Extensions

These activities are optional. They match the appendices in the Student Workbook. Pick the ones that interest you.

Extension A: Bias in large language models (20 minutes)

• AI rapper FN Meka dropped by Capitol over racial stereotyping (BBC News)

Black activist group Industry Blackout called FN Meka "an amalgamation of gross stereotypes, appropriative mannerisms that derive from Black artists, complete with slurs infused in lyrics."

• DataBack Vol 2: Truth Before "Indigenous AI" (Animikii Inc.)

"Image generation AI also suffers from a serious case of pan-Indigenization: creating a kind of 'global average' of what the software presumes Indigenous people to look like world wide."

• Navigating the biases in LLM generative AI (Forbes)

"If certain groups or perspectives are underrepresented or excluded from the training data, the AI model will lack the necessary knowledge to generate unbiased and comprehensive content."

• What's in the Box? An analysis of undesirable content in the Common Crawl corpus (Luccioni & Viviano)

"The biases found in Internet-scale language models like GPT-2 are representative of the data on which the model was trained."

Extension B: Industry opinions on AI as a songwriter (20 minutes)

• Will AI write the lyrics of tomorrow's hits? (Music Business Worldwide podcast)

"It's like having a songwriting partner who has great ideas that you can either use or not use, but you cannot hurt their feelings."

"When the drum machine emerged in the '80s, people said we won't need drummers. But drummers were able to manipulate this new technology, and together with the sampler it arguably created hip-hop."

• Musicians, machines, and the AI-powered future of sound (Wired)

"Generative AI isn't unlike turntables: when artists discovered they could use them to scratch records and sample their sounds, they created whole new genres."

• Artistry in the algorithms: music in the age of AI (Berklee College of Music)

"There is a gray area when it comes to credit. It's hard to know when it's the artist's duty to disclose."

• AI music isn't going away. Here are 4 big questions about what's next (NPR)
• Recent advances in AI composition have serious implications for the music industry (ABC News)

"AI doesn't have the ability to discern between irony and fact," says composer Caitlin Yeo, adding that without oversight AI could make a "cultural soup" or misrepresent cultural information altogether.

• How Canadian musicians are responding to AI's rapid advancements (CBC Music)

"There's really no replacing the human experience in art. I feel like what makes my music significant is the human aspect of it."

Extension C: Generative AI and copyright law (20 minutes)

• Copyright implications of AI-generated music (Adler Law)

"The general rule in the United States is that music generated entirely by AI cannot be copyrighted."

• AI can make up songs now, but who owns the copyright? The answer is complicated (The Conversation)
• AI can write the lyrics, but who owns the music is up for debate (Bloomberg Law)

The US Copyright Office issued guidance in March 2023 stating that AI-generated content alone is not copyrightable; only human creativity can receive protection.

• How should Canadian copyright law treat works generated by artificial intelligence? (Canadian Bar Association, PDF)
• US Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
• Music publishers and Anthropic reach a deal over lyrics in a copyright lawsuit (The Verge)

Extension D: Write the whole song (30+ minutes)

You wrote a chorus in Lesson 3. Now write the rest of the song about your Indigenous role model without AI: at least two verses and your chorus. If you get stuck, decide for yourself whether and how to use the Songwriter Bot for ideas, and add an attribution if you do.

Then bring it to life. The Your Voice is Power modules teach you to remix music with code in EarSketch. You could record your lyrics and layer them over your own beat.