Lesley STEAM offered the pre-college Creative AI & Design course for the second consecutive summer. We recognize the importance of creativity that, fundamentally, requires having or showing one’s ability to produce new and valuable things. With the proliferation of generative AI or GenAI, more and more creative people are using machines as tools to interrogate AI and make art. With this in mind, we worked closely with Cambridge Youth Programs (CYP) to recruit Cambridge, MA youth to explore and go beyond the fundamentals of creative AI, which refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of generating novel and original content, such as art, music, writing, and design.
Students were introduced to artists such as Stephanie Dinkins who creates art about AI as it intersects race, gender, and history. They saw the designs of Norman Teague, whose Adobe Firefly-generated works offer a reinterpretation of design history.
Dinkins programmed the generative art to prioritize (more diverse) worldviews and figures. She did so by fine-tuning different AI models, programs that recognize patterns through datasets. Dinkins and her team of developers fed the models images by the Black photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured photos of Black people in Harlem. They also programmed it using African American Vernacular English so that the models would learn to recognize its tonality and better generate images based on the stories of people who use it. —Melissa Hellman via The Guardian
Norman Teague used Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative AI models, to imagine a world where iconic objects in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) design collection were created by a more diverse chorus of voices. Teague, and his assistant designer Daniel Overbey used Firefly to revisit 15 pieces in MoMA’s collection from the perspective of Black history and inspiration.
AI Literacy
This summer we emphasized ‘AI literacy’ that describes a set of competencies that enable people to understand, evaluate, and effectively use AI technologies, while also recognizing their ethical and social impacts. To better understand Stephanie Dinkin’s method(s) Creative AI & Design students learned how to use Google’s Teachable Machine, a free web-based tool that allows users to train machine learning models, using the computer’s webcam or microphone. Students practiced collecting and labeling their own data to train new models, which can then be exported for use in various projects. For this part of the course, students used microphones to record different sounds and train an AI model based on these audio samples.
Students discussed important issues such as AI and carbon emissions, intellectual property, copyright, and the impact on art and society. For example, ‘deepfake’ AI increases concerns about the spread of misinformation and other malicious uses. Thus, learning how to detect and identify increasingly realistic deepfakes are as important as the generative methods used to produce them. Students were also given copies of Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini. The combination of AI literacy and visual storytelling allows individuals to generate, personalize, and interpret images and sounds, transforming abstract ideas into engaging content. For this we turned to Chibitronics, a company that makes and sells circuit stickers and tools for educators, artists, and crafters, so everyone can create their own expressive electronics.
Designing and Making With Creative AI
Students explored visual storytelling and design when making electronic pop up stages that are inspired by Chibitronics’ Electronic Popables and Sequence Slide Switch. Dr. Nettrice Gaskins presented her SZA MicroPuppet & Electronic Pop-Up Stage Instructable to be used as a guide to explore machine learning (via Teachable Machine) to enhance visual storytelling and stagecraft, the latter of which encompasses the design, construction, and operation of scenery, lighting, sound, costumes, and other elements that contribute to a performance’s visual and auditory experience.
Designing the content for the stage was a challenge for the students. Most of them were already quite familiar with GenAI tools such as ChatGPT but our summer course encouraged them to go further. The students created their own hands-on projects and, in subsequent sessions, they created the visual, or graphical elements using ChatGPT and Deep Dream Generator. They created posters for presentations at the Moses Youth Center and used these posters as concepts for their pop up stage projects. Students were shown how to repurpose their AI-generated images for use on their pop up stages (see below).
Prompt Battles & Design Cyphers
As this was our second time offering this pre-college summer course, we brought back the students’ favorite activity: the prompt battle. Prompt battles allow participants to show off their prompt skills, and the audience (peers) choose the winners from each head-to-head match. The person(s) who win the most matches by the end of each battle wins a prize (but everyone gets something). Like the summer before, we held two prompt battles. We used the battles to measure how much progress the participants were making with their prompt engineering. We were looking for legibility, breadth, scope, and clarity in their written prompts. Students learned that, above and beyond the written prompts, the participants with the best modifiers or “boosters” often won their matches.
The group protocol for the prompt battle comes from hip-hop culture, especially in design cyphers where participants form a circle and, one after another, enter into the center and perform: to perform in a cypher is to cypher, or to be cyphering. As Emmanuel Adelekun notes,
A cypher doesn’t need a stage or designated area in which to take place, they can, and do, form anywhere; at parties, in clubs, outside on the concrete, in train stations, on a beach, in someone’s living room.
They learned how to generate new music using Udio and discussed the benefits and harms of using this technology. These projects and activities culminated in capstone projects that students were required to present at the end of the course.
Capstone Projects & Presentations
Lesley STEAM’s Creative AI & Design course created space for youth to bring their identities and interests into creative AI in ways that allows them to see themselves in AI-driven fields. Near the end of the course students were given a question to address in their capstone projects:
“How can [creative AI career/job] use [AI model or tool] to improve [pressing community need/personal interest]?”
Students were provided color-coded cards, then they were asked to imagine that they had a client in their chosen career. They could use their preferred GenAI tool to create a ‘pitch slide deck’ for a project that meets a community need or personal interest. Next, they were given requirements such as sample work, problem statements, anti-bias plans, and AI landscape research. Students worked individually or in groups on their final pitches. Examples include educational AI technology, teaching and preserving history through AI murals, caring community gardens, AI music production to promote well-being, and providing supportive work frameworks. Students presented their project pitches on the last day.
Note: This work has been made possible through collaboration with Cambridge Youth Programs and Lesley STEAM and the generous support of STAR, a Biogen Foundation Initiative.
