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Northern Arts Incubator Program Lets Artists Be the Director of Their Own AI
WINNIPEG, MANITOBA — The typical experience with modern AI is a conversation with a single, monolithic personality. We type into a chat window, and the AI responds. But what if the AI you need for writing a formal grant proposal is different from the one you need for brainstorming creative project ideas? This summer, The Arts Incubator is working to address this by treating its approach to AI not as a single entity, but as a customizable troupe of digital actors, with the user acting as the director.
Building on pilot projects seeded with strategic arts innovation funding from the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse and the OpenAI Researcher Access Program, this initiative, supported by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design Creative Entrepreneurship program, is now entering its third summer of digital arts and creative arts and entrepreneurship programming. Artists, students, and researchers from Manitoba, Northwestern Ontario, Minnesota, and Nunavut are collaboratively working to re-vamp and transform their digital platform.
Hidden within the platform’s settings is a sophisticated AI configuration panel that aims to demystify AI technology and hand control over to the users. Instead of one AI, the new system has over a dozen distinct “personas,” each tied to a specific module. There’s a “Projects” persona designed to support creative grant writing, a “Budget” persona that acts as a meticulous bookkeeper, and even a “Media” persona trained as a public relations professional.
Artists using the system have the power to direct each one.
For every AI persona, a user can modify its core instructions—the text that defines its personality, goals, and constraints. They can adjust its temperature, a slider that controls whether the AI’s responses are more precise and factual or more creative and varied.
The most powerful feature, however, is the ability to create and save templates. A user could, for example, create two different templates for their “Media” persona. One, named “Formal Press Release,” might have instructions like, “You are a seasoned PR professional. Your tone is formal and objective.” Another, named “Casual Instagram Post,” could have instructions like, “You are a fun and engaging community manager. Your tone is enthusiastic and uses emojis.”
With this setup, when a user is in the News Release editor, they can instantly switch an AI’s entire personality to fit the specific communication task at hand.This level of granular control is a paradigm shift. It moves the user from being a passive prompter of a black-box AI to an active director of a transparent, configurable tool. By allowing artists to shape their own digital collaborators, The Arts Incubator is offering a glimpse into the future of human-AI partnership—one that is more powerful, more precise, and fundamentally more creative.
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