Creative AI has emerged at a moment when the boundaries between artistic production, scientific inquiry and technological infrastructure are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Systems developed for prediction, classification and generation now participate in the making of images, films, texts, voices, designs and virtual environments. In doing so, they do not simply extend existing creative tools. They alter the conditions through which creative decisions are made, attributed and interpreted.

The significance of this shift lies less in the novelty or speed of machine-generated content than in the forms of agency and authority that these systems appear to possess. An image, text or voice may be presented as an immediate output, yet it emerges through distributed relations between training data, model architectures, computational infrastructures, cultural conventions, human selection and interpretation. What appears to be a singular act of machine creativity is therefore better understood as a mediated process whose conditions are often concealed.

The Art and Science of Creative AI asks what creativity becomes under these conditions. Bringing together art, computer science, philosophy, design and media research, the symposium examines AI in three interconnected roles: as a means of producing creative artefacts, as a method of research, and as an object of critical inquiry. Rather than treating these as separate domains, it considers how each reorganises the others. Artistic practice can expose the assumptions of technical systems; scientific methods can become materials of cultural experimentation; and critical inquiry can reshape the design and use of AI itself.

The issue is not simply whether AI can generate convincing images, fluent texts or coherent audiovisual worlds. It is what kinds of imagination these outputs make possible, what forms of knowledge they preserve, and what becomes absent when culture is reorganised as data. Generative systems can contribute to synthetic personae, aesthetic languages, intellectual identities and speculative worlds. Yet their apparent coherence can obscure the partial and contingent processes through which such forms are produced.

Creative AI is therefore an epistemological as well as an aesthetic question. Greater fluency does not necessarily amount to greater understanding, and technical capability does not in itself produce judgement. AI systems increasingly participate in determining what becomes visible, measurable, credible and actionable. In this sense, they operate as forms of epistemic governance, shaping not only creative production but the terms through which knowledge is organised and encountered.

Artistic and practice-based research has a particular role within this field because it can make these mediating conditions perceptible. Datasets, prompts, interfaces, errors, model behaviours, infrastructures and audience responses can all become materials of inquiry. The purpose is not merely to demonstrate what AI can do, nor to repeat familiar positions of technological celebration or alarm. It is to construct situations in which the relations between human intention, machinic process, institutional power and cultural interpretation can be examined.

The symposium therefore proposes Creative AI as a field in which making becomes a form of thinking. Its central concern is not whether machines can be granted an autonomous creative status, but how creative meaning emerges through distributed encounters between systems, practitioners, audiences and worlds. The future of AI will not be determined only by improvements in scale, speed or computational capacity. It will also depend on how artists, scientists, researchers and communities make its conditions legible, contest the forms of authority it acquires, and decide what kinds of worlds it should help bring into existence.

Who is the event for?

The symposium is for artists, researchers, scientists, designers, technologists, educators, postgraduate students and cultural practitioners working with Creative AI or seeking to understand its wider implications. It will also be relevant to professionals from the creative industries, museums, galleries and cultural heritage organisations, as well as policymakers and prospective research, cultural and industry partners.

What will participants gain?

Participants will encounter current research, creative practices and critical perspectives through presentations, moderated discussions, demonstrations and workshops. They will gain a deeper understanding of how AI is transforming creative practice, culture, education, industry and governance. The event will also provide opportunities to exchange methods, meet potential collaborators, develop future research partnerships and register their interest in the UCL Network for Creative AI.