What Happens When You Ask AI to Paint a Chart on a Wall?

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this nice Linkedin post from the DC Policy Center that shows Washington, DC student assessment scores by student group relative to pre-pandemic levels. It’s a straightforward line chart with labels right on the graph built in Flourish with a dropdown at the top. The placed the graph in a blue frame on top of a photograph of a mural.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong or ineffective here. The graph is clear and easy to read, and the background gives it nice pop on the page.

But if you look closely, the chart is not angled the same way as the wall and, quite obviously, looks like a line chart placed on top of the photo. Again, that’s not a problem and is a fairly common practice.

But it made me wonder: What if the chart actually looked like it was painted onto the mural itself?

So I turned my trusty friend, ChatGPT, with this simple prompt:

Can you redesign this so it doesn’t look like an Excel graph on a mural but the graph is painted on the mural?

The result is pretty nice. The chart now appears integrated with the wall and has a painted effect that matches the mural.

The data, however, are not quiteright. The leftmost value should be exactly 100; the top value for the “Students with disabilities” series should be around 125, not 150; and there are two entries of 50 along the y-axis.

I found the data on the DC Policy Center website and asked ChatGPT to regenerate the chart using the correct values, but it still couldn’t quite get it right. I guess the next step would be to either (a) create it from scratch by myself (not likely!), (b) ask ChatGPT to provide me with an editable SVG that I could bring into another program, or (c) try it in a tool like Canva where I could edit directly. Or, it might require a professional designer, which might be too much for a single social media post, but could be considered for other uses.

Folks have lots of opinions about these new AI tools, and weighing in on that debate isn’t the purpose of this post. But tools like this can be useful for quickly exploring design ideas—even if the final graphic still requires a human to get the data and details right.