Imagining War with AI: an Experiment in Educational Semiotics

The present study aims to describe how generative AI was used for an educational experiment based on the principles of visual socio-semiotics. In fact, hundreds of images posted on Instagram by Italian and Iranian mass media were collected and stored related to the beginning of the last Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Gaza Strip. We analyzed them using structural semiotics and described their meanings through keywords and short sentences aimed at reproducing the topics and focusing points of the messages they conveyed. The results were presented to young teenagers—Italian and Iranian students—and through a questionnaire asked them to reflect on how the war was represented in their respective cultural contexts. Finally, as the keywords and short sentences used to describe the images were meant at inspiring a certain “prompting attitude”, participants were asked to recur to generative AI to create new images that expressed their own perspectives on the war. Analyzing their reflections on this experience, the conclusion is that visual socio-semiotics and AI can be employed in educational processes to help develop critical awareness of the cultural context they live in, and the positions taken within it. Situated at the crossroads of studies on the relationship between iconicity and the narration of reality, media socio-semiotics, educational semiotics, and critical AI theory, the main research question of our research was: can generative AI be used in education to contrast the spread of ideological narratives, instead of favoring it, as many scholars seem to fear.