Download the Chat GPT app onto your phone (this won’t work on desktop).
Upload this prompt. (If you want to learn a language other than French, you type into Chat GPT: “my friend gave me this prompt to help him brush up on his French… I want to use it to brush up on my Spanish. Can you adjust this prompt to reflect my goal to learn Spanish, and provide Spanish examples instead of French ones?)
Now Tap the black, circular button with the sound wave in it (see image).
Now, ask chat GPT (with your actual mouth and voice): “can you access the last prompt I gave you and start talking to me like a French tutor?”
Chat GPT will now begin asking you questions in French. Yes, this thing speaks fluent French, and more than 50 other languages.
If you don’t love the texture of the voice, there are nine others you can choose from: male, female, upbeat, sardonic… etc. Just click this button in the top right to browse them.
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Update on last week’s post: I got two totally opposite replies.
My friend said I had “killed their spirit”, after I wrote about Udio, the theme song generator. My friend T. is a lyricist and a songwriter. He was (jokingly) appalled.
I get it. He sees it as a threat to his livelihood.
The other response was from my old friend Steve in Hungary. He’s an English teacher there, and tapping A.i. every day in his classroom. Today, he’s using it to help his kids shoot short, English-language movies on their smartphones. They write the scripts in English, then act them out. It’s the ultimate writing/reading/oral exercise. He was thrilled, because he didn’t know about Udio. Now his kids can also write and create English language theme songs for their short films. It’s a whole other exercise for them, where they are practicing their English while having tons of fun and without it feeling like “homework”: a dream assignment for teachers!
This is a great example of how A.i. may take away a little at the margins, but give us back a 10,000% return.
I have never paid anyone to write me my own theme song. I likely never will. But if I wanted to write anything better than a cheesy, 15-second FM radio ad, I would ALWAYS hire a human, because they have taste, sensitivity, and an ability to know what I want, even when I cannot express it. Because humans are insanely awesome. And especially my friend T.
Udio is a scratch tool that cannot possibly replace my songwriter friend. Maybe a few radio jingle writers will be getting less work. (And that’s a BIG maybe. I think they could feasibly get more work, because they can now work so much faster, and therefore serve more demand for their time). But my friend T. is fine. He writes Broadway musicals. He’s a giant talent.
T. can do things the robots never can. He can listen to a client, or ten collaborators, or a test audience. He can craft. He can adjust. He can combine two or three genres flawlessly. He can isolate that one thing that’s failing and turn it into a triumphant refrain. The robots cannot do this and never will.
And I think he has the MOST to gain by using Udio in the same way the Hungarian students are: as a little sandpit to play in and IMPROVE HIS OVERALL SKILLS.
Because now he has an entire orchestra at his beck and call, that never sleeps or eats, ready to conduct every musical experiment and indulge every lyrical whim he could possibly have. And T. should have fun with it! Because you know who’s definitely going have fun with it? A kid — who knows? Maybe one of Steve’s Hungarian kids! — who will one day be a professional songwriter with 10,000 more musical “at-bats” than T. had at his age, thanks to this technology. T. will not be replaced by technology. But he might be replaced by an open-minded Hungarian 20-something human! But the good news is that T. has a massive head start in terms of his musical education! He’s the luckiest guy in this whole scenario!
The A.i. moment is not about “who is better, the robot or the human?” It’s a meaningless question, because robots don’t care about music. The better question is “how good can we get when we make the robots work alongside the humans?”
My message for today: do not despair. Do not let your spirit die. Play with these tools. They are here to help us, not replace us. Be like the Hungarian kids, not the spirit killers.
