Expedition 3
Innovation and Imagination
Students explore generative AI as a creative tool and a subject for critique. They generate images from prompts, compare human-made and AI-made art, and remix AI images through their own artistic choices.
In Innovation and Imagination, students explore artificial intelligence as both a creative tool and something to think critically about. Across the Expedition, students investigate how AI generates images from prompts and patterns in data, experiment with creating AI-generated artwork, and consider the limitations, biases, and uncertainties that come with these tools.
Students also use familiar art practices — drawing, critique, interpretation, and remixing — to examine questions of authorship, intention, and meaning. They compare human-made and AI-generated images using a four-step art critique process, then reinterpret AI-generated work through their own intentional artistic choices.
Throughout the Expedition, the emphasis is on thoughtful use of AI while keeping human creativity, judgment, and artistic decision-making at the center.
The lessons
Lesson 1 · 45 minutes
You and I + AI
Students compare how humans and AI create images from text by drawing from prompts, guessing each other's prompts, and discovering that AI recognizes patterns rather than imagining.
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Lesson 2 · 45 minutes
Picture it with Words
Students write and revise prompts in the FRACTAL AI Art tool, compare how descriptive language changes what the AI generates, and learn how training data can lead to errors and bias.
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Lesson 3 · 45 minutes
AI Art Critique
Students apply the four-step art critique — Describe, Analyze, Interpret, Evaluate — to human-made and AI-generated images, and wrestle with questions of authorship, intent, and originality.
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Lesson 4 · 45 minutes
Art Remix
In the culminating FRACTAL lesson, students reinterpret an AI-generated image in an art style of their choice, then turn the four-step critique on their own work.
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