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Is AI disrupting art?

Overview

As AI-generated art becomes more widespread, artists and technologists are debating its role in the creative process. Is AI disrupting traditional artmaking—or expanding it? And who gets credit for AI-generated work? In this lesson, students will explore these questions by examining how AI is impacting creativity, artistic identity, and the definition of art itself. After analyzing diverse perspectives, students will be introduced to prompt engineering as a tool for generating both reinterpretations of existing art and new, original work. This lesson is designed for integration in both computer science and art classrooms.

  • AI & Science
  • 90 minutes
  • Created by Amanda O’Mara, CRAFT Co-Design Fellow 2024-2025
  • Adapted by 'Joba Adisa
art-work showing a woman

Digital Materials

Objectives

After this experience, students will be able to

  • Analyze the ways that artificial intelligence will impact art and technology practices.
  • Recreate a famous artwork as well as their own personal artwork through prompt engineering.

Questions explored

  • How is the advent of artificial intelligence impacting art-making and artists?
  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of using artificial intelligence to make art?
  • How is artificial intelligence harming or helping artists?
  • Is artificial intelligence disrupting art?

Key Terms

Natural Language Processing (NLP)
AI that reads, understands, and makes sense of human languages.
Prompt
The initial context or instruction given to a model that sets the task or query for it to respond to or act upon. A prompt defines the scope of the response, serving as guidelines for generating outputs based on the given input.