Art Camp workshop has concluded, and I am thrilled with the results. ChatGPT integration was successful; more on that in a bit. The project entailed creating a coloring book page inspired by the Surrealism art movement and style. The workshop included a brief art history unit and an automatism (automatic writing) exercise. We then used the text from this exercise to generate dreamlike imagery. Once the project concluded, I scanned the artwork and assembled a physical book using the university's print shop. The students could then take home a physical coloring book composed of everyone's pages.
Now onto ChatGPT. I have found this is where it truly demonstrated its utility for my workflow. It excels at efficiently managing changes in information and organization. For example, I input my initial class time slot and the tasks that needed completion and asked it to work up a timeline. I had a solution within 3 seconds. I only had to make minor edits to its suggestions. It's still essential to thoroughly review and edit any output it generates, just like you would your own work. My initial timeline and workshop agenda had a pretty significant last-minute change, so I added the new times and requested ChatGPT to reconfigure the workflow. It did. 3 seconds. Again, there were some elements I had to alter slightly. Still, the tool effectively took a load of rearranging my agenda off my shoulders, allowing me to concentrate on the more significant part. This is where I believe the usefulness of ChatGPT can serve many such as freelancers and one or two-person small businesses that often juggle numerous tasks, sometimes sacrificing their product quality, creativity, and/or sleep. When I ran my own business, the majority of my time during the day was on the business part and not on the production. That part had to happen outside of regular work hours, and the burnout after a couple of years of that schedule was harsh and helped contribute to closing the business instead of growing it. Now back to the Summer camp project.
Using ChatGPT to enhance what I already had is another way it helped with my project workflow. When teaching a Summer art camp, you can't make assumptions about students' basic art knowledge, particularly in communities where art education was defunded decades ago. I created a handout to accompany my workshop but was uncertain about the students' familiarity with art terminology. So, I fed ChatGPT the handout text and asked it to identify and provide a short definition (in parenthesis) next to each term. 3 seconds; done. Following that, I asked it to generate a separate glossary using the identified terms. It's these seemingly small tasks that enrich a project's content that I would often set aside due to lack of time. "Do I have time to do that?" Nope. I'm having to rework my timeline because of a last-minute change. So it simply would not get done. This capability of ChatGPT to assist in such tasks is one of the primary benefits I believe will become an integral part of my daily workflow moving forward.
That said. It's not a good writer. It can craft and rework a sentence, but they're not great. You end up rolling your eyes half the time. It doesn't do humor well. It's on the level of dad jokes. We are still in the Photoshop watercolor filter phase of this technology.
After the camp, I played with other formats of AI. I've used plug-ins (a way for ChatGPT to use specific online content or applications) to create a video from a few simple sentences. It was bad. SO BAD. The writing was terrible. The imagery it chose was bad. I am excited to see Adobe pushing out AI features. These updates are pretty significant changes that will make my Fall Photoshop projects very interesting. I have to say that I already use AI Photoshop and MidJourney to produce images of exactly the things I need for marketing a folklore/bizarre stories podcast I co-host. I have used stock photos in the past for this to save time. Finding the right aesthetic I was looking for took a lot of time. And that's it. It all boils down to time and money. And actually, it's more time than money that I fight to get things done which is the significant appeal of an AI assistant to freelancers, small businesses, and educators.
I consider this first round of implementing AI for my project creation a success. It helped me shave off the time and stress of doing the little things so I could focus on the big picture. I still had to review and edit, but it was minimum because I created a large part of the content. I believe my output was elevated because of the time reduction of small but laborious tasks, and my product (the workshop) flowed better because of it.
I plan to employ ChatGPT next in revamping and improving the content and presentation materials for some of my regular courses. The goal is to evaluate whether this AI tool can enhance the quality of my time and see how much that affects my teaching and the student's learning experience.
Have you worked with ChatGPT? What do you think?
