Local students put the ‘art’ in Artificial Intelligence
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - Just a few years ago, the idea of using artificial intelligence to create art was reserved only for the most high-tech companies with the most expensive software.
Today, middle school students are doing it in Colorado.
Phillip Loyd teaches digital media at Challenger Middle School in Academy District 20.
Aside from a few suggestions here and there, he tends to take a hands-off approach and let his students' creativity take over.
Creativity recently took a giant leap thanks to artificial intelligence, or AI.
The student creates various projects using a program called Adobe Express, which assembles a combination of search terms into a single image.
The more descriptive you are in your wording, the more detailed the image becomes.
“If you want to make a horse, you just type in ‘horse’,” explains 8th grader Rae Paget, “but it's very adaptive. So if you write 'horse wearing a party hat', it's going to show up like a horse wearing a party hat.”
Carson Dulski created an image that includes a narwhal and a T-rex.
“It gets kind of wacky sometimes,” he says.
The class is entirely on computers, with no pencils or paintbrushes, but the outcome is all about art.
Loyd points out, however, that there are boundaries.
Certain words cannot be used to create images.
“They cannot use 'kill'. They cannot use 'cry' connected with 'children'. If they put down 'kill', 'death', or any of those things, it comes back and says 'we can't do this',” he says.
The software also prevents the students from using copyrighted images, so everything they create is theirs.
Challenger is among the first in D20 to utilize the technology.
Loyd hopes the class can become a recruiting tool for the campus.
“For me, I want this to be a highlight. I want to have people coming to this middle school because of our program, saying you know... 'They do things here, we want to be involved in that.' That's what I want,” he says.
Another limitation he pointed out is the laptops issued by the district, which have limited computing power and struggle to process some of the more intense graphics programs.
Loyd hopes that if there's enough interest in the program, that can lead to more funding for a set of classroom machines that will allow the students to use more intensive software and become even more prepared for the workplace.
There is no additional fee for the students to use Adobe Express, as it’s included in the enterprise licensing through Adobe that’s available for all students and staff.
For now, the district has no specific policies related to Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it relies on existing policies related to acceptable use and plagiarism.
However, the district is exploring this component through an upcoming District Technology Advisory Committee in April.
