It was a pleasure to present at the 2023 Ohio Art Education Association Conference on A.I. current issues, tools, and uses for A.I. in the 6th-12th grade classroom. This page will be available for perhaps 3 months (or longer) after the conference for your reference. I hope that you were able to make use of the information provided during the presentation, and the tools and links included here continue to assist you in the classroom.

At the end of the presentation I covered a website from an A.I. artist by the name of Aaron Dotio. When I say that they are an A.I. artist, I mean it in the fullest sense of the words. Aaron Dotio is completely invented by myself as a teaching tool in the classroom. Even the name, Aaron (The acronym for the first A.I. to generate art) Dotio (".io", the web suffix indicating input-output) was created by A.I. as a nod to it's own roots in A.I. The purpose of this website is to provide a thought provoking conversation on the uses and values of A.I. as it pertains to the visual arts, and what is and isn't ethical about it's use. 

The Process
I started by asking the A.I. ChatGPT a recursive series of questions about itself. For example, I asked for a series of personality traits that could be applied to a person which would also describe an A.I. From there I asked the program to provide a possible visual description of someone who would possess those character traits. For other traits like age and background, I used the very history of A.I. art itself. This information was used to find a face that closely matched the written description on the A.I. website "this person does not exist," and then fed that image into other series of GANs (Image generators) and provided written prompts to create variations of the original portrait. 

With the artist created, it was time to ask ChatGPT to create the series of written statements including a CV/Resume, artist bio, and written artist statement. While the entirety of the content was written and created by A.I., the process was guided by my hand and the intent for the end result. 

In the Classroom
My Advanced Art Studio course had recently finished up an Identity Unit and a self-portrait and were in process of writing their own artist statement. We looked at past student examples and professional examples of written statements and discussed criteria for what makes a good one. With the website and artist completed, my Advanced Art Studio class was asked to look over the website (we had recently created our own portfolio websites) and critique the written artist statement that was included. They were not given context of the backstory of the creation of Aaron Dotio. The discussion that followed ended with what the statement was missing (more or less the "human" aspects that makes a written work compelling). When it was revealed that the whole website, artist and all, were written by A.I., we continued a discussion about what is ethical when using A.I. and what is not. The final note in the discussion included how we might use A.I. as a tool for production, though it can't be made to replace the "human work" that we do as artists and humans. 

If the hammer replaces the carpenter, there is either a problem with the hammer, or the carpenter. The goal of an artist is to remain as the carpenter and use the most appropriate tools in their toolbox to create the human connections that are most often the intent of the visual communications that happen in the arts.