AI Advocates

S1 E5: Digital You: Exploring the Power (and Pitfalls) of AI Avatars

• Lisa Dieker • Season 1 • Episode 5

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In this episode of AI Advocates, hosts Lisa Dieker and Maggie Mosher dive headfirst into the wild world of AI-generated avatars. From hilariously inaccurate depictions (think: spelling “teacher” wrong 12 times) to surprisingly spot-on digital clones, they share the highs and headaches of building personalized avatars using tools like Copilot, Poe, Canva, and more. Whether you're an educator, tech enthusiast, or just curious about the chaos behind AI image generation, you'll walk away with laughs, insights, and maybe a new tool to reclaim your time—and your digital identity. 

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Music:

Reclaim your time….., time…., time.

Lisa Dieker:

Welcome to AI Advocates. I'm Lisa Dieker.

Maggie Mosher:

And I'm Maggie Moser.

Lisa Dieker:

And we're excited to once again, help you reclaim some of your time. So Maggie, I think the topic is avatars. Is that what we're going to talk about?

Maggie Mosher:

I think so love to make our own.

Lisa Dieker:

I know. I know. And and they're kind of fun to make, but have you found them hard to make?

Maggie Mosher:

It depends. Sometimes when I'm using something easy, like Photoshop, where all I'm doing is the avatar pictures, it's easy. But then when I'm trying to do something more complicated, then I yeah, then I have trouble.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah. So for those who don't know an avatar, I'm pretty sure you do. But just in case, we like to always be respectful of the range of listeners we have. It's just really making a creation of something that symbolizes a person, and the movie Avatar is probably the most famous example of that. We're not talking about, you know, having a human inside the computer, but actually having a image that acts like a human or looks like a human. And so, yeah, Maggie, I'm doing, I think, you know, a big presentation. And we all decided, each one of us, that we're doing the panel to make an avatar of ourselves. And I, literally, I went out to Copilot again, my go to, I don't think it matters what you use. There's a lot of things that will make avatars, but I had to make it 40 different times. And what itdid is it kept making me like, I'm like, make a professor, and then it made me look like an old curmudgeon. And then I'm like, make it look younger, and then it made me look 12. And then I said, you know, make it look like a professor that likes technology and like things were coming out of my head. And and then it gave me gray hair, and then it gave me blue eyes. And so finally, you know, as I got more descriptive, but I did finally laugh that it did put on a jacket on me, and it put a Jayhawk, which I don't know if that was legal, but it did, and I didn't. And then it actually put kind of quasi Adidas symbols on it. So clearly, AI knew that KU is a Adidas campus. Like, okay, that's really interesting. But you know, when I was making it, I was thinking of the presentation you did about all the different avatars and all the mistakes it made. Do you want to share that?

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, I actually had to create my own chatbot. For that very reason. I went into Poe and created a higher education images chat bot so that I could make avatars and pictures and presentation images that are actually what I say, because I'd say something and it would give me something totally different, or it would give me like, one student's paying attention. Everyone else isn't. I'm like, that's not what I want. No matter how detailed the prompt, it would still give me the wrong thing consistently and and when I'm doing Copilot would also give me the wrong words, like, great, we have a great picture, but then the words in the picture are all wrong.

Lisa Dieker:

They're in a different language or not, not spelled correctly

Maggie Mosher:

Exactly. And I'm like, kids notice every little thing. And so I created my own, and I actually did it with a bunch of middle schoolers too. I had them work on the specific avatars, and they created really cool like, I want this avatar to be a police officer in Chicago, you know, with my face and adding their pictures and everything into the avatar. You can choose to have an avatar that looks nothing like you or really similar to you. And I was shocked at how many wanted it to look similar to them, but to be a specific like superhero or career.

Lisa Dieker:

That's funny well, and you know my my experience, and I know that happened to you is that you get a lot of hallucinations with avatars. They're missing a head, missing an arm and and my personal pet peeve, for those of you who design these AI tools out there, and we hope you listen, but this is for our education friends, is every time I ask for a person who is neurodiverse with a disability, they always are in a wheelchair. And I'm like, there's gotta be ways to represent and so, you know, I don't think it's representational of our population, and so it's something to be aware of. And then my last little thought is, yeah, the spelling is crazy. So my second one I thought would be really easy to make was I wanted a teacher in colorful format with technology, and it took me 12 times to get Copilot to spell the word "teacher" right. I was like, it wasn't even hard. I kept saying spell it right, and it would spell it, it put the word "right." And I was like, okay, that's not what I meant, either. So it was teacher right. And then I got an arrow. And so finally, I had to stop my chat and start a new chat. And I find sometimes when you get down a rabbit hole, you're just better to go new chat and stop. So I think the last thing I wondered for your Listen, for the listeners, I tend to use DALL-E and Copilot. What are some other things you said you've created? Can you explain to them what Poe is and what that means you made your own? Because,

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, when I do avatars, I tend to go towards Canva or Captions AI, or even Creative AI. But what Poe, I love about Poe is that I train my avatar with those other ones. It's trained into whatever they want with Poe, anyone in seconds can create a free custom avatar. So there are a lot of avatars out there. Any teacher can create their own. There's a great statistics avatar out there that's created by a statistics professor. So you can create whatever you want, but what it does is it combines DALL-E 3 and, well, it depends on which ones you click, but you can combine ChatGPT-4o with DALL-E 3, and it'll combine those two chat bots into your own chatbot. So then you get the best of both worlds. So creating your own gives you a lot of flexibility, because you can actually click which chat bots you want within yours, which is nice.

Lisa Dieker:

And I know we our theme here is reclaiming time. And you know, you found a way to create your own which took you time, but now you get better, or you see you can try my model of wasting a little bit of time of trying to get the word teacher spelled right. So again, but much faster than me trying to make art. And yet I still really respect the world of digital artists. Well, I know Maggie, we're both excited that kind of coming soon is ChatGPT and Sora, which will make videos, but we'll save that for another future podcast. So.

Maggie Mosher:

That sounds great. All right, it's gonna be even better than Invideo. So stay around.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, so we're excited, and thanks for taking the time to listen this podcast and hopefully reclaiming some of your own time.