I wanted to share a discussion forum post I made this morning in my Lakeland Community College Course, MUSC 1800: Popular Music. Usually my prompts for discussion forums are centered around primary source material, but the prompt in this case is to write a verse of 12-bar blues lyrics, using a model that is discussed in our textbook and in the supporting materials I provide, including a Google Form to help students along. ChatGPT’s answer to the prompt is actually indicative of the mistakes some students tend toake on their first attempt. Here’s my post:
So, like many of your professors, I’ve been thinking a lot during 2023 about ChatGPT and similar AIs and what students and teachers might be doing with them. Of paramount and immediate concern to many of us is whether ChatGPT can do your assignments for you. So far, my finding has been a resounding “no, not if you want full credit.” But… it can probably help you as well.
To that end, here’s a short conversation I had with ChatGPT this morning:
Dr. Saunders: Write a verse of lyrics for a 12-bar blues about ChatGPT
ChatGPT:
Well, I’m a ChatGPT, baby, here to please
I’ll answer your questions, just like a breeze
I’m an AI, powered by GPT
Ready to rock, come and chat with meI’m a language model, with knowledge so vast
From history to science, I’ll make it last
Ask me anything, I’ll give you my best
In this digital world, I’m your friendly questI’m the blues of the internet, keeping it real
Analyzing data with an electric feel
I’ll write you lyrics, with a soulful touch
Bringing the rhythm, you’ll love it so muchSo come on, let’s groove, in this digital zone
With ChatGPT, you’ll never feel alone
I’m here to entertain, 24/7
Just type away, and let the blues of AI heavenI would say that the first thing you should notice is that ChatGPT gave us multiple verses when I only asked for one. That’s OK… I wouldn’t take points off for showing more creativity than is strictly required. However… our model for 12-bar blues lyrics is three lines, with the first two lines being similar to each other and the last line rhyming with the first. It’s clearly not doing that. But, as I discussed in my previous post, the three-line structure is typical of early blues, but was modified by later musicians, so maybe we can use some of this.
I’m not an English professor. To me, the quality of these rhymes is really just so-so, but the content of the lines is pretty good. I’m going to rewrite the first verse a little:
Well, I’m a ChatGPT, baby, and I’m just here to please. [bars 1-2, instrumental response in 3-4]
Well, I’m just a little ol’ ChatGPT baby, and you know I’m here to please. [bars 5-6, instrumental response in 7-8]
I’m gonna answer all your questions, just like an AI-powered breeze. [bars 9-10, instrumental response in 11-12]
This fits our model better… I think the most powerful potential for AI for students right now is this kind of thing: maybe you understand the way 12-bar blues works fairly well, but coming up with poetry is not your bag. ChatGPT is here to help.
Now… could you have given a more specific prompt and have the AI spit out a verse that does fit our model? Possibly. I’d love to see your results in this thread, but if you work with ChatGPT or something similar, academic honesty means that you need to let your instructor know.
(Saunders, Matthew. “ChatGPT Blues.” Posting in “12-bar Blues Forum” in Blackboard Ultra site for MUSC 1800: Popular Music Summer 2023 CRN 40149. Lakeland Community College. June 30, 2023.)
So… what am I trying to do here? I’ve been thinking about ways that I can use AI as an ally, and encourage my students to learn use it as a part of their toolkit, both now as learners, and later as workers in some capacity: where I only have to deal with AI for the second half of my career, my students will be dealing with it as part and parcel of what they do… much like the difference in the way a Boomer would have related to e-mail vs. the way a Gen Xer would have approached it. Building and learning to use a toolkit is in part, I think, what students should be doing in a general education course in the humanities.
When I took statistics in college in the mid-1990s, I learned a great deal about statistics, but I also had assignments that were due in a software program I had never used before, Microsoft Excel (music majors didn’t do many spreadsheets in those days). As it turned out, I have used Excel or a program like it in every job I’ve had since graduation (except the summer I sold shoes at Dillard’s), in my artistic and personal work. When I worked on my DMA document (the not-quite-a-dissertation you write when you earn a Doctor of Musical Arts), Excel was a big part of my process. ChatGPT and programs like it are probably the Excel of Gen Z.
“Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.”
—Adventures in Babysitting
At the same time, we make non-majors study the humanities because being “educated” (as opposed to “trained”) means that a person has the skills to reflect and think about what it means to be human, about whether decisions are right. This little experience with ChatGPT shows that AI can make a stab at writing the blues, and even if it doesn’t get it right, it can still be helpful to a human who has an assignment to complete. But that’s not what the blues, or any musical expression, is, is it? The blues is taking the difficult parts of a human life, and putting them into an experience that we share with other humans. We can think about the reasons humans might like to do this: catharsis comes to mind, but there is also the need to share with others and to feel not alone. There is the satisfaction that the listener gains too, from feeling that someone else is living this life. My students have to write blues lyrics because I tell them too, not because they have the deep-seeded need to express their pain and anguish (which they may do in other ways, and which I try not to contribute to). In that sense, is their experience of the blues more like the experience of an AI trying to write the blues?
Last, I have a job to do, and as much as I’ve always worried about my fundamental ability (or lack thereof) to know whether the person registered for an online class is actually the person doing the work, ChatGPT should have us all reconsidering what we assign and how students might complete that assignment. I gave a very simple prompt, and ChatGPT bombed the assignment. This has been my experience so far every time I’ve given assignments from my class to ChatGPT, but it’s only a matter of time, they tell us, before AI will be able to produce convincing creative work.
So, I think the next time I run this class, I’ll modify this prompt: I’ll ask students to use ChatGPT or some other AI to create blues verses and copy the conversation into the forum. Then, the class can critique the verses, just like I did above, and demonstrate in that way their understanding of the 12-bar blues form. Or something else. Keep the machines guessing, everyone!