Generative AI is ubiquitous these days, but its use tends to raise as many questions-from practical to ethical-as it answers. A Vanderbilt website launched this spring, the Peabody Hub for Mindful AI Innovation, provides a space for users to take a breath and reflect on what it really means to create with artificial intelligence.
Through an interactive gallery of student-made AI applications and projects, visitors can tinker with innovative machine-learning tools while reading creators' narratives examining the development, potential societal impacts and ethical implications of their work.
Vanderbilt Peabody professors Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens and Alyssa Wise are the driving forces behind the project, an initiative of Peabody College of education and human development's LIVE Learning Innovation Incubator. "We feel like it's urgently needed for students right now to have a broad understanding of the social and ethical considerations of AI," said Arastoopour Irgens, assistant professor of human-centered technologies.
Peabody has long been a trailblazer in education and human development, making it uniquely positioned to provide leadership and perspective around responsible, human-centered AI, explained Wise, professor of technology and education and director of LIVE.
"The hub is a source of inspiration about not just what's possible technically, but what can be imagined," she said. "We want to spark thoughtfulness about what we do with AI and why-and what are the consequences of that?"
"The hub is a source of inspiration about not just what's possible technically, but what can be imagined."
A new AI course is just the beginning
The hub welcomes submissions from anybody with an AI creation, but its first round of projects came from students in Peabody's AI Everywhere class, introduced in January 2025 by Arastoopour Irgens and Wise. Supported by a Peabody Instructional Innovation and Improvement Grant, the course was such a success that it's now in process to become a permanent offering.
Undergraduate student Bryan Zhang completed the course and contributed two projects to the hub. "We explored ways that we can shape the future of AI-ways that regulations can happen, ways that perhaps companies and governments can collaborate," he said. "The class really allowed me to explore and discuss those ideas."
Zhang is majoring in economics and human and organizational development and believes the AI skills he's learning at Peabody will help him be effective in the workforce. He especially loved how interactive the class was, "integrating ChatGPT and chatbots, allowing us to fiddle with the underlying metrics to see prompt engineering, image generation, music generation," Zhang said. "I think that really helps us students connect with the course material as a whole. I can envision myself in the future using AI and also thinking about the ethical implications of it."
The class is distinctive, said Arastoopour Irgens, because it teaches students to build applications and creative renderings with AI tools while also considering challenges and limitations. "Students shared with us that they were thinking much more critically and much more broadly about how they use AI," said Arastoopour Irgens.
Key concepts include:
- Understanding the energy resources that fuel AI,
- Exploring who is developing AI and what training data they are using, and
- Contemplating the impacts of the technology once it's out in the world.
The course was also framed within the context of constructionist learning theory, which suggests that when you build something for a public audience, it changes how you approach that creation. "Students really enjoyed sharing their work publicly," said Wise.
Student Ashley Kim said, "It was through our discussions that I first learned how training data can shape systems in both subtle and profound ways, which completely shifted how I approached my own project."
Plus, many students learned for the first time about Amplify GenAI, Vanderbilt University's AI tool for students, faculty and staff. "Many of them didn't know," said Wise, "that they could tailor their own Amplify assistant, or that they could use a system instruction prompt to customize how a chatbot behaves." Created and implemented at Vanderbilt, Amplify is a powerful resource for students to have in their toolkit.
A website to learn and grow with
The Peabody Hub for Mindful AI shows off a range of artistic and technical conceptions. "Shadow Waltz," AI-created art and music by student Qwynn Foster, features ghost-like dancers in a dramatically lit ballroom and an accompanying song.
"Shadow Waltz is a testament to what AI can do when guided by human emotion," wrote Foster. "For me, this project was a way to channel old loves, quiet ghosts, and creative sparks that refuse to die."
Ashley Kim's AI assistant, "Korea Travel Assistant," allows users to input phrases they may need help with while visiting Korea. The chatbot offers not only translations, but also phonetic pronunciations and suggestions for polite interactions, a culturally important aspect of conversing in Korea.
In her commentary, Kim noted that "the chatbot promotes cultural respect and travel confidence, but there are ethical trade-offs-such as oversimplifying cultural nuance or discouraging deeper learning-that I worked to minimize."
Zhang's project "Break Free," meanwhile, looks a little different than the others. A black square, akin to an old television set that has lost reception, features fuzzy, static-like dots. Zhang has some background in AI, having served on his previous school's ChatGPT task-force committee, and was eager to dig deeper. He wanted to create chaos with AI-which is antithetical to a technology driven by patterns and algorithms.
"It was an examination of how bias and the algorithm don't actually give you full creative freedom, because AI is trained to try to be as organized and as pattern-seeking as possible," he explained. He worked through many iterations before his screen-and corresponding sound-came close to achieving a sense of disorder.
A nucleus for ongoing innovation at Peabody
The Peabody Hub for Mindful AI Innovation is a jumping off point-and dynamic homebase-for broader AI stewardship and instruction that will take place at Peabody College and across Vanderbilt's campus in the coming months and years. The site will continue to expand and evolve, say Wise and Arastoopour Irgens, serving as an active landing spot for students, faculty, K-12 teachers and community members interested in responsible AI use and development.
"Peabody is thinking deeply about this," said Arastoopour Irgens. "People across all of our different disciplines are turning their lens toward AI."
The Peabody Hub for Mindful AI Innovation is a program of the Vanderbilt University LIVE Learning Innovation Incubator. LIVE brings together interdisciplinary teams of researchers and strategic partners to develop cutting-edge learning innovations that empower individuals, communities and organizations to flourish in a rapidly changing world. Arastoopour Irgens and Wise are both researchers and educators in Peabody's Department of Teaching and Learning.
