AI for Artistic Imperfection

Dejan ANDONOV, Sylvain GRESSIER, Mary KOLONIA, Bastien MASSE, Avra SOTIROPOULOU, Sofia THEODOSIADOU, Violette VIGNERON, Géraldine WUYCKENS.

Concept

A workshop on creativity and AI

A workshop where participants engage in a collaborative and creative process to produce fictional content that reflects current public issues, using AI generation and storytelling tools.

Priority

Priority 2: Addressing AI-Generated Biases and Ethical/Deontological Implications
Priority 3: Developing Skills as a Critical AI Prompter (in Media Reception and Production)

Objectives

Cultivating critical thinking about the uses of AI in the creative process

Target group

Practitioners (teachers, educators…) that works with people over 15 years old.

Modalities : steps and instructions

5 stages

1 – Set up the challenge !

Format: Collective activity with all participants.

Objective: Define participants’ stance on AI-generated creativity while gaining first-hand experience with prompting and chatbot interaction.

2 – Contextualizing the future city

Participants collaboratively imagine a city 30 years in the future by proposing short ideas on topics like ecology, social issues, technology, health, leisure, or transport.

These contributions are collected and used to prompt the AI, which generates a descriptive text of the imagined world. The group then reflects on the AI’s output, comparing it to their initial ideas and discussing what was captured, added, or left out.

Objective: Explore collective world-building while critically examining how AI interprets and transforms human input into narrative form.

3 – Determining the characters

Participants split into small groups of 4–5. Each participant creates a character shield(“blason” in French) -inspired by SWOT analysis -to design a main character, mixing real and fictional traits.

These attributes are entered into the chatbot, which generates a description of the character’s home—serving as the story’s initial situation.

Objective: Develop original characters through a mix of imagination and structured analysis, while using AI to enrich and contextualize their role in the story.

4 – Building the story

Participants learn basic narrative structure by first describing their character’s routine, then introducing a disruption to create tension. They expand this into 3–5 short scenes where weaknesses generate challenges and strengths help resolve them.

Along the way, they use an AI chatbot in a card-game format for inspiration, illustration, or rewriting, deciding whether to keep or reject its suggestions.

Objective: Practice story structuring while critically experimenting with AI as a creative tool.

5 – Presenting the story

Each group presents their story to the others, choosing whether or not to use AI (for example, through voice generation) in the narration. The audience then tries to guess how AI was involved in building the narrative.

Objective: Share creative outcomes while reflecting on the visible and hidden roles of AI in storytelling.

6 – Evaluating the work

Participants use a set of teacher-provided criteria to evaluate their stories. They then ask the AI to assess their work and provide feedback based on the same criteria.

Objective: Compare human and AI evaluation to gain insight into the story’s strengths and areas for improvement.