Best of CASE District III Award
 

Institution: Florida International University

Title of entry: Adventures in AI Image Generation

About this entry: Aimed at advancement professionals, particularly those involved in writing and marketing for higher education fundraising, this blog post explores ways to use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate useable images in advancement publications. This may include proposals, impact reports, and other materials involved in fundraising and/or donor relations. Published on the UC Davis-hosted website for the Advancement Strategic Communicators Network (ASC)—a newly formed group of advancement writers—it is published in the ideal place to reach our colleagues.

The article grew out of a need for a cover image for an impact report to be presented to the university’s top alumnus donor. Stock images did not seem to represent the contents of the report and can be expensive. Lacking time and wishing to keep costs down, I experimented with free AI image generation. After trying several different platforms, with varying success, I realized AI-generated images might be a resource for other advancement writers. Besides, it was fun to write a prompt and see what AI would come up with, the results being occasionally amusing.

In the end, AI produced an image that I used for the report’s cover. Along the way, I got a feel for what does and does not work in AI and what to look out for. I hope it will be useful to others in the same position—those in urgent need of an image that does not already exist.