5 Ways to Spark Critical Thinking About AI in the Art Room

Art teachers are in the heat of summer, but for some, our brains are already gearing up for the fresh school year ahead. Whether you’re still crossing off fun bucket list items or you’re making checklists for the art room, now is the prime time to talk about artificial intelligence. AI is your magical key to unlocking the latest trend, dipping your toes into novel artmaking, and sparking critical thinking!

Here are five AI activities to explore this summer to help you and your students navigate artificial intelligence with an ethical, responsible, and creative approach.

Note: Be sure to follow district and school policies regarding AI. It is your responsibility to check on these policies often because they can change quickly.

1. Use Google’s Quick, Draw! to have fun and get curious about AI.

We all have a desire to doodle–even students and adults who say, “I can’t even draw a stick figure!” Bring lots of light-hearted energy into your art room with Google’s Quick Draw! tool. This platform allows you to draw simple prompts, such as a bike, a cat, or a cup, in 20 seconds. While you’re drawing, AI attempts to recognize the subject.

This tool works with any skill level and is a space to draw freely without overthinking. Beyond quick sketching, this activity demonstrates that human input builds machine learning, and it’s only as “smart” as the information (or in this case, drawings) we feed it. It’s a fun way to explore the evolving role of AI in our visual world!

No tech? No problem! Use paper to run the same activity. You can even use the Thumbnail Sketches template in FLEX Curriculum. Students sketch quick prompts in groups and then guess the drawings to spark conversation about how AI “learns.”

Here are two reflection questions to ignite critical thinking about artificial intelligence: 

1. How does AI recognize drawings? (What clues do you think it looks for?)
2. What happens if you feed AI wrong, inaccurate, or false information?

2. Put your students’ image detective skills to the test with an AI quiz.

Visual culture is an important part of art education. While it’s not a new idea, it’s evolving, especially with the increase in AI-generated images. These images are even changing the way we view local news and storytelling.

Real or AI isn’t just a quiz and fun guessing game—it’s a chance for students to learn how to critically examine an image. They will build a visual understanding of common traits that make an AI picture. For example, sometimes there are extra limbs, misspelled words, inconsistent texture pairings, impossible architecture, or strange pictures in the background. After students choose an image, the quiz explains why it’s AI-generated.

Do you want to take it up a notch? Students snap a photo and use AI prompts to create a lookalike. Then, students will challenge their classmates to guess which one is real and which one is AI-generated!

Use these two reflection questions to get students thinking about why identifying AI images matters:

1. How could mistakenly identifying an AI-generated image as a real one impact how people think or feel?
2. How might this quiz change the way you create or view digital art?

3. Teach AI ethics with This Person Does Not Exist; the face isn’t real, but the conversation is.

Artists understand that identity and visual representation are complex. Take police sketch artists, for example. They rely on a wide range of details like face shape, eye color, beauty marks, accessories, and much more to capture a person’s likeness. On the other hand, This Person Does Not Exist generates faces based on three broad categories: age, gender, and ethnicity.

After generating a few faces with your students, the limitations become clear. Mainly, many of the images do not match the selected categories. This opens the door for meaningful discussions around representation, bias, and ethical implications.

Take it further by having students draw a real face from observation. Adding more descriptive details and unique physical traits will prompt students to realize how much AI can miss! Follow the tips in the Portraiture at the Secondary Level Pack in PRO Learning for ways to teach portraiture with confidence.

Spark meaningful discussion on representation and ethics using these three questions:

1. What does it mean to “generate” a person?
2. What features or background elements are missing?
3. How can artists push back on oversimplified portions of a person’s visual identity?

4. Challenge students to explore AI’s role in art with Ai-Da, the artmaking robot. 

AI-generated art is already a hot (and often controversial) topic, but what happens when a robot creates the art? Meet Ai-Da, the AI-powered, artmaking robot! Based out of Oxford, Ai-Da is a traveling performance “artist” who draws, paints, and sculpts using her built-in camera eyes for observation. Made from silicone, aluminum, and carbon fiber, she sports a bobbed haircut and a robotic arm capable of holding various art tools to bring her creations to life. She’s exhibited work around the globe and even sold pieces at auction!

Use Ai-Da to lead a Socratic discussion in your classroom to challenge students to talk about art and artificial intelligence. Whether students argue that she is an artist or dismiss her as a “fancy printer,” the debate will get them thinking and talking.

Introducing Ai-Da as a springboard, students can address these two questions:

1. What defines art: the process, intention, product, or something else?
2. Can a machine without emotions or personal experiences be an artist?

5. Build a visual vocabulary using AI image generators to transform how students write, observe, and discuss art.

You walk into class and show your students a famous artwork, like The Scream by Edvard Munch. You ask them to describe what they see, and their answers are simple, such as “a bridge” or “a man.” But what about the color scheme? Share about the posture and gesture of the figure. What’s happening in the background?

As art teachers, we want all of our students to develop their descriptive language skills so they can engage more deeply with art. Incorporate AI image generators like Adobe Express or Magic Studio to reverse-engineer artwork and build a visual vocabulary! Students pick an image from a magazine. Challenge them to describe it to AI and see what it comes up with. Does it match their original image? Probably not at first—and that’s the fun part! Continue to tweak and revise their prompt, encouraging them to pay attention to every detail, until AI gets closer.

Here are two reflective questions students can use after this activity:

1. What details did AI need to add to make it look more like the original?
2. How did changing the words in the prompt alter the AI picture?

It’s okay to learn alongside your students. Artificial intelligence is an emerging and relevant topic everywhere, especially in art. Rather than avoid it, embrace the opportunity to explore AI together! Show that AI can be a valuable tool when used thoughtfully, appropriately, and ethically. From playful sketching to testing image recognition skills to reverse engineering visuals, help students develop a balanced and informed perspective that prepares them to think critically about the evolving world around them.

How do you prompt students to be ethical AI creators vs. consumers?

What other AI activities encourage curiosity, creativity, and responsible exploration?

To chat about artificial intelligence with other art teachers, join us in The Art of Ed Community!