About the GenAI Studio
The GenAI Studio support Milieux and AI2 students, staff and faculty develop collaborative and personal research projects using generative AI. The studio’s technical and social governance is part of the ongoing research-creation of the studio itself and is subject to change. As a research-creation project, the studio privileges free software approaches to AI first, open models second, commercial models last in its adoption and design.
The studio serves as a central hub for students from any discipline to engage in peer supported research and research-creation with generative AI tools. Studio members are expected to share expertise and resources, and this can be expanded with basic and advanced workshop, residency, and internship programs as interest and participation.
Objectives
- The studio’s technical and social governance is part of the ongoing research-creation of the studio itself and is subject to change.
- The studio privileges free software approaches to AI first, open models second, commercial models last in its adoption and design.
- Applications should be as local as possible, as frugal as needed.
- The studio may be a staging platform for cloud infrastructure but not a replacement.
- The studio should support a range of data and security needs from air-gapped solutions to public collaborations, but such efforts will take collaboration.
- Studio projects should be responsible and care for datafied subjects — human, daemonic, and otherwise — that enable and are affected by AI.
Values
- Support small scale, low overhead, and sustainable projects by graduate students and faculty
- Improve local capacity to run and tune open source and open access models aiming to contribute to the building of larger similarly focused research-creation communities across Canada and the world
- Support analysis of private and open data sets to build capacity in privacy and data sovereignty
- Represent and participate in larger scale public projects providing an organizational bridge between student and faculty researchers and organizations like The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC) or Hugging Face.
- Coordinate faculty and student grants and external partnerships as well as a central training hub for grad student HQP who are members of Milieux and AI2.