By Leslie Todd, Assistant Professor of Art History
Many of the discussions on AI in education that I hear across campus have focused on professors’ anxieties around cheating and how to build a course policy. This is a complex and necessary discussion, but not one I’m interested in here. Instead, I would like to shift our focus for a moment to how we can use AI to create engaging and effective materials and activities on our course content while communicating to our students the limitations of AI.
In my Global Renaissance course, during our week 6 module on materials and techniques we address Medici porcelain, Benin bronzes, and Nahua featherworks. Because I teach using a flipped model, the students come to class having completed the readings (usually Smarthistory articles for the first day of class and a scholarly article for the second day) so they are already familiar with the material when they enter the classroom. (I know what you’re thinking. Yes, they really do actually complete the readings. How I do that might come in a different blog post.)
Last year, I experimented with what generative AI might offer students as I assessed their understanding of the different objects. In preparation for the week’s activity, I used the free version of ChatGPT. I prompted it to generate images of “Medici Porcelain,” a “Benin Bronze,” and a “Nahua featherwork”. This version only allowed me to enter three prompts before cutting me off so I had to wait until the next day to enter more prompts before arriving at a set of images that were worth working with. As I expected (and desired), the images were inaccurate to varying degrees. I asked students to examine the inaccurate images using the art history skills of stylistic and iconographic analysis they were building in the course.
Students were able to assess that the AI Medici porcelain example did not have an accurate shape and displayed an improper use of gold among other details. This then gave us the opportunity to address what we should expect to see and how those styles developed and related to Renaissance forms and values, or potentially challenged existing forms and values of the period to expand our understanding of the Renaissance in a global context.
While the activity is about digging into how students recognize the objects stylistically and iconographically to give me the opportunity to assess what knowledge they may be lacking as it pertains to the week’s theme and individual objects, it also implicitly pushes students to consider the limitations of AI. A consistent warning about AI is its potential inaccuracies. At the faculty gathering in August, some panelists noted that employers are beginning to want to see that future employees have skills connected to AI. But a key part of those skills is discernment. As experts in our fields, we must know what to expect to come out of an AI generator. This activity demonstrates to students what an expert is and does in my field. Art historians must strengthen and maintain their visual literacy to know what to expect to see and how to confront and ask questions of the unexpected. I therefore also frame this exercise as an opportunity for them to recognize the growing strength of their own visual literacy in the face of a world in which, for better or worse, “fake” images can be generated with a few clicks on the keyboard.
Note from the CfT:
We’re interested in how our faculty are thinking about and/or using AI tools to support our students’ learning.
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