Creating Characters with AI Art Part 2 - Creating with Characters

In this previous post (https://education.apple.com/en/story/250012661), I shared some ideas for how you can use prompts to create imaginative characters. In this post, I want to share a few ideas of how you could creatively use AI generated characters in classroom projects.

Characters for Storytelling

PROMPT: a flying hamburger character, wearing a purple cape, flying through the sky

Ask students to generate an unique character that can be the basis for creative writing. Include: An animal or object + an action that they are doing + a location. Then use Pages to write a story about that character using the story spine method:

• Once...
• Every day...
• But one day...
• Because of that...
• Until finally...
• And ever since...

Older students could include the generated character image at the top of their story (and as an extension could try to generate more pictures that go along with their narrative). Younger students might not be able to generate their own characters, but students could come up with character ideas that their teacher could create and show using a projector. The teacher could save character images and print them off "trading card" style for students to use as story starters. Or the characters could be shared with student iPads using Airdrop or Classroom.

Animations in Keynote

Generating AI characters with a solid gray background makes it easy to remove the background and put into a scene in Keynote. Then the characters can be animated as part of a digital storytelling project.

Here is an example having a bunny on a surfboard "surf" across a wavy dynamic background:

In this second example, I created the galaxy background and the cat flying in the rocket using Bing Image Creator (cat) and Adobe Firefly (galaxy), then animated with Keynote :

Talking Characters

Another way to use these AI generated characters is having them talk and tell a story. The Chatterpix Kid app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chatterpix-kids/id734046126) is easy to use on the iPad. Here is an example of a talking avatar character:

Call to Action: What other ideas do you have for using these kinds of AI generated characters in projects? I'd love for you to share them in the comments!

 One Best Thing:

This post is a part of my One Best Thing Project "AI Art for Inspiration, Creativity, and Learning." I am collecting my AI Art project ideas and resources at this website:

https://sites.google.com/view/creativeapptitude/ai-art