Author: daniil.ivanov

In the last week of the 3rd semester, I received a huge amount of insights related to the topic of my master’s thesis. Therefore, I decided to change the vector a little. I would like the practical part to prevail in my work. I compared feasibility, my own desires and interests, my skills and decided to focus on practice.

Recently I have spoken with Mrs. Lagger, Mr. Kipcak, Mr. Baumann and Mr. Kaltenbrunner about the framework for my future work.

Therefore, now in the near future I will take the following steps:

1. I will compile all the information that I received from the professors into one document, which also includes a mood board for a future potential exhibition.
2. I will formulate the exact purpose of the exhibition and what topic it will be created on.
3. I will accurately formulate the topic, title of the work and question.
4. I will rewrite the Expose in accordance with all the changes that my topic has undergone.
5. I will explore all the opportunities that the city of Graz provides for such independent art exhibitions, be it art venues, museums or Leerstand.

All these steps will certainly be completed by me in the near future, so that I can begin the theoretical part of the study as soon as possible.

At the end of the 3rd semester we organized our final exhibition in the ESC Kunst Labor space. This event had quite an impact on me, so much so that I was able to decide on the exact direction of my Master Thesis. I got great pleasure from the process of preparing and creating complex technical exhibits, from all the difficulties that this brought.

It was very inspiring to see how visitors came and interacted with real interest with the exhibits that we created with our own hands, how our ideas came to life and really brought some emotions to real people.

I came to the exhibition every day 20 minutes before the opening to launch the main exhibit “Portfolio machine” and every time small difficulties arose and were constantly different, which was especially interesting. Sometimes during the exhibition my colleagues had difficulties and then I always responded to help. I really enjoyed this work and would be very happy to do this in the future.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am the organizer of the LARP games. For this activity, I decided to use AI image generators to visualize the rules more clearly.

I created a page on the Notion platform and created different sections, for rules, for character descriptions and so on. The only question was which neural networks to use. We used three and I will describe my experience below.

Lime Wire

Lima Wire is a free neural network that can generate pictures based on promt. It is worth noting that the quality of the generated content is not that high at all, this is due to the fact that the service is free and still in the active development stage.

Artbreeder

Artbreeder uses a slightly different model. We used it to generate character portraits. It doesn’t use promts, rather it generates images based on existing ones, can compile multiple ones, and offers to change parameters, allowing for unique results.

Midjourney

Midjourney is perhaps one of the most famous image generators. For a subscription it allows you to generate images of quite high quality, although some things the neural network still doesn’t understand. For example, I needed an image of a drakkar, the platform didn’t understand the word at all and drew me a dragon. Anyway, we used this very service to design the rulebook.

Working title

Meaningful application of high technology in design

1. the problem (Starting point, problem description)                                             

Which theoretical, practical, social, etc. problem is the starting point of your thesis?

What do you think is the real cause of the problem?

In the last few years, technology has made huge leaps and we are on the verge of a technological revolution comparable to the advent of the steam engine. This cannot but affect various fields of labor, and some professions may cease to exist in the next decade. Some fear that the design profession (in various iterations, from graphic designer to product designer) may be replaced by Artificial Intelligence. This is a topic of great interest to me, as I myself am studying towards Interaction Design and plan to continue my career as a UX Designer. That’s why I wanted to explore this topic.

2. state of research

What is the state of research on this problem? What findings are available? What has not yet been (sufficiently) addressed, clarified or contradicted? How does your own work relate to the existing research?

At this point, I wouldn’t say there are a lot of different studies regarding this topic. Many papers are appearing right now, as the topic became relevant just a couple of years ago. So I keep my finger on the pulse and check to see if new research is emerging.

3. the question

Which question(s) should be answered in your master thesis? What is the main question?

Consequences of AI on the traditional UX/UI design

4. the hypothesis resp. the objective                                               (max. ½ page)

What do you want to prove, disprove or design, programme, … in your Master’s thesis?

Target catalogue

I’d like to answer the question of how much the latest technology will affect the design field. I will probably consider two scenarios: utopian and dystopian.

5. the reference to theory

Which explanatory approaches or theories are referred to?

What is your point of view? What is your position?

I also want to look at previous cases of technological revolutions, how they occurred in a historical context, and what input they had on disappearing or highly changing fields of labor. I would also like to look at how AI works, what it can do, and what the potential outcome of its development might be.

6. the method

What is the methodological procedure (work steps, approach)? Which methods and instruments do you want to use in the project? What does a possible solution path or procedure methodology look like? How should the problem be solved, the question answered, how should the sources be analysed?

Speculative design, expert interviews

7. the material

What material and sources are available on the topic?

Which sources (data, videos, comparative material, …) are available, which need to be identified, collected?

There are many interviews with famous visionaries (Ilon Musk, Bill Gates and others) about AI and its possible impact on the industry, many designers share their opinions and experiences on various portals, there are already some statistics on layoffs from large companies. All this is to be collected and analyzed for relevance. I also want to do some interviews with experts and process them.

8. (preliminary) bibliography in compliance with the rules of citation

I can’t give a preliminary list of references yet, as the topic is quite specific and evolving dynamically

9. (preliminary) structre

Which aspects should be dealt with and in which order?

I would definitely like to include a historical overview, the nature of AI, how it works and what it can do, expert interviews and 2 scenarios at the end, a utopian and a dystopian.

10. the timetable (project phases and duration)

How much time is needed for the most important work steps (research, data collection, data evaluation, creation of the work piece, writing the raw text, revision, layout, final correction)? – Milestones

When should the work be finished?

