This article examines the implications of the artworks and public performances of the robot artist Ai-Da. While the project claims to advance AI public literacy and foster critical debate around intelligent systems, it instead ends up perpetuating popular misunderstandings about AI creativity, agency, and consciousness. Built in 2019, Ai-Da is a humanoid robot capable of creating drawings, paintings, and composing poetry. However, the project often conceals or miscommunicates the technical aspects of Ai-Da’s capabilities in a manner that encourages the public to misattribute human-like traits to the robot. This lack of transparency in the presentation of Ai-Da’s abilities and the creative processes involved risks reinforcing existing misconceptions about AI, rather than promoting a more nuanced understanding. By employing discourse analysis and drawing on scholarship on machine and computational creativity, anthropomorphism in social robots, and posthuman embodiment, this article uses the Ai-Da project as a case study to illustrate how the dangers of AI hype can be obscured when presented through the lens of public art. The analysis examines how the Ai-Da project, despite its stated goals of advancing AI literacy, fails to effectively challenge and may even exacerbate public misperceptions about the nature of AI-generated art and creativity.

Partaking in the editorial process of an academic journal is both a challenging and rewarding experience. It takes a village of dedicated individuals with a vested interest in the dissemination and sharing of high-quality research outputs. As members of the editorial team of an open access data journal, we reflect on the emergence of data-driven open research, a new journal genre (data paper), and a new journal type (data journal) in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS). Access to data—the currency of empirical research—is valuable to the research community, crucial to scientific integrity, and leads to cumulative advancements in knowledge. It therefore requires significant investment and appropriate venues for dissemination. We illustrate the necessity of raising awareness about data-driven open research and best practices in data-driven publishing. We discuss how it involves building a community of authors and readers, establishing a company of editors, reviewers, and support staff, and passing on the practice, which has been challenging the status quo in research and publishing. Potential future directions are considered, including data peer review and reward, recognition, and funding structures for data sharing.

The Knowledge Technologies for Democracy (KT4D) project seeks to produce new mechanisms to support the protection of human agency in the context of tensions between democracy and emerging technologies. Addressing this challenge from the perspectives of education, regulation and innovation, the project has chosen to deliver a number of its interventions through the paradigm of serious games. The place of agency in gaming is contested, however, leading the project to weave multiple mechanisms to foster agency as a collective process across its approaches to critical digital literacy, narrative and co-creation.

This chapter examines data understandability as a core epistemic condition for democracy and democratic deliberation, arguing that contemporary challenges stem less from data scarcity than from uneven capacities to interpret increasingly complex, AI-mediated information environments. Building on scholarship on visualisation literacy, epistemic inequalities, and the limits of model-centric XAI, the chapter reframes explainability as a matter of sensemaking rather than model disclosure. It theorises narrative scaffolding, critical interactivity, and participatory design as infrastructures capable of contributing to equitable interpretation in civic contexts. The analysis is grounded in two EU projects, KT4D and ORBIS, which operationalise these principles in practice and offer empirical evidence of how visualisation becomes explanation, narrative becomes interpretation, and co-creation becomes a method of democratic alignment.

Firenze University Press - Università degli Studi di Firenze - Nell’ultimo decennio è stata dedicata una notevole attenzione a come la società dell’informazione e gli strumenti digitali stiano mutando il panorama culturale e linguistico in cui avviene la produzione letteraria. Ma quali sono le radici di questo cambiamento e del dibattito conseguente? Questo libro nasce con l’intento di studiare come, fin dalla prima diffusione delle tecnologie dell’informazione a metà degli anni Cinquanta, due tra gli scrittori italiani più influenti della seconda metà del Novecento, Italo Calvino e Paolo Volponi, abbiano reagito ponendosi domande sulla funzione del linguaggio letterario e della creatività artistica in un contesto di macchine intelligenti ed informazione di massa. Eleonora Lima, sottoponendo a una serrata analisi testi tra i meno battuti dei due autori, tratta dell’opposizione tra mondo naturale e tecnologico in una società in cui l’informazione è divenuta un prodotto e un bene da sfruttare; ricostruisce prerogative e identità dei soggetti biologici e meccanici così come definite dall’allora nascente scienza cibernetica; indaga il ruolo politico della rappresentazione televisiva negli anni della contestazione e del terrorismo. Le analisi comparate, organizzate per nuclei tematici preceduti da un complessivo inquadramento storico-metodologico, fanno emergere le modalità secondo cui ebbe luogo nella scrittura un processo di ‘rimediazione’, e mostrano come, con strategie nuove e spesso divergenti, i due narratori abbiano affrontato in modo personalissimo la necessità di adattare gli strumenti letterari al mutato contesto comunicativo.