Well, hello and welcome to the Hilbert School podcast. My name is Bill Selleck and I am going to be your solo host for this episode of our podcast. We've been talking a lot this season about the arts, about creative arts, performing arts, visual arts, all the arts, and the importance of it. And I think you've been on board with it. We've heard good things, although I suppose if you're just like low key critical of it, you probably wouldn't leave a comment and say, meh, you probably would just would stop listening or listen at like triple speed. Either way, we're glad we're making it. We're glad you're listening to it. And this episode is kind of a take on our last one around AI and music, but it's also looking at kind of this whole season as we head into spring break as a whole. And I'm going to try and frame it up for you a little bit with some conversations I've been having with kind of various people and just kind of different articles and ways that AI has changed. Like I was going to say in the last couple months, in the last couple days, if we're being realistic, but there's definitely kind of a trend. And I think that there are stories being told around artificial intelligence in schools and AI and education in general, and some of those are just off. Some of those are wrong. Some of those are brilliant. I'm going to jump into one particular take, and that is actually the importance of writing and creative writing as possibly the most important skill a student can learn. Now, let's see. Let's see if that that thesis statement, spoken as a question, actually plays itself out. A lot of talk has happened about the idea of prompt engineering is the new job, and there's all these openings for prompt engineers and yeah, that's great, and that's true and accurate and all those things. But the thing is, if you are a fourth grader, that's not particularly helpful to say prompt engineering is a thing, I think, for adults. A lot of thoughts are like, oh, this is new. This is different. There's a whole new era of jobs going away and new jobs being created. And I think prompt engineering as a job is one of those things we can point to, certainly as a school, to say, like, we're creating an environment for students to succeed in a world we can't yet imagine. I've been hearing our head of school, Mark Silver, say that now for ten years, not because he's been saying it for less time, because that's how long I've been here at Hillbrook for ten years. I've been hearing him say that. And it's like, yeah, okay. But it's always felt very vague and, like, idealistic in a way that it should be, right? Like, I agree with it 100%, but it's always felt kind of an unattainable vague thing. And now, particularly with this idea of, like, prompt engineering is a job, and people are making a lot of money doing it, suddenly it's like, oh, this? This is that job. We can't yet imagine. Three years ago, if you hear an 8th grader being like, I want to be a prompt engineer. You're like, I don't know what that means. Let's get back on task. And now we're like, this is amazing. So I think we're. This is the first of possibly thousands of examples of new jobs that we can't yet imagine of a future we can't yet imagine. But I think we're starting to see it, like, vaguely take shape in an incredibly, like, nebula, blurry, vague way. But here's the thing. I think people are missing about talking about schools and education and kids and the importance of AI. So if you've been following the news, you know this. If not, I'm breaking the news to you. Sora is the latest in AI creations. It does text to video. Say that again, because this is a thing that you might need to pull over and be like, what? It does? Yes. And if you know this, you might be like, dude, yes, this is amazing. Text to video. So at his most basic, one was like, chat GPT 3.5. And just to be simplistic, we're going to talk about just kind of chat GPT in particular, 3.5, was like, it's amazing. It can write and be coherent, and you can ask questions. I was like, that's amazing. So, like, text generation amazing. Check. Dolly comes around. Text to image, mid journey. Similarly, text to image. And what I think we're missing as people talking about education. So if you're an educator, right? Put on your educator hat. If you're a parent, put on your parent hat. If you're both like, put one hat over the other hat. I don't know. This is why I usually have more people on the podcast, and they keep me from telling these terrible jokes. The idea that the more descriptive your writing is, the better and more detailed an image is, is an entirely new concept. Now, I'm gonna pause that thought for just a moment. When I was teaching second grade full time, one of the primary things we spent time with in writing was be more descriptive. And an unhelpful thing I said many, many times was add more adjectives, describe it more, describe it better. And very generally speaking, the more descriptive writing is, the better it is. But also not necessarily. When I'm writing an email at our school, I don't go back and be like, oh, let me add two more adjectives to this sentence. That's ridiculous, but that's what I did as a second grade teacher. And to be fair, I'd likely do a similar version of that if I was still teaching second grade. It's an important skill to be able to be more descriptive in your writing, particularly with creative writing. But I was always stuck with the why? Like because it's good writing. Well, that's not a good answer to a seven or an eight year old. But now with Dolly, with mid journey, with any number of text to image AI generators, the more descriptive your writing is, the more interesting, the more control you have over your images. So whether you ask it to make a realistic photo, like a paper folding 3d piece of art, a drawing in crayons, something in the style of another artist, an impressionistic painting of whatever, the more descriptive you