During spring I would like to collect all the theoretical material, in summer I am going to process it and conduct expert interviews. By the end of August I would like to finish it.

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I’m in the field of creating and organizing LARP games as my Hobby and I decided to try using AI to help me in this activity. My task was to write a list of rules, regulations for a game event, namely for a conference that took place within the game. These rules were to include a rather lengthy list of rules and prohibitions, but had enough loopholes that players could use them in the game format if they wanted to. It would have been a challenge to create such a large amount of text on my own, so I decided to take advantage of new technologies and involved ChatGPT in this task.

At first things did not go smoothly, the neural network did not fully understand the task and the specifics of the RPG setting, so it did not give me the results I wanted, but later, when ChatGPT got a sufficient amount of context, it gave me roughly the results I wanted. I discussed some points with the AI separately, asked to change nuances and in the end I was happy with the result.

After I showed the result to my team, they were impressed that I had created this with AI, but they still had questions about the rules, so I took the second round and came to ChatGPT to work on some parts. Since the neural network was already aware of the whole context, it was not very difficult to correct mistakes, I find the memorization functionality within one dialog box very handy.

In the end, I posted these rules for the players and they were more than happy with the result of the work I had done.

In October our group took part in the city festival “Klanglicht”. At this festival, new technologies were used to immerse visitors in a special atmosphere, to awaken feelings and emotions, to make them think.

I like the concept of the festival as a whole, Graz for a few days becomes a huge exhibition platform where artists can realize their most daring ideas and citizens and guests of the city can touch something beautiful and interesting without any special efforts.

It was very interesting for me to look at the organization of the process from the inside, to find out what technologies can be used, what places and locations are involved and so on.

Below you can read an analysis of the article I read according to the SQ3R method.

Survey.

I found the structure of the article simple and clear. It is divided into several parts, namely: Introduction, AI and AI in Education. The titles of the main parts and sub-chapters are conveniently highlighted in colors, so it doesn’t take much effort to do a brief overview.

Questions.

1. How exactly can chatbots be used in education?
2. How can they be implemented into the learning process in schools as part of UX design?
3. The ethical side of the issue.
4. How might the introduction of AI affect classical educational methods?

Read.

The article briefly reviews the history of the emergence of AI as well as its development, which is undoubtedly important for a general understanding of the issue. Separate subchapters are devoted to chat bots in general and Chat-GPT in particular.  Then there is a chapter devoted to a specific topic, namely AI in learning. Both pros and cons of the approach are discussed in detail, and the ethical side of the issue is also not left without attention, and a separate subchapter is devoted to it. Of course, at the end there is a brief conclusion that summarizes the results.

I would say that the article did not disappoint me at all, I got my questions answered and was satisfied with what I read. A few new insights have definitely emerged in my mind and I hope to be able to use the new to me information in writing my Master thesis.

Recite.

• Chatbots can be used to personalize the learning process for each student as much as possible, not to mention that, unlike a teacher, a chatbot is always ready to answer any question at any time of the day or night.
• The chatbot should behave as much like a real person as possible, the interface should not be very different from a normal chat with a teacher, so for the student such an introduction will be smooth.
• There are some concerns that the article provides:
  • reliability and accuracy of the information it presents
  • potential biases in the data, resulting in discriminatory or misleading responses
  • privacy issues since it may collect and store personal information about students
  • questions about the role of teachers and the impact on the job market for educators
  • lack of human interaction, reducing the quality of the educational experience for students
  • over-reliance and dependency on technology
  • concerns about the rights of intellectual property
  • transparency and accountability as it might be difficult to identify how decisions are being made by the chatbot
• The article says chatbots can make learning a lot easier for teachers and administrators, but they can never replace a real person.

Review.

Revisiting the article and my analysis above I can confidently say that I found the article very helpful. It expands my knowledge in AI and provides certain insights that will be useful to me when writing my paper. At first glance, it may seem that the topic is not that relevant to the topic of my Master thesis, however, the use of chatbots, specifically Chat GPT in training, is a great example of smart use of high technology and from the UX point of view it is also exciting to consider. What implementation methods are already in place, what can be improved, how to deal with ethical issues – all of this is relevant to any field where new technologies such as AI are or will be used.

I listened to a podcast on the history and development of neural networks and algorithms that worked with language and speech. It started with studying the very structure of language, not any particular language, but any language, looking for various common features in order to identify patterns and implement them in algorithms for recognizing and generating speech. Then followed the simplest algorithms, for example, the well-known function for button phones “T9”. Then came the simplest machine learning, neural networks learned from huge arrays of text and were able to predict answers. For example, such an algorithm can solve the simplest arithmetic problem without knowing arithmetic at all, it just knows that if there are “2” “+” and “2” in the text, the answer according to the probability theory will be “4”. At this stage, the neural network could already be useful, but it is not perfect at all. Such systems did not look at the whole sentence, but checked one word at a time, so they could produce an incoherent set of words if the sentence was constructed in an atypical way.

In 2015, a company called Open AI appeared, which would later turn the idea of language models upside down, but in the beginning, they were losing the technology race to Google. In 2022, Open AI releases ChatGPT, which was a turning point in how people perceive language models. Users use ChatGPT for literally everything: It to help write an essay, find a bug in code, formulate the right Google query, now it can already draw pictures, and so on.

ChatGPT is a great example of how new technology can be used in real life by real people, and the best part is that it is actually being used.