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The ability to seamlessly integrate generated images is fascinating. Although it currently takes too long to really work in a game or educational context.

As an experiment I just asked it to "recreate the early RPG game Pedit5 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedit5), but make it better, with a 1970s terminal aesthetic and use Imagen to dynamically generate relevant game artwork" and it did in fact make a playable, rogue-type RPG, but it has been stuck on "loading art" for the past minute as I try to do battle with a giant bat.

This kind of thing is going to be interesting for teaching. It will be a whole new category of assignment - "design a playable, interactive simulation of the 17th century spice trade, and explain your design choices in detail. Cite 6 relevant secondary sources" and that sort of thing. Ethan Mollick has been doing these types of experiments with LLMs for some time now and I think it's an underrated aspect of what they can be used for. I.e., no one is going to want to actually pay for or play a production version of my Gemini-made copy of Pedit5, but it opens up a new modality for student assignments, prototyping, and learning.

Doesn't do anything for the problem of AI-assisted cheating, which is still kind of a disaster for educators, but the possibilities for genuinely new types of assignments are at least now starting to come into focus.

2 comments

I love this, and as for AI-assisted cheating, I would make it such that the student can use any tool whatsoever under the sun, but then needs to do a live in-person presentation on it followed by 10 minutes of Q&A. Some are better bullshitters than others, but you'll still see a very clear difference between those who actually worked and those who had the work done for them.

Yes, I think this kind of combination is where higher ed is going to land. I've been talking to a colleague lately about how social skills and public speaking just got more important (and are things we need to focus on actually teaching). Likewise, I think self-directed, individualized humanistic research is currently not replicable by AI nor likely to be - for instance, generating an entirely new historical archive by conducting oral history interviews. Basically anything that involves operating in the physical world and deploying human emotional skills.

The unsolved issue is scale. 5-10 minute Q&As work well, but are not really doable in a 120 student class like the one I'll be teaching in the fall, let alone the 300-400 student classes some colleagues have.

AI could help with scale. Schools need to build SCIFs for their students to complete evaluations in an environment guaranteed to be free of AI assistance.

Just as a side note, I ended up turning the 1970s RPG type game it originally made into a text-based RPG where you play as Henry James in 1889, kind of fun! Curious if the link actually works:

https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...