Excerpts from Rice Thresher story
See full story
Jahnavi Mahajan’s research thesis sits at the intersection of her two majors, computer science and philosophy. She’s questioning whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to human creativity.
Mahajan, a Lovett College senior, found her way to the project through a tech ethics reading group in the Department of Philosophy where she met department chair Robert Howell. When she learned Philosophy offered a thesis option, she emailed him to ask if he would advise her. “I see myself growing,” Mahajan said. “I see my philosophical muscles stretching the more I work on this project.”
Her approach, Howell said, has been to focus not on definitions of creativity but on why humans need it in the first place. “Instead of focusing upon something that’s just arbitrarily set, she’s looking at what we value in human creativity and then asking whether or not that sort of thing is what we can get from artificial intelligence,” Howell said. “She’s good at seeing how creativity ties into things like moral psychology and ethics.”
Mahajan said the question feels urgent on a campus where AI use has become widespread. “We value creativity a lot at Rice,” Mahajan said. “With the rise of AI, I think we’ve all seen our classes and our classmates sort of infiltrated with this use of AI. So there’s a genuine question: are we going to see AI as a threat to our creative faculties?”