Converge-Con

THINK FIRST. PROMPT SECOND.

October 20 – October 22

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Hussman School of Journalism and Media

"I feel Curious about AI."

Schedule

Select a color to filter the schedule.

Events are subject to change. Please check back for updates.

10/21

What We See at First Glance

8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Curtis Media Center

Learn what you look at first glance when viewing imagery. With eye-tracking technology, be among the first to see what our brains notice.

Tech and Innovation Through the Ages

9:15 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. Innovate Carolina Junction

Join Cary Levine as they speak about how creative work has evolved through the ages with a focus on technology and innovation.

Hone Your Human Voice

10:35 a.m. to 11:35 a.m. Innovate Carolina Junction

Join Tommy Tomlinson to learn through an interactive workshop how to hone your human voice, while AI is on the rise.

Questions Over Answers

11:55 a.m. to 12:55 p.m. Innovate Carolina Junction

Learn how to ask better questions with Ryan Paulson, instead of focusing on the answers. Level up your skills in advertising when you place your creativity in your hands.

Coffee, Code and Creativity

2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Innovate Carolina Junction

Grab a coffee and discuss code and creativity with us. Experiment with your peers for a live poetry experiment co-hosted by the UNC English department.

The Science of Creativity

4:00 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. Freedom Forum, Carroll Hall

Join Dr. Keith Sawyer for a keynote presentation about how creativity works from an introspective and psychological perspective.

Beyond the Cue

5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Swain Hall Black Box Theater

Join Tao Wang for a demonstration of his research that experiements with AI as a device for cueing live performances in a scene from Hamlet.

Challenging Assumptions

7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Swain Hall Black Box Theater

Enjoy two solo performances by UNC students, Grant Sizemore and Matthew Donahue, as they share AI-related and AI-infused works.

10/22

What We See at First Glance

8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Curtis Media Center

Learn what you look at first glance when viewing imagery. With eye-tracking technology, be among the first to see what our brains notice.

Teaching Creativity in the Age of AI

10:15 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. Carolina Union

Join the Center for Faculty Excellence as they discuss how education is changing and learn how creativity can impact the education environment.

Songwriting Has Patterns, What are They?

12:50 p.m. to 1:50 p.m. Innovate Carolina Junction

*TENTATIVE*

Join Jocyelyn Neal for a panel discussion about the theoretical underpinnings of creativity and novelty in songwriting.

Digital Twins: Humans vs AI

2:10 p.m. to 3:10 p.m. Innovate Carolina Junction

Take part in a live experiment to test judgement of humans vs AI. How are aesthetics perceived by humans and how does it compare to the recognition of patterns?

Ethics Workshop

3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Innovate Carolina Junction

Join the Parr Center for Ethics as they discuss the ethical implications of AI in today's world.

Project Voltron

7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Swain Hall Black Box Theater

The final performance for our two-night run of an immersive, interactive concert experience.

This event is ticketed due to a limited capacity. Look for ticketing information in a follow-up email. Additional, viewing locations will be offered on campus.

2026 Creatives

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Glossary

Hover over a word to learn more.

Artificial Intelligence

The broad field of building machines and software that can perform tasks — recognizing patterns, understanding language, making decisions — that normally require human intelligence.

AI systems that create new content — text, images, audio or video — by learning patterns from existing data rather than simply retrieving or classifying it.

A branch of AI that trains computers to interpret and understand visual information from images and video, much like human sight.

AI models trained on massive amounts of text that predict and generate human-like language, powering tools like chatbots and writing assistants.

A subset of machine learning that uses multi-layered neural networks to automatically learn complex patterns directly from raw data.

A method of teaching computers to improve at a task through experience and data, rather than through explicit, hand-written rules.

Supervised learning trains a model on labeled examples with known answers; unsupervised learning finds hidden patterns in data with no labels at all.

Low-effort, low-quality content mass-produced by generative AI and published with little human review or creative intent.

Systematic errors in an AI system's output that reflect skewed, incomplete or unrepresentative data used to train it.

Confident-sounding but false or fabricated information that an AI model generates as if it were fact.

A computing system loosely inspired by the brain, made of layered nodes that pass and weigh signals to learn patterns from data.

A chunk of text — a word, part of a word, or character — that a language model reads and generates as its basic unit of language.

Large facilities of networked computers and servers that provide the massive computing power needed to train and run AI models.

The challenge of understanding exactly how a complex AI model reaches a given output, even for the people who built it.

The sheer amount of computing power and hardware required to train and operate increasingly large AI models.

A critical term describing large language models as systems that convincingly remix patterns in language without true understanding of meaning.