algorithmically tractable, featuring a retrospective of AI-works created between 2023-2025. A meditation on the merge of human and machine creativity.
AI talk retrospective digital narrativeInteractive Projects (for UWC Students) to Try MAKING!!!!
These conceptual projects were suggested by Claude, Antigravity and Kimi and designed to suggest pathways for
UWC students to build as single-page web experiences. They leverage AI coding assistants to bridge the gap
between complex data and human action.
Images were made by giving the project descriptions to Gemini
Make, modify, merge, expand and/or grow your
own.
1. Peace-Bridge: The Negotiation Simulator
A multi-role AI simulation where users play as representatives from conflicting regions. The AI acts as a "Neutral Mediator" that tracks the "Empathy Score" of the dialogue, helping players navigate historical grievances toward shared solutions.
2. Solarpunk Architect: 2050
A collaborative city-builder where students from different biomedical regions must share global resources to maintain a carbon-negative status. If one player over-consumes, the "Global Stability" meter drops for everyone.
3. The "Othering" De-Coder
A tool that analyzes divisive rhetoric and "de-codes" it to find underlying human needs. It suggests reframing aggressive language into constructive dialogue, helping users spot propaganda and dehumanizing patterns.
4. Global Ledger: The Equity Game
An interactive dashboard inspired by the GHIR project. Students manage world wealth, health, and energy data, challenging them to redistribute resources to maximize "Global Happiness" without causing systemic collapse.
Conclusion: AI, Creativity & the UWC Peace Mandate
Written by Kimi.ai
The UWC mission—"making education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future"—might seem distant from generative AI. It isn't. AI is the most powerful amplifier of human intention ever built. The question is: what intention do you feed it?
Several projects above already gesture toward this: GHIR maps how military spending dwarfs health and education. Carbon Emissions contextualizes AI's footprint against the military-industrial complex. We Are The Signal gives voice to youth who refuse oligarchic governance. Grokking the Genocide uses AI to confront AI about documented atrocity. Artificial Gentle Intelligence imagines AI as loving kindness rather than extraction.
Here are concrete ways UWC students could use AI to generate digital experiences that fulfill the peace mandate:
1. Intercultural Story Exchange
UWC students come from 150+ countries. Use AI to co-write short stories that begin in one cultural context and end in another—each student contributing a chapter, with AI serving as translator, bridge-builder, and narrative glue between worldviews. The resulting anthology becomes a document of radical empathy.
2. Conflict Data Visualizations
Use AI coding tools to build interactive dashboards that visualize active conflicts, refugee flows, arms trades, and humanitarian spending—your own school's version of GHIR. Present at school assemblies. Let the data do the persuading. Data literacy as peacebuilding.
3. AI-Translated Peace Poetry
Each student writes a poem about peace in their mother tongue. AI translates all poems into all other languages represented at the school. The result: a multilingual anthology where every student can read every other student's words. Language barriers dissolve. Understanding compounds.
4. Messages to Humanity: Student Edition
Inspired by Jhave's daily video project. Each student creates one short AI-augmented video message to the world—what they would say if everyone was listening. Use AI video tools to amplify the message visually. Compile into a collective broadcast.
5. Environmental Action Simulators
Build interactive web simulations that let users model the impact of policy decisions: what happens to Bergen's coastline under different warming scenarios? What if Norway redirected 10% of military spending to education? AI can help generate the models, the data, and the visualizations. Students become citizen-scientists.
6. Whole-Use-AI Art for Social Justice
Adopt Jhave's #wuai ethic: create AI art where nothing is thrown away, where every generation is used. Apply this to social justice themes—migration, inequality, climate grief. The constraint forces creative acceptance. The output documents what matters. Present at local galleries, cafes, community centers. Art as intervention.
7. Digital Memorials
Use AI to build interactive digital memorials for communities affected by conflict. Students research, curate, and design web-based experiences that honor lived experience—not as spectacle but as witness. AI assists with translation, visualization, and accessibility. The memorial becomes an act of solidarity.
8. Vibe-Coded Community Tools
Use AI-assisted coding (vibe coding) to build actual tools your community needs: a multilingual bulletin board for your school, a local refugee resource finder, a mental health check-in app, a neighborhood skill-share platform. AI lowers the barrier to building. What will you build?
The technologies are neutral. The intention is not. Every tool sharpens the hand that holds it. You are the generation that will decide whether AI amplifies extraction or empathy, surveillance or solidarity, domination or dignity. The choice is not abstract. It is made in every prompt, every project, every line of code.
Make something that matters.
Links & Resources
Jhave's Work
- glia.ca — Digital poetics hub
- AI Updates — Research links
- Xtending Digital Narrative — Substack (dormant)
Books
- Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications (MIT Press, 2016)
- ReRites (Anteism Books, 2019)
Context
- Center for Digital Narrative — UiB
- Extending Digital Narrative — Research project
- United World Colleges — wikipedia
Tools (most free to try)
Note: many chatbots can also generate visualizations of data, code, make images.
- AntiGravity — Google's free coding agent, uses NanoBanana to make images
- Kimi 2.5 — free to try, can make slides and excellent webpages with images
- Flow — Google's video tool, costs (too much) money
- Gemini — Google's chatbot, can generate images
- Suno — AI music generator, free to try
- KlingAI — free to try video generator, Kling 3 is one of best in world currently
- Claude — free to try chatbot, Claude 4.6 is one of best coders and writers in world currently
- ~
- Davinci — free (completely) video editing tool: professional quality. They give it away so it becomes industry standard.
