Creative explorations play around the edges of text generation technologies, asking students to consider the technical, ethical, and creative opportunities as well as limitations of using these technologies to create art and literature. Many of these assignments look beyond our contemporary scene of LLM text generation and lend valuable context to our current moment, drawing from earlier technologies or historicizing connections.
Addison Eldin
University of Pittsburgh
This activity engages students in a conversation about text generation AI, namely ChatGPT, in order to prompt a deeper conversation about narrative. As an assignment, students engage with a storytelling engine based on ChatGPT, AI Dungeon. Then, in class, the instructor guides a conversation about the stories students experienced, the nature of the technology AI Dungeon relies on, and the ramifications such technology might have on what we consider to be narrative.
Daniel Hutchinson and Erin Jensen
Belmont Abbey College
We introduced undergraduate history and digital art students to multimodal AI models through the practice of prompt design. Students learned techniques for developing textual descriptions for generating images using models like DALL-E 3, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. Students then applied these techniques to explore art history through prompting of specific artistic styles on subjects of their choosing. After experimenting with these technologies, students then reflected on the broader social implications of AI-generated imagery.
Marc Watkins
Academic Innovation Fellow, Director of the AI Institute for Teachers, and Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric
University of Mississippi
This assignment is part of an introduction to an AI literacy module for undergraduate students to think critically about generative text by first reading an interactive essay made with the aid of generative AI, and then asking students to create their own short narrative using generative AI. The goal is for students to reflect on the pragmatic affordances and ethical considerations of reading, and then writing a text mixed with human and machine-created text.