Generative Artificial Intelligence and Prompting: Utilizing Existing Artworks for Educational Purposes

This paper explores Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), whose popularity among users has notably increased with the emergence of the user-friendly chatbot ChatGPT-3.5 intended for generating text in late 2022. The paper first briefly discusses the previous research related to GAI, especially its implementation in the educational context, after which the focus is shifted on the characteristics of GAI models for generating images, and the specifics related to providing textual instructions to such tools for the purpose of generating visual content. Such prompting is compared with some examples of textual descriptions of images that existed before Web 3.0 (certificates of Sol LeWitt, art-educational method of observation and the analysis following a description of an artwork, ekphrasis). Additionally, the work engages in simple qualitative research on some of the possibilities of applying such GAI models in an educational context through examples of prompting, inspired by one figurative and one abstract painting.