Heather (Hyerin) Im

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AI and Humanity 1 & 2


Department: Entertainment Design, School of Design, Kookmin University, Seoul 
Instructor: Heather Hyerin Im
Term: Spring, Fall 2024-2025 
Language: English
Length: 3 hours / week, 15 weeks / semester
Students: 3rd/4th Year BFA
Course Syllabus Link


Course Overview


In AI and Humanity 2, students engage in project-based learning that positions artificial intelligence not only as a technical tool but as a collaborative partner in storytelling and design. The course emphasizes prompt engineering as a critical skill for effectively communicating with AI systems, while also exploring how generative technologies can expand creative expression across text, image, sound, and performance.
Rather than framing AI solely as a threat or a shortcut, the course encourages students to critically and imaginatively integrate AI into their workflows. Through hands-on projects, they investigate how emerging technologies can reshape human creativity, cultivating both technical literacy and ethical awareness.

Each semester centers on a distinct theme. Last semester’s theme, Future and Virtuality, invited students to speculate on virtual worlds and alternative realities. This semester, the focus shifts to Nature - challenging students to examine the relationship between technology and the natural world, and to push the boundaries of what human-AI collaboration can mean in addressing ecological and cultural questions.



Learning Objectives

  • Develop technical proficiency in prompt engineering as a method for effectively communicating with and directing AI systems.
  • Explore generative technologies as creative collaborators, applying them across text, image, sound, and performance to expand modes of storytelling and design.
  • Critically evaluate the role of AI in human creativity, moving beyond narratives of fear or dependence to cultivate imaginative and reflective integration into personal workflows.
  • Cultivate ethical and aesthetic awareness of AI’s impact on authorship, agency, and cultural production, fostering responsible and thoughtful creative practices.
  • Complete a design fiction video and project, approximately 5 minutes long, based on an understanding and utilization of various AI elements.



Student Projects

Through this course, students critically engaged with AI through a speculative lens, exploring ethical, philosophical, environmental, and political concerns. Their final projects reimagined AI as a medium for provocation (raising questions of authorship, legitimacy, and ecological futures) while fostering critical reflection, public provocation, and AI literacy.  Several of these works were screened at university film festivals, and some were submitted to external AI film festivals.











 

Jane & John Doe Show / Kyungjin Nam

This project explores the philosophical and ethical implications of AI-generated media by framing it as a new form of “nature.” Through a narrative video piece, the student follows the journey of John Doe - an AI-born character searching for his biological parents and questioning whether he has a soul. The work reflects on how AI images, sounds, and motions are descended from human archives yet exist as hybrid beings with many “parents.” By blending animistic perspectives with critiques of ownership and authorship, the piece raises broad questions (philosophical, spiritual, and ethical) about what it means to create and live with AI as part of our everyday environment.







ReShot in Ukraine / Boyoung Kim, Oh Yeon, Jueun Ha

This project reimagines Apple’s iconic campaigns (Bounce, Behind the Mac, Shot on iPhone) against the backdrop of war-torn Kyiv. Using AI tools, the students reconstructed Apple’s visual language frame by frame, replacing the original backdrops with images of destroyed streets, shelters, and frontlines. They also generated portraits of Ukrainians(creators, students, journalists, even soldiers) using Apple devices in the midst of war, and reinterpreted “Shot on iPhone” as a testament of truth and witness. By blending global advertising aesthetics with the harsh reality of conflict, the work raises urgent questions about memory, media, and the role of technology in documenting everyday life during war 







After the Bang /Hamin Park, Soyoung Park

This speculative project imagines a post-human Earth where humanity has gone extinct and waste has come alive as the planet’s new inhabitants. Against the backdrop of environmental crises, ongoing wars, and rapid technological change, the work envisions trash not as static residue but as animated matter that shapes a new ecology. Through fluid, generative visuals, the project challenges viewers to confront the consequences of overconsumption while rethinking what “life” and “nature” might mean in an age shaped by human absence and technological transformation.