A Digital Humanities Project:
Storytelling with AI
Project Lead: Gerui Wang, Ph.D., Lecturer, Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies
Technology Lead: Montana Gray, M.A. student, Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies
Project Lead: Gerui Wang, Ph.D., Lecturer, Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies
Technology Lead: Montana Gray, M.A. student, Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies
Introduction:
Imbuing AI with Humanities
Gerui Wang
How can arts and humanities engage, critique, and inform AI research? This website showcases AI films and exhibitions produced by Stanford undergraduate and graduate students, as part of their course projects for my Fall 2024 course at Stanford University: Art Meets AI: Algorithmic Bodies in East Asia.
This digital humanities project invites all educators and learners to ponder this self-reflexive question: what happens when humanities clash with the automatic and generative? Is there anything human and creative about the digital? How can humanities shape a responsible and sustainable future engagement with AI?
The first part of this website consists of AI exhibitions, featuring student projects when each group selected a topic of interest and curated a storytelling exhibition showing both human created artworks and AI generated artworks. How do human perceptions of body and identity, experience and expressions differ from computer vision and machine learning simulation? How can human experience form a dialogue with machine experiences?
The second part of the website consists of AI films, featuring student films when each acted as a director, engaging multiple AI video and image generation apps, to co-create a short film with AI. The source images and topics evoke historical art forms of East Asia, including masterpieces or representative works in literature, painting, prints, posters, and architecture.
All these original works hail as some of the greatest examples of storytelling in history with profound sensitivity to life, experience, love, morality, politics, and nature. How does AI change and alter our conceptions and practices of storytelling? 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?
Now, I invite you to keep exploring with us, starting with Storytelling with AI.
Acknowledgement: This project is generously funded by Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning and Stanford Center for East Asian Studies. We are grateful for the following individuals for their support and valuable suggestions: Professors Pavel Levi, Richard Vinograd, Ban Wang, Dafna Zur, Xueguang Zhou, as well as Zhaohui Xue, Kenneth Scott Ligda, Helen L. Chen, J. Louise Makary, Yunshu Fan, and Kritika Kanchana Yegnashankaran. Profuse thanks also go to colleagues at the Stanford Library Digital Repository team for archiving this website: Peter Chan, Hannah Frost, Joshua Capitanio, and Josh Schneider.
Course Instructor: Gerui Wang, Lecturer, Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies
Gerui Wang is a Lecturer at Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies, where she teaches classes on AI, art, and media. Her research interests span arts, public policy, environment, and technologies. She is a member of UK's Alan Turing Institute AI & Arts research group. Her articles on AI, media, and society are frequently featured in public venues including Forbes, Alan Turing Institute AI & Arts Forum, Asia Times, The Wire China, the South China Morning Post etc. and have been translated into French and Chinese. Gerui holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Michigan. She has published in the Journal of Chinese History and Newsletter for International China Studies. Gerui’s first book Sustaining Landscapes: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture is forthcoming in 2025. Her research has been supported by the Software Sustainability Institute based at the supercomputing center of the University of Edinburgh, University of California Professional Development Award, Mellon Foundation, Freer Fellowships, Liberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, and among others. Her course has received the 2024 Stanford Teaching Advancement Award.
Curriculum Development Assistant: Montana Gray, M.A. Student at Stanford Center for East Asian Studies
Montana is a second-year Master's student at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) and is passionate about using multimodal AI tools for creativity. She is currently researching how cultural frameworks shape Japanese society's understanding of and relationship with AI and humanoid robots. You can find her e-portfolio here.
Banner image source: Public domain.
Watanabe Shikō (1683–1755), Flowers and Trees of the Four Seasons, early to mid-1700s, Japan. Folding Screen. Ink, color, gold, silver, and gilding on paper. Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund 2021.132. Cleveland Museum of Art.