St. Francis cycle, Assisi: Funeral of St. Francis

St. Francis cycle, Assisi: Funeral of St. Francis

Giotto Assisi Ascension of St Francis

A Free Art History Course

My Free Art History Course project started in 2020 and the plan is to produce 250 45 minute YouTube videos with full lecturer notes summarising the history of Western art from cave painting to the present day by the end of 2026. The notes were initially researched and produced manually but, since 2023, the work has been increasingly automated using Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. I still check the notes using various books and websites, particularly Wikipedia and the relevant museum or gallery but any mistakes are my own. The Infographics, the discussions and the expanding text boxes were produced by Google NotebookLM. The YouTube videos were recorded on a Mac mini M4 with a Nano Blue microphone and using an iPhone 15 Pro Max as the camera. I am trying to fully automate the process, a project I call The Automated Lecturer, but AI may not have advanced sufficiently to achieve this aim by the end of 2026. However, I now believe that by 2028 the whole project will be seen as a waste of time as an AI system will be able to do the research and give the talks in a friendly, informative and factual way that exceeds my best efforts. Ho hum, c’est la vie.

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Laurence Shafe, copyright 2020