Bárbara Cleto, is the Higher Education teacher of a second year class of a Multimeda degree, leading a project with students, exploring human and AI co-creation. In two lessons, she invites students to write and illustrate a children’s story, using ChatGPT for co-creation of text and AI generative tools for illustrations co-creation.
This lesson is divided into two moments. First focused in understanding and having students share their experiences with AI, and second focused on creative writing.
First part
This lesson starts with the teacher conducting an initial survey, to understand students’ perceptions about and familiarity with AI tools. Questions focus on: how, for what purpose, and which AI tools students are familiar with. This step is crucial to inform and enable the teacher to better prepare future lessons.
Following this, the teacher facilitates a group discussion, focusing on students’ familiarity with generative AI tools. The discussion revolves around the questions from the questionnaire:
- How did you start using AI and for what purpose?
- What is your experience with using generative AI tools?
- Which tools have you used?
- What role does AI play in the Multimedia field?
- How can you integrate AI into your professional journey?
The teacher selects a couple of AI generative tools that the students were familiar with, text to text and text to image, and does a demonstration of how they can be used.
Second part
Now that students have shared about their experience, it’s time for the teacher to share all details about the learning activity, where students will individually, imagine a short children’s story. Each student is encouraged to write and illustrate a story using solely their imagination, meaning that there is no web searches nor brainstorming with others. For the illustrations, students can sketch on paper or use an image editing software.
Having created the text and illustrations, the next step is to identify the keywords that capture the essence of the story and illustration. These keywords will be needed in lesson 2.
In this lesson, students fully dive into integrating Artificial Intelligence in multimedia content co-creation, developing new children’s stories in partnership with ChatGPT for generating text, and other generative AI tools generating images.
First part
Students begin by selecting the generative AI text and image tools they will use and are most familiar with. Examples of tools chosen by the students:
- ChatGPT (for writing assistance and idea development)
- DALL-E3 (students previously used DALL-E2, which has been upgraded to DALL-E3)
- MidJourney (Discord-free version, called Open Art)
- BlueWillow (image creation tool)
Second part
Create prompts using the stories keywords.
With the keywords identified in the first lesson, students use them in text prompts in ChatGPT. Students iterate with the AI to generate a new story, with as many iterations as they see necessary to generate a satisfatory result. This is an active collaboration process with the AI.
The same keywords also guide the creation of new illustrations, using specific prompts in the image generation AI tools.
Third part
Reflective analysis.
After completing the co-creation of the stories and illustrations, students are encouraged to compare the process and results between the story created solely with the power of their imagination and the story co-created with generative AI. The reflective analysis is done individually by each student in a digital logbook, where they document the work process – add the storyboard created, identify the prompts and the interaction they had with AI. The goal of the reflexive process is also to help students develop critical thinking skills.
The digital logbooks of students were analyzed by the teacher, later on, to assess the students process and also to share results in a scientific research paper published.
Curious about students reflections?
Student reflections about the experience of co-creating with ChatGPT:
- ChatGPT has the ability to rewrite stories and expand details like naming characters.
- The narratives from ChatGPT follow a rigid and predictable pattern: introduction, development and conclusion.
- ChatGPT generates stories with some moralism in the way themes are addressed, but this can be avoided in the iterations.
- ChatGPT cannot replace the human capacity to tell stories.
Student reflections on co-creating images with AI:
- AI tools are fast and efficient but lack the originality and creativity of human art.
- Concerns about copyright and plagiarism of generated images, given they are based on a dataset with uncertain authorization for its use.
- There are concerns about the credit system and unauthorized appropriation of images, as it is possible to request AI to generate versions based on prompts from other people.
Reflections about technical and usage challenges:
- There is difficulty in formulating effective prompts to achieve results with the desired quality.
- There is a need for constant interaction to adjust prompts and ensure quality in AI responses.
- Co-creating with AI tools consumes significant time, which exceeded the initial expectations of the students.
Overall students were optimistic in the impact AI will have for multimedia content creation. Unanimously considering AI will be able to assist them as professionals, in the future, in a fast and optimized way for any task, at anytime and anywhere.
