Code of Conduct

All members of this course have the following responsibilities as learners, facilitators of learning, and as participants in dialog and discussion. This document was inspired by and references the p5.js community statement.

As Learners

• Actively ask for help from your peers.

• Be open to new experiences and ideas.

• Be present. Avoid using laptops during discussions.

As Facilitators of Learning

• Do not assume prior knowledge or imply that there are things someone else should know.

• Actively seek to support your peers when they need help.

• Recognize and validate multiple forms of contributions and expertise.

• Be open to constructive feedback.

• Avoid jargon when possible.

In Discussions

• Prioritize listening.

• Be open to new ideas and alternative perspectives.

• Be mindful and kind in your interactions with others.

• Be respectful. Debate across different points of view is productive and passionate discussion is encouraged; however, disagreement is not an opportunity to attack someone else.

• Any form of harassment or offensive comments relating to gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, language, neuro-type, size, ability, class, religion, culture, subculture, political opinion, age, skill level, occupation, or background is unacceptable.
  
  

As Authors or users of Computationally-Generated Content

• Openly share your knowledge and progress with your peers. Publish your in-progress and finished work on the course Github organization.

• Give credit to your sources, when possible. (See below for details on work generated with large-language models).

• If you are unable to credit a source due to using a tool that obscures training data, provide documentation of any and all input you provided. 

Policy on AI Generation

In this course, we will look at the impact of generative technologies on human expression. These technologies include Artificial Intelligence (AI) and/or Large Language Model (LLM) based tools for generating code and images. You are encouraged to investigate such technologies over the course of this class, and depending on your chosen assignments, there may be cases in which the inclusion and discussion of images, text, and code generated by such tools is warranted.  In these cases, I request that you indicate your use of these tools.
Specific guidance is as follows: 

• Using AI software to write or paraphrase prose text for any assignment (including reading reflections) and presenting this text as your own writing is not allowed. You may use grammar editing tools like Grammarly. I urge you to limit your use of chatbots to restructure text you have written for clarity.  For more details on my reasoning, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4

• Using AI software to generate or alter programming code for any assignment is permitted; however, you are required in the comments of the program to list the tools you used to do so (in a manner identical to how you would cite code sources) and the general application for this. 

• Using AI software to generate images / video / other media elements as the output of your work is also permitted; however, you are required to list the tool used and any and all prompts you provided to generate the resulting imagery.  In these cases, the prompts will be considered the work you did for the assignment.

• Further, please note that the legality of using copyrighted training data for these tools is currently an unsettled matter, and such technologies frequently rely on low-paid under-resourced humans to function. 

Elements of this policy are structured around guidance provided by Nick Monfort and Edward Schiappa. This policy is subject to change.