StarryAI and AI Art Creating Tool

In my blog post on October 10th I wrote a bit about Visual Thinking Strategies and some of the ways it is useful for learning foreign languages. In this blog post I would like to write about one of the activities I am thinking about using with it, new online tools that allow users to create artwork using artificial intelligence. 

Here is a link (new as of October, 2022) of the "top 10" artificial intelligence art generators. Many of them offer limited-term free access and vary according to what they do best. The one I settled on, StarryAi also has limits, but seems to me to be the easiest to use and the quickest to "recharge" once you have reached your limit. They also give you extra points if you post to Twitter or Instagram (nothing for FaceBook yet).

My idea for my activity is to show students a VTS artwork and ask them to do the usual VTS activities, which include a shared Google Sheet which lets students share their vocabulary regarding artwork along with automatic translation into Japanese using Google Translate and a Google Form to share their ideas with each other (I'll write that up in a separate blogpost). 

 Then I thought a fun way to expand on it would be to ask them to try to recreate the artwork using their own text and StarryAi. 

Here is one of the VTS artworks.

Here is the sample prompt I typed into StarryAi (the typo for holding was mine).

100 years ago 8 boys are all holdiilng (sic) hands and running together barefoot in a field and one boy has fallen to his knees. They are wearing caps and suspenders. There is a small red building behind them. There is a church in the distance.

Not too bad. It would be fun to have students work together to come up with a prompt of their own for an artwork and to then see what kinds of artwork they can get. Finally, they could share their results and compare theirs with other groups.

Here are links to see all the images generated from this prompt.

https://create.starryai.com/user/spmcg82/creation/868818002

https://create.starryai.com/user/spmcg82/creation/641952959

https://create.starryai.com/user/spmcg82/creation/929954377

Another variation would be to have groups try to recreate and artwork, and then try to match the AI-generated artwork with the original artwork.

This activity would be fun with or without VTS, since students can play with transforming their vocabulary into images.