A Story of YOU

Final Project | Winter Quarter 2026 | Music 356 / CS 470 "Music and AI (A Critical-making Course)" | Prof. Ge Wang

In this final project, you are to reflect on your personal journey throughout this quarter (in this class and, especially, beyond), and in ~1500 words, write a piece of creative nonfiction featuring two parts. It is important to note this is NOT a critical reflection, but an exercise in self creative expression. You are to use NO AI tools of any kind to aid you in this endeavor. Learn to work through it for yourself, even and especially if you find yourself struggling. Take a walk, talk to a friend or family, and come back to the work.

You are required to eventually submit a final project webpage. To protect personal information and people you may be writing about, however, you have the option of not publicly posting your creative nonfiction (in that case, you can vaguely summarize what you have created/written about on your webpage, and submit your actual work as a PDF or other to the new #final-projectsLinks to an external site. channel in Discord). Please respect one another by keeping any non-public works confidential within our group. Also, we will make the final reading (and pizza party) a closed event.

Part 1 "A Story of YOU"

In our critical making course, we have always asked a fundamental question, "what do we (really) want from artificial intelligence?". And instead of focusing on, say, "how do we make AI more clever or more powerful", the goal of this course has always been to explore questions like "how do we want to live with AI? And through what we design with AI, how do we want to live with one another?" and ideas such as "AI as tools, not oracles". In the spirit of our critical making course on Music and AI, this final project asks you to reflect on these questions. The truth is, of course, all of you have been doing this all along in this course, from your display of vast human creativity (especially as you grappled with the capabilities and limitations of AI tools) in creating poetry tools, audio mosaics, and playful wekinations of the world around you.

It is not difficult to say that in less than one quarter's time, reasons for Weltschmerz has only intensified and multiplied. How does it make you *feel*? Tell us a tale of your personal subjective journey through this quarter and this time in our world. It can use ideas and lens from our course (e.g., Weltschmerz, interactive AI, the importance of friction in giving life meaning, the cultural or education or economic dimensions of "Big AI", the Turing Trap). While you may want to use some of these lenses, you do NOT necessarily need to write about your experience in this course. Rather, reflect on your lived experience this quarter at Stanford and in the world of the first months of 2026. Have you changed ever so slightly since 2026 began? How do you see yourself (and has that changed)? Interesting creative nonfiction often contains moments of vulnerability, i.e., revealing something that you doubt about yourself, your ability to control your future, or perhaps something you view as a personal limitation. Give voice to these in earnest. Who are you today? What do you care about? Weave your tale for us.

Part 2 "Message in a Bottle"

This can be a continuation or a separate "coda" from the above prompt. Reflect and write some words on what you might say to someone thinking about studying / working with AI (either in music or otherwise), or perhaps trying to get an education (in any discipline). Given the intended brevity of this exercise, rather trying to cover a lot of ground, focus on just one aspect and develop that. This "message in a bottle" can be intended for a student or a friend or a community of people (e.g., your fellow students, CS peers, artists/musicians peers, perhaps someone who fears being "left behind" by AI in our world, or perhaps a pre-frosh, or a high school student, or maybe your parents wondering what you are learning in your Stanford education). What would you want to tell them?

This can take the form of advice based on your experience and reflection, or some "words to the wise". Alternately, you might craft one or more "design principles" for building AI systems. Remember that design principles are not recipes but a lens to think about how to approach a design task, especially in moments of ambiguity. Whatever you choose to do, remember to favor arguments over opinions, ways of thinking over verdicts, well-framed questions over answers. Do it with the intent of helping someone think through some aspect of working with AI and these times. What message would you put in a bottle?