The Real Deal and Phony Balonies

The past couple weeks I have been exploring the tip of the iceberg in regard to artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative artificial intelligence. I made an account on the OpenArt website, to dabble in some digital doodling. I wrote the prompt “A fox in a chair sitting beside a man who is also in a chair, by a fire pit with stones in a circle, under a starry night sky, drinking beers”. This is what the AI generated for me.

I wasn’t happy with the results, as I wanted a real human sitting with the fox and I wanted more greenery, reminiscent of the forest and actual camping, so I revised the prompt to say, “A realistic fox sitting in a folding outdoor chair sitting beside a human male who is also sitting in a folding outdoor chair, by a fire pit with stones in a circle, under a starry night sky, drinking beers, surrounded by lush summer greenery”. This is what the AI generated for me.

I still thought I could do better, so I revised the prompt, one more time to say, “A realistic fox sitting in a folding outdoor chair sitting beside a human male who is also sitting in a folding outdoor chair, by a fire pit with stones in a circle, under a starry night sky, drinking beers, surrounded by lush summer greenery and tree top canopy”. This is what the AI generated for me.

Now the AI never “drew” the human male for me but I was quite happy with the rest of the image. It was a fun little foray into generative image making and I’m sure it won’t be last. And that’s what I think needs to happen. As educators, we need the time to explore, experiment, go out of our comfort zones, fail, succeed, and have some fun! And then, we need our students to do the same.

Now as enlightening as this investigation was, I soon found myself to be quite frustrated. I was talking with a friend of mine who uses ChatGPT quite heavily in her work as a lawyer. I asked her if she was happy with the app and she emphatically said, “Yes! It was a game changer. You need to download it!” So I took it upon myself to look for it in the App Store only to find these options.

Now to the trained eye, it was probably easy to pick the correct one, because it says “The official app by Open AI”. It has 158K ratings compared to the 15K ratings and 691 ratings of the other two choices. And when you scroll down a bit, in the Developer section, it clearly says “Open AI”. But to the untrained eye, those logos sure look awfully close to one another and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it would be easy to choose the wrong one.

 

And in these examples one says “Powered by ChatGPT…” and another one says “Built on ChatGPT…”. And again, these three logos look very similar to one another, and also to the actual ChatGTP logo. In case you’re wondering, the real deal is in the top right corner.

And this is what we need to teach our students, heck, even our colleagues, and our families. All could benefit from learning about digital literacy and being able to distinguish the real deal from the phony balonies! How might one do this? Check out this website How to Spot and Avoid Fake Apps to learn more. It certainly helped me out and if you have others, please share with me in your comments. Thanks!