What a crazy last 6 hours it’s been. I just finished my final project and it definitely did not go as I expected. Last week for my weekly summary, I detailed how I was going to do a commentary video on some aspect of AI and the advantages / disadvantages. While doing the rest of my piled work for the week before finals, I thought about topics that I wanted to hone in on, and it was definitely the use of ChatGPT and other forms of AI assistance in assignments. I did not have any time until today to knock it all out, so I prepared myself to finish my creation in one sitting starting at noon today. Not the greatest decision, but it has been a trend during my DS106 career, and I have made some of my best works with this last minute sprint towards the finish line, so I was expecting the same here (spoiler, it did not go as expected).
While watching some YouTube this morning, I stumbled upon an edited video full of jump cuts and memes that I used to enjoy watching back in high school. I drew some inspiration from this blessing from the YouTube algorithm and decided to make one of my own. My intent was to create a POV story about a student who doesn’t have a job lined up, and is looking for his first opportunity. However, he stumbles upon ChatGPT and uses it throughout his schoolwork and his interview prep, which leaves him with no actual knowledge and coding ability. It was meant to be a commentary on harmful AI use in computer science students. At the end, I was going to add 3-4 minutes of recorded commentary answering the question of whether or not AI is beneficial or harmful to students.
Around 8pm, I started to write up a script for this 3 minute commentary at the end of my video that would tie all of the knots up and bring the audience to a good conclusion. By 9:30pm, I’d written up a solid few pages on this topic to be read into my mic, recorded, and then overlaid with some various clips that relate to the topic.
This was when I messed up.
I was writing on my Windows Notepad, the default one that is preloaded on every Windows computer. I usually never do this and write all of my documents on Google Docs, but since I had so many tabs open for ClipChamp, OBS, downloading music and clips, along with other programs, I didn’t want to open another tab for Google Docs, and thought that since I’d just be reading off of it and discarding it, I would just write it on the Notepad.
Of course, my computer gave me the blue screen of pain and suffering for the first time in my ownership of this PC, and wiped all of my tabs, and most importantly, my script. My edited video was saved into the Cloud via Clipchamp, but the script for my commentary was completely wiped.
I tried various methods to restore the lost text file, but it seemed as though the system cache was already wiped due to the reset. I tried to rewrite all of it, but with my 4 hours of sleep and the deadline fast approaching, I had no willpower left to recreate a script that I’ve been writing for almost 2 hours, and I didn’t want to give the SparkNotes version in my final video, either.
Completely demoralized, I came to the conclusion to publish my video as is, and detail these events in my summary post instead. I think that narratively, my project is missing a conclusive answer and purpose due to not having the commentary at the end. I was going over some DS106 examples of how a few of my daily creates were AI generated, and how many aspects of DS106’s topic of the semester being AI contradicted the entire essence of the class, as well as going over some other computer science examples of how AI is used in classes as a distraction to student learning.
While I cannot share these insights anymore with the limited time that I have remaining, I will go more in depth about the video and audio editing that I that made me jog my creative digital skills that I accumulated throughout the semester.
I used OBS to record myself going through a scripted sequence of searching on Reddit for advice and using ChatGPT to solve a LeetCode problem, which is just a practice website for coding interviews.
I made sure that each click towards the next phase wasn’t too hasty, as I needed some time to overlay memes and audio clips to create the edit.
I then added this clip as the main background, and searched up various small videos and images that would add comedic effect to the story. A lot of the memes are from the mid 2010s, and the background music choice was also free music from Kevin Macleod that dominated YouTube for a long time.
The most difficult part about this was layering each clip and audio file to match the timing of each sequence. Also, having to track all of the different files in my arsenal became a bit of a hassle when the end product became almost 30 different files put together.
Most of the apps I used throughout the semester were used for this project. Without all of the experience I gained throughout DS106, this video probably wouldn’t have been possible.
I’m a little jumbled in the head right now from all of the stuff going on right now, but hopefully this was a comprehensive enough summary about my process. Looking forward to my conclusion to DS106 next week.
Leave a Reply