[tl;dr: I used AI to write a song, The Ballad of Bitey Boy Brock at udio.com, and you could too!]
In one of my D&D classes one of the players wants to have a pet badger. I try to run my teaching campaigns with as much historical accuracy as is reasonably possible, so I looked into it a bit. The party is currently exploring the Shetland Islands during the early Viking Age, so I wanted to know what kinds of badgers they might run into. Unfortunately there were none.
But since I wanted them to run into some badgers soon, I had to come up with some way for badgers to appear in a place they naturally wouldn't. So I figured maybe they got transported there by some previous viking travelers on their longship. Maybe they were captured and escaped, or maybe they stowed away. Either way, it is plausible that some badgers from England or the European continent could have gotten there. Fair enough.
Next I needed a way for the badger to grow in size. Thankfully there is a spell in D&D for that: Enlarge. The party's wizard just got a Wand of Wonder, which can cast the Enlarge spell. Unfortunately that spell wears off quickly, so I needed to find a way to make it permanent. So I created a special magic item that gives a Sorcerer the ability to apply metamagic to other caster's spells. The bad guys would have it and use it to intercept the Enlarge spell, making the spell's effects permanent.
Then I needed to come up with a name for the badger. More research led me to learning that the old Norse word for badger was "brok", so I figured we could name him Brock. But as I was using chatGPT to work on all this I realized that maybe I should try to create a song that the bard would have sung about all this. So I started a new chat and wrote up a prompt for it:
I want to write a song. The working title is "the ballad of bitey boy Brock". It's the story of a badger named Brock. His grandparents stowed away on a Viking longship and ended up on an island in the Shetland islands where there weren't any other badgers. The song will be played by a female gnome Bard that uses bagpipes.
The first response was OK but not what I was looking for. I responded to the AI just like I would have if talking to a person I had hired to write the song. Eventually we worked up a good set of lyrics. I then probed a little about the music and learned that you can't sing while playing the bagpipes, so the music should be based on the lute instead.
Wanting to put together a printed page I could hand to the player, I quickly asked it to make pictures of the gnome bard and the badger. It did excellent work on the first try for each. So I put it all into a document and printed that out.
It could have ended there, and I would have been satisfied, but I knew that AI tools have advanced. Looking at one of my favorite AI tool aggregator sites I found a couple websites that can generate music. I chose Udio.com as the one most likely to be able to do it easily and for free, and got started.
I went through the guide quickly and then made my first attempt. It was super easy to do, and in only a few minutes I had a song done. But it wasn't quite what I wanted so I started over. The second time it was even better so I worked on that, making a couple dozen variations until I had something that felt finished.
The entire process, from starting with a vague idea to a finished song took just a few hours over the course of a week. This is an incredible amount of productivity for someone with no musical talent. I can see this process being used even for simple songs that might only get played once. And as the technology will only get better, I think anyone playing a bard should certainly look into using this to enhance their role-playing.