Movement Magazine, Fall 2024
2024’s 48-page Movement Magazine theme focused on AI in higher ed. I rolled up my sleeves and jumped in, experimenting with many platforms, including Dalle-3, Firefly, and Midjourney. For the feature, our writer and I decided to use a yellow robot as the personification of genAI arriving to our school, inspired by U-M’s rollout of its AI bot Maizey.
I liked the idea of generating Maizey into real spaces in our iconic building, easily recognizable by readers, which reinforces the idea that AI is becoming ubiquitous. I imagined Maizey as mid-sized, friendly, and unimposing.
For the cover I generated Maizey walking up our school’s own iconic stairs, easily recognized by our readers. Multiple iterations of Maizey, prompted in the different platforms, appear throughout the feature.
Firefly Prompt: Friendly yellow robot arm closeup opening door, blended with Kinesiology building. Image by Leisa Thompson/Michigan Photography. These are the doors students use every day.
Instead of explaining the unique vocabulary of artificial intelligence ourselves, we thought we'd ask U-M GPT. Here are its responses, with annotations from our writer and an AI expert. I decided to make it look like the real GPT interface, with text bubbles as if our writer was chiming in. DALL-E 3 prompt: Friendly yellow small round robot stands on top of a mountain of old computers and books.
Midjourney prompt: Friendly yellow rounded robot studiously typing on a laptop in a full college classroom with human students also sitting, natural light (blended with a Kinesiology classroom photo by Leisa Thompson/Michigan Photography).
Firefly prompt: Realistic friendly yellow robot with a burst of ideas and HTML code and music above its head. Generated variation with expanded background.
Left: For “What are the Rules here?” I wanted to ask that visually, too. What happens when AI creates art that looks like it came from the hand of DaVinci himself? If you look carefully, Maizey has a reflection of the woman’s painted dress on it, a suggestion that Maizey is trying to mirror real art. Firefly prompt: Friendly yellow robot paints a portrait in the style of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Right: I had a lot of fun creating Maizey’s Business profile here. Firefly prompt: Closeup of yellow robot hands holding a phone on a dark teal desk. Added Maizey profile illustration.
More spreads from other parts of the magazine. The Art of Anatomy story was one I thought would be enhanced by putting students’ creations front and center. This is a pattern I made from a single “wheel” design by student Angel Rose Sajan. Each of the pieces of the wheel is made out of a 3-D printed version of a human bone. I continued the design into the following spread.
We had a blast in our gym with this photoshoot, which highlights a professor doing research on women’s fitness.
