COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 31 and the class as a whole will try to figure out which ones were written by human students and which ones were written by AI. Revolutionizing Theatre One of the things Gabel particularly likes about the course is that, even though the first-year seminar is about AI and art—and its applications in the world of theatre, specifically—their students come from diverse backgrounds with a variety interests and will go on to major in a variety of disciplines. For Can AI Make Art?, students start out with a basic introduction to two popular generative AI platforms before moving on to more exploratory assignments. “The first project was to write a script with ChatGPT,” Gabel said. “The second project was to create a series of images and then perform in front of them, using DALL-E to make the projections.” The students then spent the next few weeks doing what Lowry and Gabel call “fast practices,” which is more of an ad hoc experimentation methodology for creating art, rather than a long-term, iterative creative process. “We wanted to empower students to continue to explore on their own,” Lowry said. “We’ve used these two interfaces heavily throughout, and we’ve seen what they can do—but you also need to get out there and just play with them.” For one assignment, students were introduced to four generative AI programs they hadn’t used yet to create a short film. The first platform is DALL-E 3, which is the next version that students have been using in class, so they can experience the differences between the two. The other three platforms were Runway ML, which is machine learning that can create video; ElevenLabs, which can do AI speech; and Stable Audio, which provides AI-generated sound effects. “Some of these students, if they haven’t done video editing before, over the course of just a couple of days, use four new pieces of technology to make a brand-new piece of art, and that’s what’s exciting,” Lowry said. Later on in the course, students participated in Lowry and Gabel’s version of a Turing Test, a thought experiment made famous by British mathematician Alan Turing where a human judge engages in a conversation with both a machine and a human, but the judge is kept unaware of which one is which. If the judge cannot reliably distinguish which participant is the machine and which is the human based on the conversation, then the machine is said to have passed the Turing Test because it demonstrated a level of artificial intelligence comparable to human intelligence. Students were given the option of either writing a monologue script themselves or writing it only using ChatGPT, ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRUNO MALLART / THEISPOT.COM
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