AI and Art Workshop
Workshop at the MIT Media Lab
Problem
By 2023, a year after ChatGPT and Gen AI entered mainstream use, I discovered that most of my students understood what AI is, how it works, or how it might shape their futures. Their schools are not offering any AI-related lessons. Many had never interacted with AI tools, and few had considered its ethical or artistic implications.
Together with Safinah Ali from the MIT Media Lab and Griffin Smith from Rhode Island School of Art and Design, I co-organized and co-taught Creative Futures, an intensive K12 workshop designed to explore the intersection of AI literacy, creativity, and ethics.
Our guiding questions were:
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How can we help children meaningfully engage with AI tools?
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What are the challenges and responsibilities when using AI in creative work for K12 students?
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What does ethical AI use look like—especially in the arts?
The workshop was a five-day, full-day (9am–4pm) summer workshop for middle and high school students (grades 7–11), hosted in 2023. The program welcomed 20 students and included sessions on AI literacy, ethics, and creative application in art, music, and text.
Key curriculum components:
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AI Literacy + Ethics: What is AI? How do generative models work? What are the ethical considerations?
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Art Practice: Included drawing, poster design, clay sculpture, and collaborative discussions on the changing role of the artist.
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Multimodal Projects: Students explored AI tools like Midjourney, ChatGPT, Suno, and others, across different forms of media.
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Mentorship: The teaching team included three core instructors and several visiting artists and technologists.
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Final Project: Each student developed an independent AI-assisted creative project, to be presented at the final showcase.
Approach
All 20 students created unique projects that reflected their personal interests and explorations, showcasing the diverse creative potential of AI. Final works included a music album generated with Suno, a short film combining Midjourney visuals, Google webcam animations, and original narration, a fashion design concept book, a conceptual architectural design, a text-based adventure game, and several AI-assisted illustrated storybooks. Also, a student from Seattle made up his mind, he is not going anywhere but MIT.
Result
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This workshop reaffirmed one core principle: ideas must come first. Students who began with a strong personal concept were able to navigate across tools, platforms, and modalities with purpose and confidence.
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For example, Jackie(12 years old), created a video that blended tools like Suno, CutPro, Midjourney, and Google’s webcam animation feature. Watching her process raised an important question: how can we design environments that support fluid, cross-platform creativity?
Reflection
3. The experience also showed that for students to truly understand AI, we need to expand their understanding of what “art” can be—not just as a product, but as a process of thinking, experimentation, and iteration.
4. Future versions of the curriculum should include even more time for deep project development and collaborative critique.