Task 9: Break a story cliche with AI

As with Task 8, you will imagine a scene or plot that breaks a storytelling cliché, then make a storyboard that illustrates it. Like the other AI tasks you’ll use AI to get some input or content, but you’ll also be graded on how you analyze and critique the output of the AI.

Background

In programming Task 7, you spent time incrementally prodding the AI to get to a desired game avatar. It can be hard to see the results of incremental prompting as clearly when asking for a storyboard, but this assignments asks to prompt AI repeatedly to improve your storyboard idea, text, and images. You’ll also need to use both text and image generators.

🤖✅ You must use AI for this assignment.

Process

1. Choose a cliché from a list of Narrative Tropes and pair it with a game, movie, book, or other story that leans on it. Remember, not all tropes are clichés, only those that are boring or overused.
2. At the class website, start a new post and entitle it something like Task 9:Mary Gonzalez Pat Smith Sandy Park.  ⚠️ Please add the names before clicking the Save Draft or Publish button so they will show up in the post stub.
3. At the top of the post, type the heading “Featured cliché:” and add the name of the cliché you chose and a description pasted from Narrative Tropes.
4. Under this, add a new heading called “Breaking the cliché”.
5. Drawing on the reading for this week, write a logline for a story of your own design.
6. After the logline, write one or more paragraphs to serve as the profile for one or more characters of your story.
7. After the character profile/s, add a sentence or two explaining how your story would surprise the reader by departing from the conventional trope (cliché).Now use the class AI text generator in some way, eg to critique your own ideas, brainstorm new ideas, or push even further beyond a cliche. (See the FAQ for more on what is and isn’t allowed.)
8. Add a heading for “Storyboard”.
9. In a separate text-to-image generator such as Leonardo.ai, create at least three images to represent different characters or moments of the story (see the FAQ for a sample prompt). ⚠️ Even using the techniques shown in class, you may find it difficult to achieve consistent character design. Do your best to generate a lot of images until you get at least three you can sequence into a coherent storyboard.
10. Click on Add Media and upload these to the website. (Do not insert them into the post yet.)
11. Back in your post, choose the Text tab and paste the following HTML template at the bottom (continue the pattern to add more than three images):

<table>
	<tbody>
		<tr>
			<td>Description</td>
			<td>[image]</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Description</td>
			<td>[image]</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Description</td>
			<td>[image]</td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>

12. Back in the Visual tab, select the word “image” only (not the brackets) and click Add Media.
13. After choosing an image, make sure Align Left and Medium or Large are selected, then Insert into Post.
14. Replace each of the descriptions with actual text that explains in detail what happens at each moment.
15. Select and delete the brackets [] afterward. ⚠️ Be careful not to delete the image by accident. You may want to find and delete the brackets in the Text tab.
16. Add a “AI Dialogue” heading and underneath give examples of how you repeatedly prompted the chatbot and image generator to get better results.
17. Add a new heading called “Credits” and underneath explain the role each teammate played in producing the storyboard, from brainstorming to writing to creating images.
18. Select the category “Task 9” and publish your post to WordPress.
19. Complete the feedback survey to get credit for this assignment.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Your team can add a single Post for this task, as long as you add everyone’s name to the title, eg “Task 10: Mary Gonzalez Pat Chen Sandy Berkowitz”.

FAQ