120° Nexa Lunch Seminar - Imagining war with AI: Teenagers, Generative AI, Social Media and the Representation of War

ILARIA INGRAO

Università di Torino

MAEDE MIRSONBOL

Università di Torino

ANTONIO SANTANGELO

Senior Research Fellow del Centro Nexa, Università di Torino

Mercoledì 26 febbraio 2025

ore 13.00 – 14.00

Centro Nexa su Internet & Società
Politecnico di Torino, via Boggio 65/a, Torino (1° piano)

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Stanza virtuale: https://didattica.polito.it/VClass/NexaEvent

Can generative AI be used in education to contrast the spread of ideological narratives, instead of favoring it?

To answer this question, Antonio Santangelo, Ilaria Ingrao and Maede Mirsonbol will talk about a study they conducted with two groups of Italian and Iranian teenagers, reflecting with them on the way the last Israeli-Palestinian conflict was visually portrayed by the mass media of their countries on Instagram. After analyzing hundreds of images and reflecting on what was shown and what was not, the most meaningful pictures where displayed to the students, who were asked to recur to generative AI to create new images that expressed their own perspectives on the war. Watching what they produced and analyzing their reflections on this experience, the conclusion is that, with the help of visual semiotic techniques that activate critical thinking, AI can be employed in educational processes to help young people be aware of the cultural context they live in and express themselves. Sometimes it can also be used to say what has not been said by the mass media. But the fear to say something strong and maybe different must be faced and defeated.

Biografie

Ilaria Ingrao graduated in Communication and Media Cultures from the University of Turin with a Master’s thesis focused on exploring representations of the human being in Artificial Intelligence narratives. She is currently a second-year PhD student in the Semiotics and Media program at the same university, conducting research on Artificial Intelligence and responsibility.

Maede Mirsonbol is a PhD student in Semiotics and Media at the University of Turin. Her research is about a multimodal study to understand the impact of Generative AI images on communication skills in a foreign language learning environment with attention to the edusemiotics perspective. She is continuing her research as a visiting student at Lancaster University, England where the quantitative part of her study is collected. She is interested not only in educational research and its connection to the semiotic model of learning, but her goal is to use the innovative approaches in applied practices in teaching and learning contexts.

Antonio Santangelo is a professor of Semiotics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Turin, where he teaches Semiotics, Semiotics of Digital Cultures, and Multimedia Design and Management for Communication. His main research interests are focused on the development of semiotics as a social science of meaning and on narrative theory, which he applies in various fields: from media and cultural studies to bioethics, from investigations into the significance of digital tools in our society to futures studies.

Letture consigliate e link utili

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D’Armenio E., Deliège A. and M. G. Dondero (2024). “A semiotic methodology for assessing the compositional effectiveness of generative text-to-image models (Midjourney and DALL• E)”. In European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops: 1st workshop on critical evaluation of generative models and their impact on society. At: MiCO — Milan Convention Centre | LINK
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Santangelo A., Ingrao I. e M. Mirsonbol, “Imagining War with AI: an Experiment in Educational Semiotics”. In Spasić, А. & Stojanović, D. (Eds) (2025). 1st International Scientific Conference “Education and Artificial Intelligence (EDAI 2024)”, Book of Proceedings, Vranje: Pedagogical Faculty in Vranje, University of Niš, Serbia
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