From DSC:
A few items re: ChatGPT — with some items pro-chat and other items against the use of ChatGPT (or at least to limit its use).


How About We Put Learning at the Center? — from insidehighered.com by John Warner
The ongoing freak-out about ChatGPT sent me back to considering the fundamentals.

Excerpt:

So, when people express concern that students will use ChatGPT to complete their assignments, I understand the concern, but what I don’t understand is why this concern is so often channeled into discussions about how to police student behavior, rather than using this as an opportunity to exam the kind of work we actually ask students (and faculty) to do around learning.

If ChatGPT can do the things we ask students to do in order to demonstrate learning, it seems possible to me that those things should’ve been questioned a long time ago. It’s why I continue to believe this technology is an opportunity for reinvention, precisely because it is a threat to the status quo.

Top AI conference bans use of ChatGPT and AI language tools to write academic papers — from theverge.com by James Vincent; with thanks to Anna Mills for this resource
AI tools can be used to ‘edit’ and ‘polish’ authors’ work, say the conference organizers, but text ‘produced entirely’ by AI is not allowed. This raises the question: where do you draw the line between editing and writing?

Excerpt:

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) announced the policy earlier this week, stating, “Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.” The news sparked widespread discussion on social media, with AI academics and researchers both defending and criticizing the policy. The conference’s organizers responded by publishing a longer statement explaining their thinking. (The ICML responded to requests from The Verge for comment by directing us to this same statement.)

How to… use AI to teach some of the hardest skills — from oneusefulthing.substack.com by Ethan Mollick
When errors, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies are actually very useful

Excerpt:

Instead, I want to discuss the opportunity provided by AI, because it can help us teach in new ways. The very things that make AI scary for educators — its tedency to make up facts, its lack of nuance, and its ability to make excellent student essays — can be used to make education better.

This isn’t for some future theoretical version of AI. You can create assignments, right now, using ChatGPT, that we will help stretch students in knew ways. We wrote a paper with the instructions. You can read it here, but I also want to summarize our suggestions. These are obviously not the only ways to use AI to educate, but they solve some of the hardest problems in education, and you can start experimenting with them right now.

NYC education department blocks ChatGPT on school devices, networks — from ny.chalkbeat.org by Michael Elsen-Rooney

Excerpt:

New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT — the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing — on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday.

Teachers v ChatGPT: Schools face new challenge in fight against plagiarism — from straitstimes.com by Osmond Chia; with thanks to Stephen Downes for this resource

Excerpt:

SINGAPORE – Teachers in Singapore say they will likely have to move from assignments requiring regurgitation to those that require greater critical thinking, to stay ahead in the fight against plagiarism.

This comes on the back of the rise of ChatGPT, an intelligent chatbot that is able to spin essays and solve mathematical equations in seconds.

ChatGPT Is Not Ready to Teach Geometry (Yet) — from educationnext.org by Paul T. von Hippel
The viral chatbot is often wrong, but never in doubt. Educators need to tread carefully.

Excerpt:

Can ChatGPT provide feedback and answer questions about math in a more tailored and natural way? The answer, for the time being, is no. Although ChatGPT can talk about math superficially, it doesn’t “understand” math with real depth. It cannot correct mathematical misconceptions, it often introduces misconceptions of its own; and it sometimes makes inexplicable mathematical errors that a basic spreadsheet or hand calculator wouldn’t make.

Here, I’ll show you.


Addendum on 1/9/23:

9 ways ChatGPT saves me hours of work every day, and why you’ll never outcompete those who use AI effectively. — from .linkedin.com by Santiago Valdarrama

A list for those who write code:

  1. 1. Explaining code…
  2. Improve existing code…
  3. Rewriting code using the correct style…
  4. Rewriting code using idiomatic constructs…
  5. Simplifying code…
  6. Writing test cases…
  7. Exploring alternatives…
  8. Writing documentation…
  9. Tracking down bugs…
 

Teaching: Will ChatGPT Change the Way You Teach? — from Chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie

Excerpt:

Want to get involved in the conversation around AI writing tools? Here are a few resources you might find helpful.

Anna Mills has put together several documents:

Elsewhere, a group of professors is compiling examples of how instructors are using text generation technologies in their assignments. The results will be published in an open-access collection. You can find out more about the project on this site, Teaching with Text Generation Technologies.

If you’re rather listen to a discussion, here are a couple of webinars:

 

 

The Difference Between ‘Playtime’ + ‘Production’ for AI + Legal Tech — from by Jim Wagner, CEO, Lean Law Labs.

Excerpt:

It’s fascinating to see what GPT-3 can do and the possibilities are in some cases nothing short of mind blowing. But before you plan your early 2023 implementation, you may want to exercise a bit of caution.  When it comes to using AI in a production environment – i.e., serving real customers with real expectations – you need solutions that deliver reliable results that you can explain to your clients … and potentially to a lot of other stakeholders, including courts and regulatory authorities.