can be. Whatever's in your head is better. Going to show up on those pixels in that image. And that, in and of itself, really takes creative writing from like, okay, yes, is an important skill to like, whoa. Suddenly this is immediately applicable. So let's take that, and without being hyperbolic, multiply it by 1000. Because when we look at the number of pixels you have to generate for a photo versus the amount of pixels you create for video, even like 3 seconds of video, it is thousands more pixels. It's thousands more amounts of data. This is why in the early days of the web, video wasn't really a thing. Audio wasn't really a thing. It was like low res images. It was mostly text. Because that's what you could get over, like a DSL line. Or what was the old, old one? Like a 44 one, dial up something 128k. I'm forgetting somebody. Tell me. Anyway, as we now have broadband and fast wifi in most places, certainly in my life, our ability to have video is now just kind of permeates everything. It's how most of us often consume content. So now let's take all of that and look at generative AI video. So the more descriptive a person can be in that prompt, the better their videos are going to be. So if we look at this with like a 6th grader let's say, all right, write your paragraph, 6th grader. Great. Okay, whatever. Add more descriptions. Why? Because it's on the rubric. Because that's what good writers do. Because I said so. But now let's work together as a 6th grade class. Let's write a really good prompt to make. And I'm just going through kind of my mental list of what Sora, which is under the umbrella of OpenAI. That's their AI video generator with what some of theirs are. Right? So like a photorealistic, like, helicopter view of an 1849 gold mining town. All right. The more descriptive you're going to be with how you want to see that video, the more accurate that video is going to be with what's in your head. So at its heart, creativity is so, so, so important. Right? That's how we're connecting with this whole season on this podcast episode. But for this particular episode, the better you are at writing, the more creative you are at writing, the better your videos are going to be. To put that more simply, the more descriptive you are as a writer, the better you are as a movie maker. That has never quite been the thing. Movies need scripts. We need people to be good writers in order to make movies. But it's never been one step of type in text, get a video. And so now why do I have to be more descriptive? Why do I have to add more adjectives? Well, because you're going to have more control over that movie you're making. And this might feel a little far fetched, but I genuinely believe in this calendar year we're going to be seeing the ability for people to create videos based on text prompts. And that, my goodness, that puts creative writing and the ability to be descriptive, the ability to be creative and put those creative ideas into descriptive words, that puts that at the forefront of skills that kids need to learn. So do they need all of these different arts in school? Yes, absolutely. Are we always going to teach reading, writing and math? Yes. Yes, we are. Depending on what school you go to, that's most of how you spend your day in school because that's most of what's tested in schools. And now we're at a point where the better you are as a writer, the more creative and descriptive you can be as a writer, the better you are at creating images, the better you are at creating videos. Right? That's the exciting part right there. I hope you're excited about that. I know I'm excited about that. I think the more we as parents, we as educators, can wrap our brains around that, the more we're really going to prepare our students to be these content creators that are making movies using AI video generator. We're still going to want people to shoot with actual cameras, right? And like, edit them in your standard, like, final cut pro video editing suite. All of these skills are still incredibly important. We're still going to need people to write actual scripts that are 200 pages long. That's still gonna be a thing. That's a long script, 150 pages. We're still gonna want that and need that, and that's how most of it will get done. But I think there's gonna be this whole other category of people who suddenly are good creative writers that are going to be movie makers. And for me, that just bridges the whole world of writing and creative arts in a way that we haven't quite seen yet. It's new, it's a little scary, but it's also deeply, deeply exciting. So if you have anyone that's been like, kind of shrugging off AI stuff, of being like, oh, it writes terribly, whatever, I really think that's not the conversation we should be having. It really needs to be like, what are all these different tools that our students, that our kids, that all of us actually are going to have literally at our fingertips? Or, you know, at some point we can just talk. It. You actually don't even need to type. To talk. With chat GPT, you can just talk, which is another argument for why we don't need to teach typing skills. But that's for another day. You can just talk or type or whatever, input words and get video, get words, get photos, get kind of all the things. It's pretty exciting. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see. I'm excited to try. Sora, if you have any other video AI platforms you know of, I'd love to hear about them. I think Sora by OpenAI is number one on my list and yeah, we'll see where we go. So wrapping things up, we have a few more episodes this season to continue with our theme around the arts in education. We're gonna come back with some more guests. We have, I think, three more episodes left this season. So thanks for sticking around. And if you're listening to this in real time, happy spring break. If you're not, then happy insert your day here. And thanks for listening.