The Cyberpsychology of AI + Creativity

The Psychology of Human Creativity (Before AI)

What is human creativity when stripped of technologies and algorithms? What lives at the core of the imaginative act? This week builds a sacred ground. It’s an invocation of the imaginative self — without machines, automation, or any AI. It is only from this centered human place that we can begin to question what’s being automated, simulated, or co-opted when machines “create.”

The Mind’s Eye: The Psychology of Human Imagination

This week explores imagination as a foundational psychological capacity distinct from creativity, while understanding its role in perception, memory, future thinking, emotional regulation, and meaning-making. Students will analyze imagination’s function across different psychological theories and reflect on its relevance to inner life, artistic expression, and even survival.

Philosophical vs. Psychological Aesthetics

Philosophical aesthetics tells us what beauty and art mean; psychological aesthetics tells us how beauty and art are experienced. To understand human (and machine) creativity, we need both.

Synthetic Creativity: Artifice, Autonomy & Algorithmic Output

This week pivots the class from examining human creativity (Weeks 1–3) to confronting the notion of synthetic creativity—a term that invites us to wrestle with questions of authorship, authenticity, process, copyright, and meaning in machine-generated outputs.

The Creativity Crisis: "Are We Being Replaced?"

This week tackles the psychological, economic, and philosophical anxiety surrounding generative AI’s role in creative labor. We explore the rise of AI-generated art, the contested idea of “machine creativity,” and the real-world implications for artists, designers, illustrators, and visual creatives. We center class discussion around labor, including who gets paid, who gets displaced, and who owns creativity in the age of machine-made content.

Exploring Co-Creation I: Prompt Engineering as Creative Craft

Prompt engineering is rich enough to merit its own deep-dive because it embodies the craft of collaboration with machines, not just the output. Separating it from the broader topic of AI-human collaboration allows students to first build technical and conceptual fluency with generative systems before tackling the relational, ethical, and expressive dimensions of full-spectrum collaboration.

Exploring Co-Creation II: Human-AI Collaboration

Week 7 explores the possibilities of human-AI co-creation through hands-on experimentation with generative tools for text, image, and video. Students will engage with prompt engineering as a creative craft, reflecting on authorship, voice, and collaboration. Activities include generating AI-assisted poetry, visuals, and short video clips, followed by critical discussions on ethics and aesthetics. The week culminates in a creative reflection project showcasing their collaborative work.

Reflections, Projects, and Forward Paths

In our final session, we turn inward and outward—creating space for personal reflection, peer exchange, and shared growth. Students will present either a brief final project (up to 10 minutes) or share their reflections on what they’ve learned, how their perspectives on creativity and AI have evolved, and what they plan to do with these insights.