The image featured here is probably unlike any classroom you’ve ever seen, but a little like every classroom you have ever seen. It was produced by AI, specifically the DALL-E application which can turn written prompts into images with astonishing speed. The prompt entered by its human operator, Mr. Ward, asked DALL-E to create “a vibrant and contemporary all-boys classroom setting, featuring male students of various ages engaged in learning with advanced technology.”
It is mighty impressive in a lot of ways – the convincingness of the human forms (despite their somewhat uncanny plasticky sheen); the sophisticated use of one-point perspective with a vanishing point near the center of the board, a glowing orb in place of the human brain; a boy in the center, taller than all the rest, and highly alert, and the teacher standing in front of him, jointly commanding our attention; and the beautifully rendered shadows, which are created by the natural light coming from the window on the left and complemented by the more diffuse artificial light emanating from the computers.
AI necessarily uses existing images to create new ones, and this “classroom setting” is a peculiar hybrid based on a massive data set. It looks like a lively place for learning to happen – two teachers, 13 students, and presumably a few more students in the room outside the frame of the picture. None of the students are obviously off-task and none are in danger of being dress coded. AI has certainly succeeded in making an image of a “vibrant” classroom full of “engaged” students.
But the longer you look at the image, the more oddities reveal themselves. The room itself looks as if every kind of subject is taught there – the subject of the current lesson appears to be biology, and the abundant use of technology has not displaced traditional books, which are invitingly arranged on bookshelves around the room. But do the books ever get opened? The posters above the board are in no particular language (zoom in – it seems to be a blend of the Roman and Cyrillic [or Russian] alphabets, and the diagrams show a mashup of goodness knows what objects. Next to the window, is that a religious image? It’s hard to tell but I think an amorphous image of the Virgin Mary/Our Lady of Guadalupe is discernible.
And what are the kids wearing? This is almost exactly the same as the uniform as I wore going to grade school in Britain in the 1980s, the only difference being that we wore sweaters of that color rather than sweater vests; everyone has the same clunky-yet-practical shoes. All the students have the same haircut or at least had their last haircut in the same week as each other. A couple of students have potted plants on their desks. Why would that be? That’s not going to end well. The image does not quite feel contemporary, despite the subject matter. Rather the image has the feel of a Norman Rockwell painting or an illustration from a children’s book from decades ago. While Mr. Ward’s prompt asked for students of “all ages” – in my mind that would mean something like an advisory group at Priory – the students are resolutely all of the same age. They are seventh graders, perhaps.
And hang on. Are all the children white? Yes, they are. Every single one. In what possible way does this resemble contemporary education? Note there was nothing in Mr. Ward’s prompt that referred to the race of the students or the location of the school. AI has somehow decided that a modern school is not racially mixed, a decision based not on an explicit racial prejudice exactly but on patterns within the vast bank of images being fed to it. Should we be alarmed or merely amused by these blind spots in artificial inteligence’s decision making? Likewise, the teachers – yes, there are two of them – are both white males of a certain age. (Again nothing in the prompt specified this should be the case – it only said the students should be male).
AI is a powerful tool. It can liberate our collective imagination, and yet, at the very same time, limit it.
