The rapid advance of AI writing tools, image generators and texttovideo models opens a new world for creative possibilities. It also raises questions about the role of the artist, the nature of creativity – and ethics.

Hosts Beth Coleman and Rahul Krishnan dive into these topics with guests Sanja Fidler and Nick Frosst.

About the hosts:

Beth Coleman is an associate professor at U of T Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/) and the Faculty of Information. She is also a research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (http://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/). Coleman authored Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds (https://kverlag.org/books/bethcolem...) using art and generative AI. 

Rahul Krishnan is an assistant professor in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He is a Canada CIFAR Chair at the Vector Institute, a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a faculty member at the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine (TCAIREM https://tcairem.utoronto.ca/). 

About the guests:

Nick Frosst is a cofounder of Cohere (https://cohere.com/), a Torontobased startup that develops large language models for enterprise use. Frosst did his undergraduate degree in computer science and cognitive science at U of T and was the first employee of Geoffrey Hinton’s Google Brain lab in Toronto. He is the singer in an indie rock band called Good Kid (https://goodkidofficial.com/). 

Sanja Fidler is vice president of AI research at NVIDIA (https://www.nvidia.com/enus/research/), leading the company’s research lab in Toronto. She is also an associate professor of mathematical and computational science at the University of Toronto Mississauga and an affiliate faculty member at the Vector Institute, which she cofounded. The coauthor of more than 130 scientific papers in computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing, she has received the University of Toronto’s Innovation Award and the Connaught New Researcher Award, among other accolades. Fidler completed her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto.