Minds On: Every Song Tells a Story
Welcome to Your Voice is Power! Your Voice is Power is a program that combines music, social justice, and technology.
In this course we are going to talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and where it fits into creative activities like songwriting. Every song tells a story. By the end, you will have written lyrics that tell the story of an Indigenous role model, with AI and without it, and you will decide for yourself what role AI should play.
Activity 1: Key terms (3 minutes)
Before we start, let's clarify a few definitions. You will see these words throughout the course.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- When a computer mimics human intelligence or behaviour.
- Generative AI
- AI that creates new content such as text, images, music, or video, based on patterns in the data used to teach the AI.
- Large language model (LLM)
- The algorithm that processes natural (human) language when you use generative AI to understand or generate text.
- Prompt
- The input or instruction provided to an AI model to guide its output.
Tools like ChatGPT, and tools that create images from a description, are all examples of generative AI. They use large language models to understand your request and to generate output.
Quick check
You type "Write a happy song about my dog" into the Songwriter Bot. What is that sentence called?
Activity 2: The ground rules of AI (5 minutes)
Before we start using generative AI to help create song lyrics, we need to learn the ground rules.
The first rule when using AI is to NEVER share information that is not public information, such as your name, address, date of birth, or what school you attend. Remember, generative AI is trained by reading data, and that might include the data you enter!
Ethical companies are transparent about whether their generative AI tools store your prompts or the generated output. Our Songwriter Bot is based on Anthropic Claude and Amazon Bedrock, which do not store your prompts or generated output. You can read the details on the Songwriter Bot Technical Specifications page.
AI Safety
Keep private information private. Do not share personal information with AI.
Ground rules
Your answers are saved in this browser only. You can copy or download everything you wrote from the last lesson.
Coming up
In the next lesson you will put the Songwriter Bot through four tests and catch it making mistakes.
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