Module 6: AI Art
Mandatory Watching - videos with quizzes - finish before 11 am, Thursday, July 9
- 6.1 — Lecture: AI Images and Reality, 46 minutes (Apr. 28, 2026)
- 6.2 — Lecture: AI Art and Creativity, 40 minutes (Apr. 29, 2026)
- 6.3 — Gonkee: How Stable Diffusion Works, 30 minutes (June 26, 2023)
- 6.4 — Dustin Ballard: Is AI Ruining Music?, 11 minutes (August 21, 2025)
- 6.5 — Hank Green: What is “Slop”?, 12 minutes (March 27, 2026)
Written assignment - turn in by end of Thursday, July 9, give feedback by meeting on Tuesday, July 14
6. Generate AI art about your assigned fiction
Generate AI art about your assigned fiction. Note that some of the image generator services only let you do a few images per day, so you should probably start this one a bit early. Let me know if you need an extension.
Further watching/reading
- Vox, AI Art, Explained (June 1, 2022) - see what people were saying about this four years ago
- Gal Lahat, I Fed AI Its Own Hallucinations Until It Lost Reality, 13 minutes (March 31, 2026) - some beautiful transformations of initial images into later ones. If you followed how diffusion models work, you’ll understand why he got the results he did.
- Josh Snider’s attempt at making a feature-length film with AI, and discussion of what did and didn’t work (July 22, 2026)
- Charles Cornell, What’s Even the Point Any More?… The AI Takeover of Music, 16 minutes (Jan. 20, 2026)
- Elliott Paul and Dustin Stokes, Philosophy of Creativity, 2023
- Catherine Wearing, Creative Products and Creative Processes, (March 26, 2025) discussing philosophical issues about what it means to be creative
- FabFourArchivist, George Harrison accidentally copied The Chiffons, (Dec. 20, 2019)
- Wired, Indian Voters are Being Bombarded with Millions of Deepfakes, (May 20, 2024) - in the 2024 election, candidates in India made deepfakes of themselves so they could call up voters and have personal conversations in languages they don’t speak
- Wall Street Journal, We Tested Google Veo and Runway to Create this AI Film, 7 minutes (May 28, 2025) - discusses their actual workflow to make usable clips for a long video
- Deutsche Welle, How AI Videos Hijack Your Emotions in 8 Seconds, (Oct. 7, 2025)
- The Waymo World Model, Google’s discussion of how they use Waymo’s world model in helping train the cars
- Corridor Crew, How to Identify AI Video, 25 minutes, (Oct. 13, 2024) discusses several issues that can often identify different types of AI video editing or generation
- For starting with a real video and editing someone’s face and speech: does the Adam’s apple move? do the breaths and hand gestures of the body match the head movements and the pauses in speech? does the background have artifacts next to the mouth, where it was edited to lip sync?
- For fully AI generated images: high contrast from bright to dark with equal amounts of all brightnesses and colors; equal noise pattern in all color channels
- The moral question - if a clothing site has real photos of clothing, with the model and background AI generated, is it a lie?
- The practical question - we used to trust anything that was printed because only official people had access to printing presses - will the ability to generate fake video be more or less significant than the development of the home printer that changed our trust of printed text?
- Their followup about AI video (25 minutes, Jan. 26, 2025), discussing fake videos of the LA wildfires, two AI-generated Coca Cola commercials, AI avatars on Facebook, and a video game trailer that wasn’t actually AI but people thought it was
- Ethical questions about AI art
- Kyle Chayka, Is AI Art Stealing from Artists? (Feb. 10, 2023), a thoughtful consideration in The New Yorker
- Kwame Anthony Appiah, Should You Be Allowed to Profit From A.I.-Generated Art?, (Sept. 27, 2024), in The Ethicist column in the New York Times
- Kate Cassidy, Is AI Killing Your Imagination?, 26 minutes (July 27, 2025)
- More on how diffusion models work
- Computerphile, How diffusion models work, 17 minutes (Oct. 4, 2022)
- Outlier, How diffusion models work, 33 minutes (June 6, 2022) - gets quite technical towards the end
- Depth First, The Breakthrough Behind Modern AI Image Generators, 24 minutes (Oct. 19, 2024) - good explanation of how diffusion models think of images, as part 1 of an explanation, but part 2 about the text prompt seems to have never been made
- 3blue1brown and Welch Labs, But How do AI Images and Videos Actually Work?, 37 minutes (July 25, 2025)
- Pre-AI movie special effects
- Moon Landings Faked?, 13 minutes (Jan. 29, 2013) - why it was easier to land on the moon in 1969 than to fake it
- Vox, Why It’s So Hard to Make CGI Skin Look Real, 9 minutes (August 3, 2021)
- King Kong: The Practical Effects Wonder, 13 minutes (March 1, 2023) - how this movie was made in 1933
- Vox, Can AI Kill the Green Screen?, 8 minutes (April 18, 2023) - investigates how much better older tools still sometimes are
- Vox, The Evolution of the Move Backdrop, 7 minutes (Feb. 14, 2024) - discusses the move from the painted glass backdrops of The Wizard of Oz, to the computer-aided backdrops of Her, and a possible AI future
- New York Times, Did the Camera Ever Tell the Truth? 17 minutes, (June 10, 2025) about whether AI-generated art will destroy trust, or restore it to where it should be (associated documentary)
- Andy Masley, A Defense of AI Art, (March 19, 2025) - a comparison to “fan art”
- Examples of AI art
- Foster the People - Doing it for the Money (2017) - music video made with extensive use of Deep Dream
- Robot dance, (Dec. 29, 2020), and explanation of the work that went into it
- King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Iron Lung (2022) - music video made with extensive use of diffusion models
- Buzzfeed Interview with creator of the Pope in a puffy jacket image (March 27, 2023)
- Vox - An AI Artist Explains His Workflow, 8 minutes (May 2, 2023)
- 15 AI Artists Who Exemplify the Weird World of AI Art, Karen Garces (Oct. 7, 2024)
- AI music/sound generation
- Audio generation from October 2022 (two months before the first ChatGPT) - scroll down for music examples, and see the difference between AI trained on music, and AI trained on audio generally
- ElevenLabs - text-to-speech synthesis - try putting in a passage of text you write!
- Generative AI apps for text-to-music, with free sign-up - they can generate lyrics or in some cases use pre-specified lyrics
- November, 2023 - The Future of Music - article about generative AI in music at A16Z by Justine Moore and Anish Acharya
- April, 2024 - AI music isn’t going away. Here are 4 big questions about what’s next - article in NPR by Jewly Hight