Media Production in the Age of AI
TDM 155AI
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
In this course you'll learn how to produce media with the help of AI and to produce media that can stand out in the "age of AI," cutting through the pervasive "AI Slop" that is dominating the internet. So you will use AI to make things — to generate images and video, to edit and transform recordings, to build interactive installations, to code creative tools you couldn't build alone. And you'll learn the production craft that makes your work unmistakably human — studio photography and lighting, audio recording and mixing, video shooting and editing — skills that give you creative control AI alone can't provide. You'll move beyond the consumer-facing AI products that big tech companies design for passive users — chatbots, image generators, one-click filters — to become a maker and developer who builds your own creative systems on top of AI. No coding experience required. By the end, you'll be prompting, context-engineering, and vibe-coding your way through production workflows that would have taken a professional team a decade ago.
You'll also develop the judgment to use these tools well. AI can automate production work that used to take days — but it also floods every platform with frictionless, generic output. The slop. This course teaches you to recognize AI's defaults, to push past them or deliberately subvert them, and to know when to lean on these tools and when to refuse them — not from an ideological position, but as a working practitioner making real production decisions every week.
Concretely: you'll vibe-code 3d visualizations and theatrical cueing systems, build interactive web narratives and browser-based games, and chain AI agents into live performance tools that respond to inputs from cameras and microphones in real time. The course runs in the Learning Lab studio, where cameras, screens, projection systems, and live switching infrastructure let you work across physical and digital media simultaneously.
Course Notes
This course satisfies the “Practical" requirement for TDM concentrators and Secondary Field students.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
