Students of my course were given an assignment.

  1. Submit a picture story (no words) that others will understand and like.
  2. Explain others’ picture stories and rank them.

Here are the results.

Firstly, why this exercise? Because it teaches three skills I believe are important in the AI era:

  1. Creating unique content
  2. Communicating with clarity
  3. Marketing your ideas

This is exactly what they were evaluated on.

  1. Uniqueness: How similar was their story to others'?
  2. Understanding: How well did others understand their story?
  3. Preference: How much did others prefer their story over others'?

Here are some stories I enjoyed. Click for details.

One interesting relationship is uniqueness and preference. The two are negatively correlated. I’m not sure why.

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The least unique stories were about these three patterns - and there were so many of them!

If people can’t come up with original stories easily, I guess there’s a concrete skill to learn and a way to differentiate capability.

The most unique stories were reasonably interesting. They included:

The top scoring story was fairly unique, too: The Bhagavad Gita.

I was surprised at how interesting some of the low scoring stories were. For example, I thought this photographer deletes a baby panda photo to protect it was really powerful.

It ranked low on understanding (3 people completely mis-understood the story but since they labelled the story “A thirsty crow” or “A steam engine…” I think these were errors or junk). It ranked only ranked mid-way on preference.

So, maybe there’s more to learn than what I was measuring.

Still, it was good to know that we can teach and evaluate useful skills even when students can use AI and collaborate.