The AI “Me,” Sort Of
As I drafted the original post to announce our upcoming panel discussion about the intersection of AI and Civil War history, I thought I’d use AI to create our flier. This was a test-case exercise for me, which I did out of curiosity because I’d never used AI in that way before. I have friends who are graphic designers who are horrified that people can now “design” their own fliers using AI. Conversely, I know people with no design background who are delighted that making fliers can now be so easy.
As I made the flier, I discovered that AI couldn’t just go and look up the panelists online somewhere and see what our faces looked like. The first draft of the flier had four completely wrong people. The program did give me the option to add photos, though, so I uploaded headshots of all four of us.
To my surprise, rather than directly use the images I uploaded, ChatGPT created AI versions of the images and placed them in the flier. Here’s a closer look at our panel as portrayed by AI:
I’ll let you compare those faces to the ones that ended up on the final flier, below. (I was gratified that my wife saw the AI version of me and said, “Ugh.”) For the final version, I used PhotoShop to spliced out the AI faces and add our actual photos back in.
There are other things AI got wrong as it created the flier. Take a look at the “artillery” piece in the upper-left corner of the flier, for instance. I also let AI draft the language that appears on the flier; the result was generic and “blah,” but as far as jargony pablum goes, it gets at the idea well enough.
There’s lots to learn about AI, even in these rudimentary applications of the technology. If you have the chance to try it out, I urge you to explore it. And, of course, be sure to tune in to our panel discussion on Tuesday, September 22 at 7:00 p.m. EDT to hear more!
