SYNTHETICA examines the complex and multifaceted ripple effects and limitations of AI-human interplay in the contexts of work, business, and society. It focuses on contemporary data-driven organizations through their ICT development and application practices as well as discursive constructions that manifest the limitations of this technology. Limits will be addressed on several cross-sectional dimensions that include technical, human, sociocultural, and communicative. These dimensions will be operationalized via mixed method studies in three key intertwined research Work Packages that focus on the Language of AI (software), Limital Sensemaking (communication), and Algorithmic and Human Interplay (ventriloquial and social network analysis). The goal of SYNTHETICA is to incite a new research paradigm that not only discusses limiting issues such as bias, ownership, and transparency, but engages novel means of actuating them within social, political, and scholarly discourses.

The project SMAK analyses co-creation processes of knowledge and creativity between humans, robots and artificial intelligence in Finland, San Francisco, and Singapore. In the second machine age, we co-create knowledge and are creative with artefacts that learn. This challenges any approach to knowledge creation and creativity to re-ask: who knows and is creative, what is knowledge and creativity and how is knowledge and creative outcomes co-created from ideas into justified results? The SMAK builds a novel and interdisciplinary spatio-temporal approach to empirically analyse creativity and knowledge co-creation processes in the second machine age. The case studies focus on early adopters: robotics university students, developers of artificial intelligence, researchers and artists.