Creative AI Meetup: September
This event will host talks from artists and researchers presenting AI technologies and their creative applications. It is organised by curator Luba Elliott.
Event schedule:
18:00 Doors open
18:30 Introduction by event curator Luba Elliott
18:35 Sander Dieleman, Research Scientist at Google DeepMind: Multimodal Generative Models
19:00 Jafar Sabbah, Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management, City St Georges: The Human–GenAI Tango in Generating Creative Ideas
19:25 Yunzhi Melissa Li, Computational Artist, Master In Training: Still Life after Machine Vision
19:50 Talks finish, networking with drinks & food
20:30 Event close
This event is being organised in collaboration with the Institute for Creativity and AI (ICAI), City St George’s space to research and explore the implications of AI for creativity and creative work everywhere. ICAI takes a transdisciplinary approach to investigating the transformative implications of AI for work; The role of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in creative thinking and practice; The legal implications of AI in Intellectual Property Law; and AI and the Global South.
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More on talks and speakers:
Sander Dieleman, Research Scientist at Google DeepMind: Multimodal Generative Models
Modern generative models produce a combination of sound, still images, video and language, sometimes all at once. They are also trained to understand inputs from all these modalities, so that the generative process can be flexibly steered. The different modalities greatly vary in terms of their statistical behaviour and semantic abstraction level, which poses several challenges that we'll take a closer look at.
Sander Dieleman is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, on the Generative Media team. His current research interests include representation learning and generative modelling of audio, images and video. He has worked on the development of AlphaGo, WaveNet, Nano Banana, Gemini Omni, and more.
Jafar Sabbah, Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management, City St Georges: The Human–GenAI Tango in Generating Creative Ideas
The research examines how the design of human–GenAI collaboration shapes creative ideation. We compare human-only ideation with unstructured GenAI use, conventional GenAI seeding, and transformational-creativity seeding in a controlled experiment with 400 participants. The findings show that augmentation is contingent on how collaboration is structured: transformational seeding improves novelty and utility, while humans continue to contribute through elaboration, contextual judgement, and attention to feasibility.
Jafar Sabbah is a Lecturer in Technology and Innovation at Bayes Business School, London, focusing on human–AI collaboration, AI agents, and the future of work. With a PhD, an MBA, an LLB, and foundational studies in Computer Science and Psychology, I bring a multidisciplinary perspective that bridges research and practice. Recent publications include two HBR articles on marketing to AI agents and agents-to-agents interaction.
Yunzhi Melissa Li, Computational Artist, Master In Training: Still Life after Machine Vision
In her talk, Yunzhi Melissa Li will present Master In Training, a four-screen still life installation that repeatedly translates itself through machine vision, text, image generation and online image retrieval. Starting from a staged scene, the work explores what happens when memory becomes search, and when artistic “mastery” shifts from the Renaissance studio to the language of training datasets. Additionally, she will be discussing current work in development.
Yunzhi Melissa Li is a Chengdu-born, London-based computational artist working across interactive installation, web-based experiments and immersive 3D environments. Her practice explores how images, code and audience interaction shape memory, identity and place. She often works with archives, 3D scans, personal stories and machine vision, translating intangible experiences into physical and digital spaces. Her work has been shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, Hypha Studios, and Copeland Gallery.