When I was teaching 6th grade history back in the very early 2000s1 I made this image to make some connection between George Washington’s strength and some SOL fact. It was silly. It’s just a thing to help it stick in their minds, make a boring fact visual, and maybe make a kid laugh.2 At that time, it was everything I could do just to scrape together a decent lesson in the last seconds before a class. I remember making this image one night and failing to get the colors to match. That’s why it ended up being black and white. I even wrote a post about it back in 2009.
Fast forward to today’s AI world. I’m frequently testing things and looking for stuff to do that is both interesting and will test the capabilities of the models. Things like body builder George Washington will pop into my head.
Here’s an example of what that looked like in ChatGPT in November of 2024.
Not terrible but not too different than what I was able to do back in the day. It was quicker. I needed no real skill and what time it took to generate the image could happen while I did something else.
It’s also worth noting that I could have done something far better with MidJourney at that same time had I thought to do it (see selfie option below – inspired by this 2013 historical selfies series).3
Let’s fast forward again to today. I’d seen a few posts talking about how Google and ChatGPT’s visual models had made major improvements. George Washington popped into my head again. I ran the exact same prompt against three models and this was the result.
The prompt was: Create a photorealistic image of George Washington as a bodybuilder. Have him doing a bicep curl. Make him very muscular but preserve the George Washington face and hair.
I have to say I’m pretty impressed by this. All three models really did what I wanted and the images are way more realistic than I expected.
Alan brought up some questions on Mastodon that I don’t have answers to. There are so many big problems out there that I have retreated to the very small things I feel I can control.4
The interesting part for me is having odd ideas and thinking about things that will connect with students. Since we aren’t going to give teachers the time to do this on their own, AI gives you some really powerful and interesting options. I would be mixing all sorts of things together- songs, video snippets, side-quests for novels. I had the ideas back then but lacked the time and skills (and the time to develop the skills).
How long would it have taken me to map the phonetic guidance here to make a rap-ish version of Chaucer’s Introduction to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English?5 Granted, I haven’t verified this completely, but I didn’t teach Middle English, my goal is to create places for kids to be interested. I just want them thinking about language and pronunciation, enjoying the melody. Or maybe they say it’s not following those rules properly. That’d be awesome.
Is any of this creative? I don’t really care. No one is keeping score and I can likely provide you with an “accepted” art example (maybe a whole movement) that embodies whatever problem you have with AI.
1 That’s two plus decades, a score, or four lustrums
2 There is a huge world of stuff on how this kind of vivid imagery association helps memory but I was just going by gut feel back then . . . and probably still am. I read some book about it not too long ago but I’m struggling to remember the title. Ironic. Google. Google. Google. It’s Moonwalking with Einstein.
3 Clearly, if I like an idea I stick with it (or I just lack for imagination).
4 Lifting weights also helps quite the voices.
5 Another obsession of mine. Driven by my hatred of a teacher who made us memorize and say this in front of the class in 9th or 10th grade.
No LLM can string together bits like you! If that happens, game over.
I know in our exchange you suggested it’s the goals of what we go into the prompt box for that count, and agreed, but in re reading your narrative I’m also thinking about the larger context of what other things you were doing with your students when you bring in Bugg George.
Or the subtle thinking that goes into the hash tags of those historic selfies from 2013.
“Go ahead, generate my day.” As Dirty Harry never said.
I think you’re right in that the goals are way outside the prompt box. The struggle is that I think most jobs and many interactions have shrunk below that. And maybe many interactions have come to feel like jobs, paid in favs or likes or what not. The struggle is real and sad.