I spent much of today writing the new week’s lesson for my online ethics & critical thinking classes. This is more on the critical thinking side – the topic being Art.
I start by showing the kids a picture that “I made”, and I ask them if they would call it “art”. In the three classes I ran tonight, everyone said yes. Then I reveal that I made it by using the online AI art generation program Craiyon. I share the web page live and type in a prompt and show them how it generates pictures. Then I re-ask the question – now that they know the picture was produced by an AI system, is it still “art” or not? Can a computer program produce something that we’re happy to call art”?
Then we talk for a while about the meaning of art. I show a Picasso painting from the Spanish Civil War period, when he produced a lot of artwork with sad imagery. I ask them what feeling they get from it, and many of the kids so far have said sadness. Then I explain why Picasso painted such images, because of his reactions to the war. And ask if knowing that makes them appreciate the art any more. Most of them agreed that it does.
Then I go back and ask is there any possible meaning behind the AI-generated art? If not, does that automatically make it inferior to human-produced art, or not? What if you can’t tell the difference? Does it matter?
And then I go into some possible uses for AI-generated art. And ask the kids what they think it means for the future of human artists.
There’s more to the lesson, diverging into a few other different themes, about destroying art, and whether famous/historical/significant art should be free for the public to view or not. I think it’s a good lesson, and it’s more fun and less stressful for me to teach than last week’s topic on cloning.
New content today:
I read an article about those algorithems – it said that they search pictures on the net and use them as the source material. They don’t pay rights to the original owners of the pictures. There is a legal loophole that makes this legal, but basically those things steal from the original creators.
There is also the issue of making money off an algorithem that you didn’t write yourself – you get a picture from one of those sites and you open an exibition – who owns the rights to that?
There was the famous picture of the monkey that took a selfie – the rulling on that was there is no original human that created the picture, so no rights.