The following is a guest post by Professor Rick Bales (Ohio Northern):
I use PowerPoint more than I used to. I think the visual stimulus helps keep students engaged, and the text prompts mean that I can ditch my notes without getting sidetracked. But I dislike text-heavy slides – I want the text to cover the highlights, and the rest of the slide to help engage the students. That requires some visual imagery.
Until recently, my images usually came from scouring the web. But for many abstract legal topics, nothing from the web quite fits, or sometimes it fits but the resolution is too low to look good on a projected slide. I’ve tried using PowerPoint’s drawing tools to create original material, but I’m not very good at it and it takes a lot of time to create just one good slide.
Over the last six months or so, I’ve been using DALL-E (the image creator that comes with ChatGPT4) to custom-design images for my slides. The main advantage to this approach is that I usually can customize my slide for its intended purpose. For example, here’s an image I used in my Employment Law course to illustrate a case about EMTs at Sacred Heart Hospital who thought they should be getting paid for their on-call time:
But not everything is customizable. I couldn’t get DALL-E to give me anything interesting to illustrate the “reasonable rate” for calculating overtime. And tort cases have been a challenge, since the DALL-E algorithm apparently has been instructed not to create images of people getting shot or maimed or killed.
Even when DALL-E can create the image I’m after, sometimes there are missteps. Words that appear in an image are likely to be misspelled. No amount of follow-up prompting was able to get DALL-E to understand that I wanted arrows pointed away from an object in an image rather than toward it. And sometimes, items in an image are just “off”, as in the image below, illustrating a workers’ compensation case in which an employee crashed his employer’s pickup truck into a tree while he was trying to retrieve a pack of cigarettes he had dropped on the floorboard. I too might have hit the tree too if it had been growing in the middle of the road!
On the upside, images like these keep students engaged. Students enjoy studying each of my slides to see if AI has gone rogue. I consider it a win any time my students are doing something in class other than watching cute puppy videos or shopping online.
My prompts tend to be short and descriptive. If I don’t get what I want after about 10 minutes of trying I might try scouring the web, and otherwise I’ll just go without an image on that slide. I don’t claim any expertise on creating these prompts. If you have suggestions on drafting prompts, or using other AI image-generators, or just generally on using AI to create better slides, please send them to me – I will compile and share in a follow-up post.
-Rick Bales
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