In all courses facilitated by Dr. Patrick Parra Pennefather, assistant professor at UBC Theatre and Film, on creativity, sound, user experience, emerging technology development and collaborative co-creation, students are invited to use Generative AI tools in multiple creative ways for assignments, including text-image, text-video, image-image, image-video, video-video, as well as LLMs to develop scripts and text-speech AI to create voiceovers for videos as well. There is a critical approach to every use of any Generative AI. Students are also provided with resources.
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Collaborative Design Exercise
A common assignment in all of Dr. Pennefather’s courses is the Dream Home. The Dream Home is a team-building exercise where participants collaborate to design and manage a prototype of a shared dream home, integrating features from each person’s ideal house while learning about Agile project management and working to solve problems under time constraints. Students work in small teams to create a prototype of a “dream home” that can include paper prototypes, maquettes, a 2D composite image or a 3D model. Students are also challenged to shoot and edit videos as if showcasing their home to potential buyers, complete with voiceover and music. Teams are encouraged to use Generative AI every step of the way. They can use Scribble Diffusion to their composite dream home by rapidly sketching it, then adding a text prompt and seeing what is generated. This can then inspire a physical prototype. One team used ChatGPT to generate text for a rap about their dream home and used Melobytes to generate a rhythmic rap from the text. They then mixed this rap over a looped drum beat and used this as the voice and music to showcase their home in the video. The use of AI in every case is to rapidly generate ideas that contribute to a rapid prototype. These are works in progress intended to teach students the value of iterative and co-creative design over specific periods of time.
Generating Prototypes
In the Managing Creativity course – part of a Biomedical Visualization Certificate with Extended Learning – students generated prototypes for interactive apps or animations to demonstrate aspects of anatomy. Students used AI to generate images for their prototyped platforms, sometimes with limited results in terms of physiological accuracy. Those prototypes, however, served as low-fidelity prototypes to get a sense of what a larger and more developed project could look like.
Human Centred Design group activity
In an activity focused on human-centered design, students worked in groups to create storyboards that needed to explain in great detail how to make coffee. This activity is well known and teaches students not to make any assumptions when designing user or human-centred experiences. One group told a fairly elaborate story involving a witch using magic to create a potion called “coffee,” using ChatGPT to generate a script for the story, and the Generative AI platform Midjourney to create images of characters and scenes in the story that they placed into an animated storybook video template.
Expanding approaches
There are many more creative examples of how students are facilitated to augment their workflows by using a variety of different Generative AIs along with other production tools like Unity, Unreal, Reaper, Ableton Live, Photoshop, Illustrator, as well as Davinci Resolve video editing suite. New advances in Generative AI continue to offer creatives the opportunity to enhance creativity, allowing students to get a better idea of what they will prototype together.
Get the book
Dr. Pennefather will integrate the tools mentioned above and text-video and video-video Generative AI starting this fall. Pennefather’s book “Creative Prototyping with Generative AI” provides many examples of how to use generative AI, the ethical considerations that need to be considered and an emphasis on the application of generative AI in creative settings as a tool to support creatives from all disciplines.
Ongoing research
Related research will also be showcased at the end of summer in a collaboration with UBC Library and UBC’s Emerging Media Lab with Shakespeare xR: A touch table allowing anyone to access Shakespeare’s First Folio that he supported the library to acquire, and an augmented reality (AR) application that features memorable Shakespearean characters whose text has been generated with an LLM using Shakespeare’s corpus of plays.