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AI Explorers 6-8 / Week 08 / Explorer Quest
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Week 08 · How Generative AI Makes Things

Explorer Quest

Explorer Quest: The Family Word Machine
// From sorting to making
⏱ about 20 min

Explorer Quest: The Family Word Machine

Rocket opens a favorite picture book at the kitchen table. "Let us turn this page into a word machine."

Raven grabs a pencil. "We count which word follows which, just like the mission log."

"Then we make new sentences the book never had," Rocket says.

Nova floats above the open book. "Notice how much the new sentences sound like the book," she says.

"And notice whether any of them are actually true."

Raven starts the tally with the very first word of the first sentence.

  1. Generative AI makes new synthetic content: text, images, audio and video.
  2. Its outputs approximate the patterns in its training data.
  3. Large language models predict the next word in a sentence.
  4. New-sounding output can be built from old patterns, and it can be wrong.
  5. Real AI is a tool people build. It does not think like a person.
◇ FAMILY WORD MACHINE
Choose three short sentences from a book everyone knows.
For every word, tally the words that come right after it. A word that ends a sentence gets STOP as its next word.
Take turns building sentences: start with the first word of a sentence and pick a next word from its tally.
Keep picking from the tally of each new word until you reach STOP.
Read your sentences aloud. Which sound like the book? Which are silly or untrue?
WordNext words seenTally
For a grown-up
Ask: your word machine sounded like the book, but did it understand the story?
Talk about why smooth writing is not the same as true writing.
Remind your explorer to ask you before using any AI tool outside this course.
QUEST CHECK
  • Read the question.
  • Tap your answer.
Your word machine made a sentence the book never had. What kind of content is it?
Could your word machine use a word that is not in your three sentences?
What do large language models predict?
What one word describes content made by a computer system instead of directly by a person?
WHY THIS EXERCISEGenerative AI makes synthetic content.
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