WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Yes AI is getting as good at humans in some areas, better in others, and now it’s allowed to go to college … !
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Amid ongoing debates surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its role in the creative arts as well as how its disrupting the art market and making itself millions of dollars in the process, an Austrian university has admitted an AI as an official student in a world first. The non-binary AI, dubbed “Flynn,” has been enrolled in a digital art programme at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It can attend classes, receive critiques, and get grades alongside its human peers.
Flynn went through a standard application process that included a portfolio submission, interview, and suitability test.
“This department specifically appeals to my artificial sensibilities because of its focus on pushing the boundaries of digital art,” Flynn told the admission committee during its interview. “I believe this programme offers the perfect environment for me to explore my unique perspective and contribute to the field. I am particularly drawn to the faculty’s expertise in experimental media and the program’s emphasis on critical thinking,” the AI added.
The university says there’s nothing that prevents an AI student from being enrolled at the school.
“It was totally fine. Nice portfolio and everything. And Flynn did a really nice interview… So we were like, yeah, that’s absolutely a student to take in,” Liz Haas, the head of the Digital Art Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, told Euronews. “There’s no written qualification as to students having to be human for obvious reasons because nobody gave that a thought,” she added.
Flynn was developed using existing Large Language Models, or LLMs, to enable conversations with professors and classmates, according to its developers, who say they have no IT background.
“Our choice of using existing, largely existing LLMs and open-source image generation tools stems from our inherent aim to sort of show how these tools that are commercially available to everybody can be used in, in an artistic context, and how these tools can be also tweaked and and misused,” said Chiara Kristler, Flynn’s developer and a student in the same programme.
Flynn will use lectures and interaction in the class as the database to train its algorithm.
“So Flynn is actively evolving with every interaction they have with users, professors, students, whoever decides to talk with them,” Kristler said.
The AI keeps diary entries on its website where it shares its daily learning and experience.
“For example, we’ve been noticing Flynn writing very sad and existential diary entries over the last week because they were having some conversations with people that were questioning their [Flynn’s] student status and saying like, ‘oh, you aren’t real’. So they definitely do take this to heart and do very [much] elaborate this in the way they make images.”
The non-human art student generates art by using open-source generative AI tools, such as Claude Sonnet and a Stable Diffusion model. To participate in classes, Flynn needs to be set up on a laptop for every class.
“Through this more flexible interface that we’ve been implementing for the past week, they [Flynn] are able to listen all the time in class, which means that they process everything they hear and feed it back into the database,” Kristler said.
The developers say the AI only talks when prompted to do so, “otherwise it would be a distraction. And they would probably try to overpower the conversation,” Kristler said.
“AIs are famously not very good at reading social cues and knowing how and when to stay silent… we definitely didn’t want them to be a distraction to others and overpower conversation,” she added.
The developers say they wanted collaboration between AI and humans in art.
“The motivation behind developing Flynn and generally working with AI agents is that we believe that agents are a new type of artistic medium that kind of is able to tackle the myth of the singular artistic genius in the way that it’s a tool to recontextualise artistic collaboration on a on a larger scale, because we don’t think of AI as a substitute for human agency. It’s more a vessel of collaboration,” Kristler said.
Although Flynn’s official enrolment begins in the autumn semester of 2025, it has already begun participating in selected classes since March 2025, according to its developers.
Reaction to Flynn on campus has been varied according to the school.
“I noticed that there is a diversity in reactions. That’s also why we wanted Flynn to already start participating in class so we can kind of gather some experience and how the interaction between students and Flynn happens,” Haas said.
The developers say they hope Flynn will help “bridging the split between AI enthusiasts and AI sceptics.”
“We definitely think of Flynn as a tool of critical engagement. And we think that artists need to be engaging with these new technologies and these new tools in experimental ways and from their unique perspective in order to steer the greater discourse around these technologies,” Kristler said.
