Art and science

Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition

‘Drawn Conclusions’ by Aoife Kearney and Anastassia Taylor from Virginia College (right) involved a comparative study on AI-generated and sketched images using the same descriptions.

Anastassia told the Celt that Aoife did the sketches without seeing any images beforehand. The same description was fed into an AI image generator.

Aoife, who is thinking of pursuing this kind of art as a career, said that she drew on the diversity of humans and specific facial features, noting AI had difficulty capturing same.

The increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligence was the inspiration for the project: “We’re seeing the constant rise in AI being very relied on for learning. We’re just trying to show that AI isn’t as good as people make it out to be, and it’s just a lot less accurate and reliable.”

The project has scope to be developed to help law enforcement with photo fit imagery. The young women agreed that AI didn’t capture humanity in the same way a sketch artist would: “A sketch artist can draw distinct features. AI doesn’t really do that, it’s very perfect,” Aoife explained.

So, on this occasion at least, the personal touch triumphed over a computer-generated image. The students competing in the senior group section of Social and Behavioural Sciences thanked their teacher Ms Kelly Ryan for her help and encouragement.