Beautiful Things · Media literacy
In this exhibition, the objects and old photographs are REAL. The films where they talk and move were made by AI this year. Historians call the real thing a primary source, and the story made about it an interpretation. Your job: tell them apart.
Name:
Date:
Your teacher will show you a real old photograph, then the AI film made from it. Which photo did you study?
Photo title:
I can verify
It's really in the original photo — I could point to it.
The AI inferred
Invented — the motion, the voice, anything not in the photo.
I still wonder
Questions a historian would go research.
Write down one clue that told you something was AI-made (odd hands or mouths, a too-clean voice, movement that couldn’t be in a still photo, the label itself…):
Some people in old photographs were real people with names and families. Is it okay to make a real person from history appear to move or speak? When would it be wrong? What should creators always do?
Ask someone older about one old thing they remember — an object, a song, a show, a machine. Write what they say. Then go back and mark each line: F if it’s a fact they remember directly (“we had a rotary phone in the kitchen”), or I if it’s interpretation (“life was simpler then”). Memory mixes both — just like the AI films. That’s the lesson.
