Comment by raincole

15 hours ago

There was a debate over whether to integrate Stable Diffusion into the curriculum in a local art school here.

Personally while I consider AI a useful tool, I think it's quite pointless to teach it in school, because whatever you learn will be obsolete next month.

Of course some people might argue that the whole art school (it's already quite a "job-seeking" type, mostly digital painting/Adobe After Effect) will be obsolete anyway...

The skill that's worth learning is how to investigate, experiment and think about these kinds of tools.

A "Stable Diffusion" class might be a waste of time, but a "Generative art" class where students are challenged to explore what's available, share their own experiments and discuss under what circumstances these tools could be useful, harmful, productive, misleading etc feels like it would be very relevant to me, no matter where the technology goes next.

  • Very true regarding the subjects of a hypothetical AI art class.

    What's also important is the teaching of how commercial art or art in general is conceptualized, in other words:

    What is important and why? Design thinking. I know that phrase might sound dated but that's the work what humans should fear being replaced on / foster their skills.

    That's also the line that at first seems to be blurred when using generative text-to-image AI, or LLMs in general.

    The seemingly magical connection between prompt and result appears to human users like the work of a creative entity distilling and developing an idea.

    That's the most important aspect of all creative work.

    If you read my reply, thanks Simon, your blog's an amazing companion in the boom of generative AI. Was a regular reader in 2022/2023, should revisit! I think you guided me through my first local LLama setup.

All knowledge degrades with time. Medical books from the 1800's wouldn't be a lot of use today.

There is just a different decay curve for different topics.

Part of 'knowing' a field is to learn it and then keep up with the field.

Integrating it into the curriculum is strange. They should do one time introductory lectures instead.

> whatever you learn will be obsolete next month

this is exactly the kind of attitude that turns university courses into dinosaurs with far less connection to the “real world” industry than ideal. frankly its an excuse for laziness and luddism at this point. much of what i learned about food groups and economics and politics and writing in school is obsolete at this point, should my teachers not have bothered at all? out of what? fear?

the way stable diffusion works hasn’t really changed, and in fact people have just built comfyui layers and workflows on top of it in the ensuing 3 years, and the more you stick your head in the sand because you already predetermined the outcome you are mostly piling up the debt that your students will have to learn on their own because you were too insecure to make a call without trusting that your students can adjust as needed

  • The answer in formal education is probably somewhere in the middle. The stuff you learn shouldn't be obsolete by the time you graduate but at the same time they should be integrating new advancements sooner.

    The problem has also always been that those who know enough about cutting edge stuff are generally not interested in teaching for a fraction of what they can get doing the stuff.