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The Hussman School of Journalism and Media hosted its second Converge-Con last week, inviting students and faculty to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence and creativity. The two-day convention featured events from an AI marketing workshop to student theater performances and an interactive concert.
Grant Sizemore, a UNC junior who helped put together Converge-Con, said that rather than design a conventional AI conference, the team wanted to create experiences and conversations exploring a central question: can AI be creative?
“We believe that designing experiences is how our students and other people at our university can really connect with this topic,” Sizemore said.
Converge-Con began on Wednesday morning at the Innovate Carolina Junction, where students and faculty gathered to hear from Converge-Con founder and journalism assistant professor Scott Geier, as well as UNC’s Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Economic Development Tommy Sowers, who encouraged students to approach the event with a beginner mindset.
Afterwards, art history professor Cary Levine spoke about the relationship between art and technological innovation. He used the case study of Bjørn Karmann’s “Paragraphica” — a lenseless camera which takes sensor data and generates an AI image — to question assumptions about what counts as “real” art. Levine described the AI “crisis” as part of a long history of art that changes, challenges and builds on past forms.
Then, award-winning sports journalist and author Tommy Tomlinson gave an address underscoring the distinction between AI and human creativity and self-awareness.
Tomlinson compared AI to artificial sweetener, saying that it lacks a uniquely human soul or ability to come up with ideas that surprise us. Tomlinson described his creative process as a writer and also shared that one of his first books was one of millions pirated to train AI models.
“I’m afraid that people who develop AI have no real goals other than to profit from the minds and hearts of people who create,” he said.
From a different perspective, former Chief Creative Officer of Dentsu Creative New York Ryan Paulson led an interactive workshop on whether AI can help humans be more creative.
Using the example of marketing men’s body wash, Paulson demonstrated strategies to prompt AI to help build creative friction — from mapping which tired advertising tropes to avoid, to drawing out connections from other fields — leading participants through a series of prompting exercises for their own product marketing ideas.
“I don’t want to be an AI evangelist,” Paulson said. “I just want you to be thoughtful and intentional about where you do want AI to be part of your creative process, and where you don’t.”
Wednesday continued with a poetry workshop with two English and comparative literature professors, where participants worked together with each other and with AI to overcome the classic obstacle of a blank page.
The workshop was followed by a keynote speech from Keith Sawyer, a creativity researcher and professor of educational innovation at UNC. Through 100 interviews with creatives from various fields, Sawyer drew out five essences of the human creative process — improvising, making, emerging, failing and seeing — that AI is not yet capable of.
“AI does not discover what to create through the process itself,” Sawyer said.
His advice to today’s creatives? “Don’t start with an idea. Start creating.”
Wednesday concluded with showcases in the performing arts. UNC dramatic art professor Tao Wang demonstrated his ongoing research at the intersection of AI and technical theater. Playmakers Repertory Company’s Matthew Donahue performed a scene from Hamlet, while Wang’s AI-powered system operated lighting, sound and projections — using cameras and microphones to pick up on cues from Donahue’s performance.
Wang’s team said the system could help safely execute risky cues like opening trapdoors and assist stage managers in their complex jobs of cueing a live show. Later that night, Sizemore and Donahue gave their own solo performances about AI.
Foster Foday-Hemingway, a UNC senior, described the experience of attending part of Wednesday’s events for their documentary storytelling class.
“As an AI skeptic myself,” Foday-Hemingway said, “I do feel pretty confident that I still learned something interesting and got to hear some inspiring stories.”
Similarly, Sizemore emphasized that the Converge-Con team didn’t want to push a singular pro-AI or anti-AI perspective, and that he hopes the event left people feeling empowered and aware of everyone around them also trying to navigate the complexities of AI.
Thursday, UNC law students argued a Supreme Court case before three AI justices. Additionally, the Center for Faculty Excellence held a discussion about teaching creativity in the Age of AI and a panel of UNC music faculty participated in a blind listening challenge to see if they might be able to tell whether a music sample was created by humans or AI.
Media and journalism professor Josh Carlton also hosted a live experiment on whether AI can reflect human taste and The Parr Center for Ethics explored the ethical questions of AI in creative fields, from plagiarism to personhood.
That evening, Converge-Con closed out with an interactive concert experience featuring the UNC Hip-Hop Ensemble and G Yamazawa, an acclaimed rapper and poet — as well as an AI-powered projection show that incorporated live audience reactions into the visual experience.
“I think there’s a lot of value in bringing people together in a time where it’s uncertain, and having an open conversation where we hear all perspectives,” Sizemore said, “because the only way to really learn and grow as people is having these conversations.”
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