Beginner course · Chapter 7 of 8
Speak, See, Create
Speak instead of typing, make pictures from words, and ask a machine what is in a photograph.
This page lists what a learner is able to do at the end of this class. It does not carry the class itself. The lessons, exercises and answers stay in the classroom and in the book.
What you will be able to do
- Produce written text using your voice, without typing
- Generate images from a description and improve them
- Control the style of a generated image on purpose
- Use a chatbot to identify plants, read handwriting and describe photographs
- Think clearly about who owns something a machine made from your description
What the class is really about
Typing is a real barrier for a lot of people. It is slow if you learned late, awkward in a second script, and hard on older hands. This class is about the three ways in and out of an AI tool that are not typing.
First, speaking. Dictation has become good enough to write a full document with. The class covers where it is accurate, where it struggles, and how it copes with an Indian accent. For a learner who types slowly, this one skill changes what these tools are worth to them more than anything else in the course.
Second, making images from a description. The prompt ideas from the earlier class carry straight over. Saying who, what, and in what style produces something you can use, while a vague description produces something generic. You also learn to control style deliberately, asking for a photograph or a watercolour or a pencil sketch and getting it.
Third, going the other way round. Point a camera at a plant and ask what it is. Photograph a page of handwriting and get it back as text you can edit. Show it a picture and ask what is happening in it.
Then the harder question, which we do not pretend to settle. If you described it and a machine drew it, who made it? What should you say when you share it? This is genuinely unsettled, in law and in practice, and a learner should leave knowing that it is unsettled rather than believing somebody has already worked out a tidy answer.
Careful use
Attribution. Saying where something came from when a machine helped make it.
Careful use is not a separate lesson at the end of the course. A piece of it belongs to every one of the eight classes, and this is the piece that belongs to this one.
How this class is taught
- One core concept. The class carries a single idea. Nothing is covered twice and nothing is rushed.
- Hands before theory. You do the thing first. The explanation lands better once you have seen what happened.
- Practice in company. Weekday slots in the lab follow the weekend class, with somebody there to help.
- Mixed ages at one table. The youngest in a batch may be ten and the oldest past fifty. Each takes something from the other.
Chapter 6, Building With Blocks · Chapter 8, Describe It, Build It, Own It