Generative AI is changing what we can make and how it gets made. Code can now be written with prose. Agents can be created in minutes to take on substantial work. Language, images, sound, video, interfaces, and interactive experiences can be generated, revised, and personalized in ways that were previously out of reach.
At GAIL, we believe this moment calls for a new kind of learning environment. The Generative AI Studio helps students understand and use Generative AI as a creative medium: a way to invent new experiences, products, services, and forms of learning. Rather than teaching students to use AI only for task completion, the Studio teaches them to explore, direct, critique, and refine what AI makes possible.
Students work on individually driven projects with no single right answer, but with the potential to serve a need or create a meaningful human experience. Through hands-on experimentation, collaborative critique, technical guidance, and intensive charrettes, they learn to develop ideas before the build takes over, evaluate AI output with greater precision, and create prototypes that make the value of their concepts visible.
What Students Learn
The Studio is designed to cultivate both practical AI fluency and enduring creative judgment. Students develop:
- A productive creative process for developing novel Generative AI experiences.
- An understanding of emerging AI tools and how to use them effectively.
- A shared vocabulary for evaluating ideas, interfaces, aesthetics, interaction, and user experience.
- The ability to identify the “Generative AI IP” of a project: the part that only Generative AI makes possible.
- Greater discernment about tone, coherence, visual design, interaction, and the difference between generic AI output and work that is distinctive and purposeful.
- A stronger grasp of the technical and ethical realities behind compelling prototypes, including security, infrastructure, data, and responsible use of images, music, video, and text.
How the Studio Works
The Studio operates as a collaborative extracurricular program for Penn students, with weekly sessions and an intensive charrette each semester. Sessions combine essential concepts, demonstrations, hands-on experimentation, individual project work, peer collaboration, and regular critique.
Students receive mentorship and just-in-time instruction from faculty, GAIL staff, designers, product builders, technical experts, and guest lecturers. Because each student pursues a different project, instruction is responsive to the needs of the work: one student may need help with context engineering, another with interface design, another with technical architecture, and another with ethical use of creative materials.
The goal is not simply to produce polished demos. The goal is to help students learn how to imagine, test, revise, and direct AI-enabled experiences with enough rigor and judgment that promising ideas can move toward further development.
Our Studio Pedagogy
The Studio draws on the education and practice of the visual arts, where students learn by making, observing, receiving feedback, revising, and developing their own judgment over time.
Project Themes
Studio projects vary widely, but many fall within four recurring areas of exploration:
Beyond the Chat Box
Designing AI experiences that use voice, vision, robotics, XR, dynamic interfaces, comics, and other forms of interaction
AI-Generated Advice
Creating systems that can offer contextual, nuanced, and useful guidance in education, business, and everyday decision-making
Designing for Awe
Using Generative AI to create experiences that are meaningful, beautiful, surprising, and emotionally resonant
Advancing Science
Exploring how AI can support research, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and discovery
Generative AI is evolving quickly, and the edge of what it can do is constantly changing. Students and workers will need more than familiarity with tools. They will need the ability to imagine new uses, assess quality, collaborate with intelligent systems, manage ambiguity, and make responsible choices about what should be built.
The Generative AI Studio is GAIL’s learning environment for that future. By combining hands-on AI experimentation with the disciplined practices of art and design education, the Studio helps students build the creative, critical, technical, and ethical capacities needed to shape AI in ways that help people learn, work, create, and thrive.
Who’s Involved
The program is led by GAIL’s executive director in partnership with Penn faculty and GAIL senior fellows and staff. Sessions feature Wharton faculty, alumni practitioners, and guests from various fields who have built AI products.
Core Team
Professor Chris Callison-Burch
Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science
Program Director, Online Master of Science in Engineering in Artificial Intelligence
Geoff DiMasi
Lecturer, Integrated Product Design, University of Pennsylvania,
Director, Temple University Entrepreneurship Academy
Innovation & Entrepreneurship Institute (IEI)
Professor Ethan Mollick
Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar
Faculty Director, Wharton Generative AI Labs
Laura Zarrow
Executive Director, Wharton Generative AI Labs
Ben Przystanski
AI Architect, Wharton Generative AI Labs
Natalie Bach
AI Frontend Developer, Wharton Generative AI Labs
How to Apply
Application requirements and deadlines for the 2026-2027 academic year will be posted on June 1.
