Unit 16 · Characters that belong to no one else

Week 17 · 45 minutes · 10th and 11th grade · every project, alone or in a group.

What you’ll do

Your project has rules. Today you give it something that can be seen and that belongs to no one else. We switch tools: this time, an image generator.

• If your project has a world or characters (a game, a story): an original character and three panels in your project’s world.
• If it doesn’t (a tool, a sound piece, a simulation): your project’s image —the cover, the icon, the start screen— in three versions.

But first there’s a question that doesn’t settle itself, and it’s for everyone. If you ask the machine for something “in the style of” a famous studio, is that being inspired or taking what isn’t yours? And if you describe what you like without naming anyone? And if you draw it and the machine only colors it in?

Why it’s worth it

These tools learned by looking at the work of a huge number of people. That’s why it’s so easy for something to come out looking like someone else’s. Knowing how to make something that belongs to no one else, and how to explain what you took and why, is a form of respect toward the people who create. Toward yourself too.

How the session goes

• First, a piece that amazes, described aloud panel by panel, and right after, how it was made and where it failed.
• Anticipate. Ten minutes without screens: four made-up cases, read aloud, which your team places standing on a line across the room, from “inspiration” to “appropriation”. Then you write your own rule in one line. By hand, the card for your character or your image, its credits and “What I think will come out”.
• The budget. Three images per project at most, one per panel, written on the board. First you describe it in words; then you generate. Drawing by hand is the lightest option.
• Act. It’s checked aloud that your card carries no names, faces, photos or voices of anyone, and it goes into the image generator’s queue. Each panel is projected and described aloud. You name which trade would have done that work.
• Reflect. One sentence per project with C1, C2 or C3. Did you keep your own rule? What did the AI decide here that a person should have decided?

The criteria

• C1. Your character or your image doesn’t look like one that already exists.
• C2. Something of your own project is in the character or the image, not just in the background.
• C3. You can say what you took from others and why that’s inspiration, and it’s in your credits.

Your character has a made-up name and a made-up face: never the face, voice or name of a real person. If it speaks inside your project, it’s text you wrote.

Your credits

Every panel carries its credits line: what’s yours, what the tool made and which work or style by someone else you started from. You don’t ask for anything “in the style of” anyone: you describe what you want in your own words.

If your project is without AI

You do the same full task with your technique —drawing, collage, painting, modelling, photos of objects you made, digital illustration without AI—, with the same time and the same criteria, and without waiting in the queue. Instead of three generations, you set your materials and time budget. The dilemma applies to you just the same: copying a character or a style by hand can also be appropriation, so your rule counts as much as anyone’s. In the viewing, the question for you is: what did you decide, and why?

If a generated image doesn’t fit today

If you’d rather draw today, you make your three panels or versions by hand and they join the viewing just the same. If your project would rather look at other people’s images today than make its own —a project about AI, for example—, you take an image that already exists on your topic, write its full credits (who made it, where it comes from, what you’d take and what you wouldn’t) and place it on the dilemma line.

For inspiration

• Example: the diablo cojuelo (carnival devil) who isn’t scary — once a detail from here showed up, it stopped looking like just any costume.
• The six o’clock guagua (bus)
• The river spirit — look at it with today’s question in mind.

Build your card with the assistant for building your instruction, describing in your own words what you want to see.

What this is, and what it isn’t

This Unit’s design is original: a design position, not a research finding. It promises no effect. Nothing is graded. Your panels stay in your project’s folder, in the room.