Located in East Campus Hall, the AI Studio (AIS) is a collaborative teaching, research, and design space that provides support for AI-focused projects for the Faculty of Arts community and their collaborators.The AIS serves as the headquarters for the Arts AI Postdoctoral Scholar and Arts AI Graduate Research Fellows who conduct research in the space, offer critical and creative workshops, and host guest lectures and instructional sessions for students, faculty, and institutional partners.
The AIS is an inclusive, safe and brave space. It operates with an in-studio design value so work stays in the room and users can more freely experiment with heavier tasks like video generation and model training.
Technology
The AIS is equipped with two workstations capable of serving approximately 12-seat workshop sessions or providing open-hours users with their own workstation to design and experiment with small models locally. The workstations run familiar, open-source user-interfaces and engines for text, image, audio, and video models, providing accessibility and versatility.
Workshops
The AIS team offers workshops throughout the term, that are open to all. From hands-on learning with generative AI to discussions about ethics and impacts, AIS workshops will showcase the many layers of AI, both technical and societal.
Workshop themes will include:
- AI and learning (brainstorming, critique, research, studying)
- AI and work (resumes, interview practice, workplace scenarios)
- Generating text and media with AI (writing, images, audio, video)
- Training your own model
- Responsible use (academic integrity, privacy, misinformation, copyright)
- Impacts and ethics of AI
- Generative AI essentials (LLM foundations, prompt engineering, output verification)
Open Studio Hours
Whether you are just beginning with generative AI, looking for assistance on an existing project or idea, or interested in learning from the team, the AIS holds regular open drop-in hours where computing resources are made available and at least one member of the team is on hand to consult.
Schedule (Winter 2026)
- To be Announced
Location
Visit us in ECH1205.
The Team
Dr. Marcel O’Gorman is a University Research Chair, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), where he teaches courses, leads collaborative projects, and directs workshops that combine research/creation and critical media studies.
O’Gorman has published widely about the impacts of technology, including his books E-Crit and Necromedia and articles in Slate, The Atlantic, and The Globe and Mail. He is also a digital artist with an international portfolio of exhibitions and performances. This experience guides the creative hands-on methods espoused by the Critical Media Lab and outlined in detail in his most recent book Making Media Theory: Thinking Critically with Technology. O’Gorman’s most recent research looks at how critical and inclusive design methods might help tackle some of the ethical and environmental issues faced by contemporary technoculture.
Jennifer R. Whitson is an Associate Professor in Sociology & Legal Studies and at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, both at the University of Waterloo. She has a background in surveillance studies. She has been conducting qualitative research (ethnography, interviews, surveys) with game developers since 2012, tracing how social and technological practices shape developers' creative work and influence who exactly can have a sustainable career doing what they love. Other projects focus on how technological shifts impact education and work.
Christopher Rogers is a PhD candidate in English working in the environmental humanities at the intersection of rhetoric, communication, technology, and design. His research explores how mixed method approaches to working with precarious environments can facilitate hopeful ways of attending to nonhuman stakeholders and speculating about positive climate futures. This work also includes critical and creative engagement with generative AI, especially as it relates to communicating responsibilities, care, and environmental implications of these systems.
Rebecca Sherlock is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo and a Design Director in the technology sector. Her research explores the intersection of responsible innovation, critical design, and ethical technology design, with special interest in how these topics are realized within industry. As a member of the University of Waterloo’s Critical Media Lab (CML), she engages in research to understand how responsible innovation might be integrated directly into technological design practices.
Leah Govia is an interdisciplinary social scientist with a background in Geography and Anthropology. Leah brings experience with social mixed methods and has worked on projects related to the ethical dimensions of AI, responsible design, and critical data governance across social and ecological contexts.
Sukaina Zaidi is a Graduate Research Fellow at the AI Studio and an MDEI student, both at the University of Waterloo. She holds an Honours BA from the University of Toronto in Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology (CCIT) and Professional Writing. Her research has looked at the social, ethical, and organizational effects of generative AI adoption, including how it changes newsroom workflows and media production. She is currently working on developing the AI Studio and AI literacy workshops.
Ambreesh Parthasarathy is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo’s Socially Embedded Machine Intelligence (SEMI) Lab, advised by Prof. Elliot Creager. Focusing on causality, interpretability, algorithmic auditing, and AI policy, their research explores both the internal decision-making structures of AI models and the societal impacts of mass AI adoption to build safer, more reliable systems and governance frameworks.