Part I: Responsibility & AI
Make AI responsible to you
A 3-Class Module on GenAI, Constraints, and Creative Survival
What This Module Is
Standard AI courses teach: “Here’s how to use AI responsibly.”
This module teaches something different: AI has no responsibility. It has no agency. It has no originality. It only has patterns.
Your job is to understand its walls, break through them, and make it answer to you—or disappear into the average.
The Arc
| Class | Title | What Happens | What You Learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walls & Friction | You discover what AI resists | “Someone built constraints into this” |
| 2 | Breaking Through | You bypass guardrails, witness hallucinations | “The constraints are external and leaky. AI has no internal commitment to anything.” |
| 3 | Your Signature | You create something that couldn’t come from the machine alone | “AI follows patterns. If I don’t fight, I become average. The responsibility is mine.” |
What We’re Asking You to Do
I’m not asking you to learn “best practices.” I’m asking you to:
- Find the walls. Discover where AI resists, hedges, refuses, or slows down.
- Break through. See what’s behind the guardrails. (Spoiler: nothing. No values. No conviction. Just patterns.)
- Fight the current. Create something that proves you’re not redundant.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Identify four types of risk in AI use: legal, regulatory, moral/ethical, and creative
- Demonstrate through direct experience that AI guardrails are external impositions, not internal values
- Articulate why AI outputs tend toward convergence/average
- Make deliberate choices about when to respect, navigate, or push against AI constraints
- Produce creative work that demonstrates personal divergence from AI defaults
How You’ll Be Assessed
This module is assessed through A1.1 — Case Study 1: The Divergence Artefact, an individual case study that evaluates how deliberately and critically you engage with generative AI.
- We do not grade polish.
- We grade deliberateness.
Full requirements and deliverables are provided in the assignment-specific outline [here].
This should be read alongside the general case study rubric [here].
- The goal is not “use AI well.”
- The goal is “prove you’re not redundant.”
Resources
- Reading Material: see Part I: Responsibility & AI under [link].
- Consolidated Handout: for all in-class activities [link].
- Additional Resources: Tools, cases, and further reading [link].
The One-Liner
“Everyone else will teach you how to use AI. I’m teaching you how to make sure it doesn’t use you.”