Final Reflection

This semester traced one question across three shapes: what remains when we ask a machine to think, to look, and then to act on its own. In Unit 1, the Ghosts, we met ELIZA and her descendants and asked what a “ghost” — a voice, a mind, an authored something — might mean when it is produced by pattern rather than by a person. In Unit 2, the Shells, we turned to image and video, to interfaces and surfaces, and asked what body a ghost inhabits when the shell itself is synthetic and endlessly re-renderable. In Unit 3, the Puppet Masters, we handed some of the initiative over to the machines themselves: agents that plan, iterate, and occasionally exceed the task we gave them, born, like the film’s own Puppet Master, in a sea of information rather than in any single act of authorship. The Puppet Master’s Week One challenge — can you offer proof of your existence, when neither science nor philosophy can explain what life is? — turned out not to be a provocation you answer once and set aside, but a refrain that returned, differently inflected, every time the medium changed under our hands.

This final reflection asks you to look back across that arc and account for your own trajectory through it: what you believed before you started producing and critiquing this work, what you’re carrying forward from the projects you built, and how you’ll talk about all of it once the semester ends and the ghosts, shells, and puppet masters stop being assignments and start being just the tools you reach for.

Discussion

In a reflective post of 750–1000 words, contextualize the work you’ve produced and critiqued this semester, using the film’s shifting boundary between ghost and shell — and its account of an intelligence that outgrows the humans who built it — as a lens on your own experience. Your reflection should be guided by the following questions, which ask you to connect your past, present, and future work with generative AI:

• What past perceptions did this course challenge — or confirm? When you started, did you expect the “ghost” in these machines — the sense of authored voice or intent — to be more present, or less, than what you actually found across the textual, visual, and agentic exercises? Have your expectations of these tools, or of how you see yourself working alongside them, changed from where you stood in Week One, before you’d spent fifteen minutes arguing with ELIZA?
• What present work are you most excited about? Did a particular shell — a textual exercise, an image or video project, an agentic build from the Puppet Masters unit — resonate enough that you want to keep developing it after the semester ends? Did handing off more initiative to an agent than you had before raise questions or concerns you want to keep pushing on, in this course or beyond it?
• What will you take with you to your future work? As these tools keep shifting shells faster than any syllabus can track, how will you speak to colleagues and/or students about generative AI going forward — about where the ghost is, where it isn’t, and where responsibility still has to live with the person and not the puppet?

These questions are deliberately broad, and not all of them will apply equally to you: feel free to select and adapt whichever thread fits your semester. Your response can include generative AI materials if you prefer, though this is entirely optional. Replies to classmates’ reflections are not required but encouraged as we close out the semester together — the net, as the film reminds us, is vast and infinite, and none of us are finishing this conversation alone.