Constructing Dreams using Generative AI

TL;DR

This paper presents a workshop that educates high school students about generative AI, enabling them to create future visions, understand technical aspects, and consider societal impacts of AI-generated media.

Contribution

It introduces a novel educational approach combining hands-on AI creation with ethical reflection for high school students.

Findings

Students successfully used prompt engineering to create future dreams.

Students gained technical understanding of generative AI capabilities and limitations.

Students identified key societal benefits and harms of generative AI.

Abstract

Generative AI tools introduce new and accessible forms of media creation for youth. They also raise ethical concerns about the generation of fake media, data protection, privacy and ownership of AI-generated art. Since generative AI is already being used in products used by youth, it is critical that they understand how these tools work and how they can be used or misused. In this work, we facilitated students' generative AI learning through expression of their imagined future identities. We designed a learning workshop - Dreaming with AI - where students learned about the inner workings of generative AI tools, used text-to-image generation algorithms to create their imaged future dreams, reflected on the potential benefits and harms of generative AI tools and voiced their opinions about policies for the use of these tools in classrooms. In this paper, we present the learning activities and experiences of 34 high school students who engaged in our workshops. Students reached creative learning objectives by using prompt engineering to create their future dreams, gained technical knowledge by learning the abilities, limitations, text-visual mappings and applications of generative AI, and identified most potential societal benefits and harms of generative AI.