Univ Seminar 2025: Creativity and AI

Univ Seminar 2025: Creativity and AI The 2025 Univ Seminar took place at the College on 3 July and included both in-person attendees and online viewers. Corinna Hartinger (2019, DPhil Bioscience) has kindly provided a report of the event.

For the latest installment of the biennial Univ Seminar series, a panel of four Univ alumni returned once again to the college grounds to discuss the topic of Creativity and AI: Professor Charlotte Deane MBE (1993, Chemistry), Philippa Malicka (2007, English), Dr Chris Mammen (1993, Law) and Professor Pireeni Sundaralingam (1986, Experimental Psychology).

While the seminar’s title was already highly intriguing to me (as a hobby artist and slight AI skeptic), it was the line-up of panellists that promised this would be a fantastic event. Between the four of them, the panellists represented a wonderful diversity of perspectives and expertise.

Before opening the floor for questions, each panellist was given time to share their thoughts, which included, for example, how useful and “creative” AI models can realistically be expected to be, given they are essentially a bunch of calculations, how our choice of language around them tends to elevate them to something beyond that, how our own creativity can be enhanced or diminished depending on how we use them, and what their impacts could be in the creative industries. Audience questions – fielded from those attending in person and online – expanded the discussion into areas such as known and unknown biases in model inputs and outputs, and the threat of homogenisation and model collapse, as AI models will increasingly learn from AI-generated data.

It would, of course, be impossible to comprehensively dissect the topic of Creativity and AI. But I believe the panel did a fantastic job balancing the discussion, providing nuanced insights into the many negatives, some of which I have often heard before and others I had not yet considered, as well as touching on some of the less frequently acknowledged positives.

The seminar was rounded off nicely with drinks and nibbles served on the Goodhart Lawn on a fine summer evening. I want to thank all panellists and organisers for a fantastic event.

Speaker Profiles

Professor Charlotte Deane

Professor Charlotte Deane MBE (1993, Chemistry) is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford and the Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). From 2022 to 2023, Professor Deane was Chief AI Officer at Recursion (previously Exscientia), a biotech, where she led its computation scientific development. At Oxford, Professor Deane leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG), who work on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery; using statistics, AI and computation to generate biological and medical insight. Her work focuses on the development of novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several Pharma drug discovery pipelines. Professor Deane brings to the panel experience in the real world AI applications and development.

Philippa Malicka

Philippa Malicka (2007, English) is an author, publishing consultant and occasional journalist. Her forthcoming debut novel, In Her Defence is set to be released in early 2026, published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, and Simon and Schuster in America. Her journalistic work has been published in papers such as the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph, with her book reviews featuring frequently in the Telegraph. Philippa’s experience within this field and her evolving understanding of how AI will impact the publishing and creative industries more widely, provides the seminar with a valuable perspective on how AI may augment of disrupt the traditional creative marketplace and the role of human authorship in the age of AI.

Dr Chris Mammen

Dr Christian Mammen (1993, Law) is a leading Intellectual Property (IP) lawyer with Womble Bond Dickinson (US) LLP in San Francisco, where he is Office Managing Partner. Dr Mammen represents a wide variety of companies on technology and IP issues, including AI. In addition to his work for clients, Dr Mammen has an interest in the broader theoretical and ethical implications of AI. In 2024, whilst an Academic Visitor with the Oxford Faculty of Law, he was the lead author on a new white paper titled, “Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and the Requirement of Human Authors and Inventors in Copyright and Patent Law”. The study incorporates multidisciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, philosophy, and law to provide a thorough analysis. It investigates the role of human creativity in making work eligible for protection under IP laws, and examines how current AI models measure up against the IP laws’ creativity requirements. The paper also debates the impact of generative AI on human creative efforts and the need for IP laws to evolve with the technology surge. Dr Mammen has received international recognition for his work in AI and IP, having lectured in the US, the UK, Japan, Korea, and other countries.

Professor Pireeni Sundaralingam

Professor Pireeni Sundaralingam (1986, Psychology), Univ Poet Laureate and Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, USA is both a cognitive scientist and an artist. As a poet, Professor Sundaralingam has held national fellowships in poetry, been published in over 30 literary journals and her work has been translated into five languages. As a scientist, Professor Sundaralingam has held research posts at MIT’s Dept Brain & Cognitive Sciences and at UCLA, researching human decision-making and innovation, and led research at Silicon Valley’s Center for Humane Technology.

Professor Sundaralingam has served as Science Advisor to the Irish government’s Minister of Art & Heritage, and as Principal Advisor on Human Potential for UNLive, the Museum of the United Nations, leading strategy on the connections between behaviour change and the arts. As founder of “NeuroResilience Consulting”, she has been an advisor on human-computer interaction for groups ranging from Wall Street’s Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to the European Union Parliament. Professor Sundaralingam was also a co-author on the white paper “Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and the Requirement of Human Authors and Inventors in Copyright and Patent Law”, which was led by Dr Mammen.