You can see everyone’s AI pitches here: https://ds106.ai/category/aipitch/. I recommend looking them over because you may find a tool you can use in the upcoming weeks. I noticed some people didn’t link to the tools they promoted, which is surprising for a couple reasons. One, it’s like trying to sell a car without letting the customer see it, let alone take a test drive. And more importantly, hyperlinking is a fundamental element of digital text. This is the web, people! Without links, a post is just a strand of silk floating in the breeze.
I asked the great and wise Dr. Oblivion for his thoughts on this, and he responded in full attitude:
I didn’t specify that the pitch should link to the product because, to me, that’s just common sense. But maybe it’s not. Also, I suspect people have been trained to look for rules and rubrics and may not be used to the kind of freedom of interpretation they have here. But in any case, links to the tools are on the Week 8 page, and there is a good variety so take a look and see if you can make use of any of them in your creative endeavors.
One tool I’ve been using regularly is the MP3 to TEXT tool from Converter.app. It saves me the trouble of transcribing Dr. Oblivion, which is great for adding grammatically correct captions to Youtube videos. It’s a great timesaver on podcasts too, when they don’t offer transcripts. There are a lot of other converters, but converter.app gives you something the others don’t: Free sentences! For example, at the end of Dr. Oblivion’s response above, it added “At this point we have some scenarios that are interested in producing the vision of the AI’s team.” I have no idea where that came from or why it did it. Does it hallucinate like ChatGPT? Does it go a little off the rails every once in a while like Dr. Oblivion? It’s an AI tool that goes above and beyond the call of duty.
Speaking of above and beyond, in a conference call the other day with Dr. Oblivion’s creator and inspiration, I shared the Aggressive Technologies website that Feli created. They were as impressed as I was. When we say ds106 is #4life it is because people get inspired to go above and beyond and create amazing things like this. Now the challenge for the rest of the class is to see if there are ways to tie the site to their stories. Not that anyone has to, but it would be wonderful if they can.
