Professionally Ethical Ways to Harness an Art-Making Generative AI to Support Innovative Instructional Design Work

Abstract

Instructional designers often pride themselves on using the most cutting-edge commercial authoring and other tools available to achieve their work. Their creations have to meet high technical standards in order to function in a digital environment, in learning management systems, content management systems, on social media, on digital content platforms, and others. In the present moment, generative AI tools enable the making of novel texts and digital visuals, among others. A major extant question is how best to harness generative art-making AIs in instructional design work. In this case, this work explores professionally ethical (and legal) ways to use a generative art-making AIs for ID work, as an innovative approach based on a review of the literature, a year of using several free web-facing art-making generative AIs (CrAIyon, Deep Dream Generator, and others) in open or public beta, and learning from applied instructional design work (over several decades).