As the gateway to cross-disciplinary creative and humanistic inquiry, the Global Arts + Humanities (GAH) is invested in cultivating exchanges where complex subjects like artificial intelligence can be examined critically and where discovery and knowledge circulate across disciplinary boundaries. This investment is exemplified by GAH’s 2025-26 lecture and workshop series, Artificial Intelligence: Propositions from the Arts + Humanities.

This series is aligned with the Society of Fellows Program and 2025-26 theme, Creativity | Intelligence | Automation. The Society of Fellows is one of GAH’s signature programs that brings Ohio State faculty, graduate and undergraduate students from across the disciplines together to share research around an annual cross-disciplinary theme. This lecture series invited the university community to approach artificial intelligence as a constellation of exchanges, rather than as a purely technological phenomenon. 

Moving away from instrumentalist thinking toward qualitative exchange that fosters contextual thinking, the series foregrounded the ethical obligations arising from the simulation of human intelligence and increased surveillance, and the vital role of artistic and humanistic perspectives in fostering innovation and transformative inquiry.

Series contributors revealed AI as inseparable from the social, cultural and embodied contexts that give it form and function and the role of artistic practices in challenging surveillance systems and revealing both the promise and limits of human and nonhuman exchanges. Taken together, this work demonstrates that ethical engagement with simulated intelligences demands awareness of the historical forces and social contexts from which these systems emerge.