This week I thought about what modalities included audio, could engage with the photos from the “What’s in your bag?” task, and would also move beyond just spoken word audio to include other modalities.
Ultimately I decided on creating a short podcast episode. This podcast is hosted by an AGI system and takes place in the “near distant” future. This AGI system is a bit of a humanity aficionado, and the show focuses on different ways humanity would exist in the world. In this episode the AGI is able to secure a permit to thaw an entry from the library of humanity to talk about how humanity would physically exist in the world and move from place to place.
I was thinking about the great multimodal diagram from Cazden et al. (1996) so wanted to create a visual, audio, and linguistic artifact. To that end I used a variety of tools and services and within the fiction of the episode I wanted to unadulterate the products of the systems as much as possible.
- Copilot to create the podcast logo/image
- I did try a couple of times to get it away from such stereotypical AGI imagery and incorporate more elements of podcast splash screens/logos. Eventually I thought, maybe my ideas around what makes a good podcast image are limited by my frail humanity so I left it as-is.
- Suno.ai to create the podcast intro/outro music
- I’m not really a music person, so this I left as-is without any micro-managing. The prompt was just around creating podcast theme music for a podcast hosted by an AGI in the near distant future.
- ChatGPT 3.5 to create the script for the AGI host
- Again, I kept this simple and used the first output. It’s more long-winded than the script I had drafted but I realized I wanted to adhere to the in-fiction rules as much as possible.
- FreeTTS.com to generate the audio of the host from my script
- This is far from the best AI generated voice I’ve heard but is listenable!
- Kaltura’s machine-generated captions to create captions of the final product
Finally, I wrote myself a script for my section, recorded myself, and edited it all together. I’m hopeful that this final product ticked the same boxes the images did, in a playful way.
References
- Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J., & New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u