Artificial Intelligence for Creative Practice MA

This module builds your practical and professional foundations through making, reflection and dialogue. You will create small artefacts, examine legal and ethical considerations and learn to design for diverse audiences. Alongside exposure to pipelines and specialist techniques, you will produce reflective case studies that evidence your development and connect your practice to professional pathways.

This module explores the relationship between technology and creative practice across media, from technologies of reproduction and automation in the creative industries to contemporary AI-enabled cultural production. You will be introduced to the core AI technologies used in creative work and supported to situate current and emerging tools within their broader historical, cultural and economic contexts.  

Building on the first two modules, you will research an existing creative practice case study and define a new creative workflow for your own practice, developing fluency with the relevant technologies and sharpening your conceptual clarity. The module emphasises iterative experimentation and reflective documentation, while also considering the industrial and innovation histories of the tools you use.

This module examines AI as both a technical field and a societal force, focusing on how systems are built, deployed and governed. You will analyse issues including bias, transparency, labour impacts, creativity and ethics. Through research-led study of an AI application in context, you will evaluate its technical, aesthetic, social and moral implications and reflect on AI's wider effects on human agency and society. 

The Major Project is an extended opportunity for independent research and portfolio-ready creative production, using AI tools in support of clearly defined aesthetic and conceptual goals. You will define and pitch your project at a proposal milestone, apply project and time management methods, and produce the final artefact and a supporting creative statement as your principal submission. 

Learning is situated in an environment that mirrors the creative industries, helping to prepare you to take your learning and apply it in real world contexts. You'll learn through guided lectures and seminars, as well as through exposure to research projects, participating in group projects and your own research. You'll also get to explore the range and breadth of research in a creative institution, collaborating with research colleagues in technical centres such as the Centre for Blended Realities, along with those in other areas that resonate with your own professional practice. 

Assessment for this course is 100% coursework. There are no exams as part of this course.

Assessments are composed of practical activities underpinned by critical analyses of technology workflows, applications and practices to further support your learning. Module leaders and supervisors will be available to guide and support you through your assessments to enhance your relevant technical and academic skillsets. 

You do not need to be a computer programmer or data scientist to thrive on this course.  

We welcome applicants from across the creative and humanities disciplines. If you come from a background such as art history, film and media studies, literary studies or cultural theory, your existing theoretical and aesthetic knowledge is a genuine foundation for this course, not something you'll need to set aside. We're equally interested in applicants with an established creative practice who are ready to extend it through critical and practical engagement with AI.

We welcome applicants with varied qualifications, but most applicants will have an undergraduate (bachelor's) degree. Our typical applicants hold an undergraduate degree of 2:2 or above, or equivalent industry experience.

We also welcome your application if you have other formal or 'certified' learning (such as training courses not run by universities or colleges) and learning from work experience or self-study. This is called Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL) and should have been gained within the last five years and be equivalent to the learning outcomes of our minimum entry qualifications. 

If English isn’t your first language, you'll need to demonstrate English language skills that are sufficiently developed for successful completion of your studies. We accept a range of recognised English language qualifications that are equivalent to the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Academic minimum score of 6.5 overall, with a minimum of 6.0 in Speaking and a minimum of 5.5 in Reading, Writing and Listening.  

The MA AI for Creative Practice is a practice-led programme and your primary creative tools are central to the work. You will be working with AI-integrated media production pipelines - not AI as a conversational assistant, but AI embedded in the making of images, sound, moving image, text, and interactive work.

The university provides studio access, specialist computing facilities, and bookable equipment throughout the course. The items below represent your personal setup. You do not need to arrive with everything on day one, and we will discuss tooling in detail during Welcome Week, but it is worth beginning to plan and budget now.

Essential items

• Laptop capable of running current AI media generation tools (min. 16GB RAM, dedicated GPU strongly recommended; Apple Silicon M-series or equivalent Windows; see note below) approx. £1,200 – £2,500
• External SSD for project file storage and backup (min. 1TB, USB-C; reliability critical - G-Tech, Samsung T-series, or similar recommended) £80 – £150
• (Variable costs) AI tool subscriptions - several tools we use operate on subscription or pay-per-use models (see tool guidance note below) £0 – £600 per year

Optional costs

• Sketchbook / research journal - analogue documentation is part of the creative process on this programme £15 – £40
• Headphones - closed-back, suitable for studio work (e.g. Sony MDR-7506, Sennheiser HD 280 Pro, Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro) £60 – £150
• Optional study trip / symposium attendance - details will be confirmed in Study Block 1 £0 – £400