Maybe in 2023 you can also try this line: ‘Dear client / court / regulator, we know it’s hard to believe, but a lot of the time you can rely on what we tell you.’

NOTE: Artificial Lawyer and its Founder are
now on sabbatical during 2023, returning in 2024.

From DSC:
My guess is that they are pursuing some serious, new opportunities involving using AI within the legaltech realm. Time will tell.

 

From DSC:
Check out the items below. As with most technologies, there are likely going to be plusses & minuses regarding the use of AI in digital video, communications, arts, and music.



Also see:


Also somewhat relevant, see:

 

The Edge Newsletter from Goldie Blumenstyk

Subject: The Edge: Today’s Issues in Schools; Tomorrow’s Higher-Ed Challenges

Excerpts:

Issues like chronic absenteeism in big urban and rural districts, the impact of classroom shootings on kids, and schools’ struggles to handle teenagers’ mental-health challenges might not be day-to-day concerns for college leaders and those who work with them. But these will matter to higher ed in the not-so-distant future, as those K-to-12 students make their way to college. And they could matter even more if those students don’t ever even make it to college.

Words of wisdom:

Those of us who might be a little higher-ed siloed in our thinking on education would do well to widen our perspective. 

From DSC:
And it isn’t just about the impacts of COVID-19 either — though those things are very important. We would do well to get out of our siloes and practice some high-level design thinking to implement a cradle-to-grave, lifelong learning ecosystem. The vocational and corporate training worlds are highly relevant here as well.

 

 


Also relevant/see:

 

94% of Consumers are Satisfied with Virtual Primary Care — from hitconsultant.net

Excerpt from What You Should Know (emphasis DSC):

  • For people who have used virtual primary care, the vast majority of them (94%) are satisfied with their experience, and nearly four in five (79%) say it has allowed them to take charge of their health. The study included findings around familiarity and experience with virtual primary care, virtual primary care and chronic conditions, current health and practices, and more.
  • As digital health technology continues to advance and the healthcare industry evolves, many Americans want the ability to utilize more digital methods when it comes to managing their health, according to a study recently released by Elevance Health — formerly Anthem, Inc. Elevance Health commissioned to conduct an online study of over 5,000 US adults age 18+ around virtual primary care.
 

GPT Takes the Bar Exam — from papers.ssrn.com by Michael James Bommarito and Daniel Martin Katz; with thanks to Gabe Teninbaum for his tweet on this

Excerpt from the Abstract (emphasis DSC):

While our ability to interpret these results is limited by nascent scientific understanding of LLMs and the proprietary nature of GPT, we believe that these results strongly suggest that an LLM will pass the MBE component of the Bar Exam in the near future.

LLM — Large Language Model
MBE — Multistate Bar Examination

 

What’s next for AI — from technologyreview.com by Melissa Heikkilä and Will Douglas Heaven
Get a head start with our four big bets for 2023.

Excerpts:

But take the conversational skills of ChatGPT and mix them up with image manipulation in a single model and you’d get something a lot more general-purpose and powerful. Imagine being able to ask a chatbot what’s in an image, or asking it to generate an image, and have these interactions be part of a conversation so that you can refine the results more naturally than is possible with DALL-E.

10 AI Predictions For 2023 — from forbes.com by Rob Toews

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

  1. GPT-4 will be released in the next couple months—and yes, it will be a big deal.
  2. We are going to start running out of data to train large language models.
  3. For the first time, some members of the general public will begin using fully driverless cars as their day-to-day mode of transportation.
  4. Midjourney will raise venture capital funding.
  5. Search will change more in 2023 than it has since Google went mainstream in the early 2000s.

AI Trends For 2023: Industry Experts (And ChatGPT AI) Make Their Predictions — from forbes.com by Ganes Kesari

Excerpt:

To understand the top AI trends, I asked industry leaders and academic experts five questions. It’s the age of human-machine collaboration, so what better way to demonstrate this than by asking AI software about the 2023 AI trends it’s excited about? I did that too.

    1. What do you think was the biggest achievement in the AI space in 2022?
    2. What’s the most exciting AI trend that you look forward to materializing in 2023?
    3. What’s a fad in this space that you wish would go away next year?
    4. To get value from AI, what’s one thing that leaders can start doing today that doesn’t take big effort or money?
    5. What’s one thing that leaders should stop doing immediately to realize benefits from AI?

Is A.I. the Future of Test Prep? — from nytimes.com by Craig S. Smith (NOTE: Paywall)

Excerpt:

Riiid is one of a handful of companies that believe that A.I.’s algorithms are perfectly suited to track student performance and give individualized attention.

“Education is a complex field deeply related to cognition, motivation, peer interaction, etc.,” Mr. Jang wrote in an email. “We draw insights from learning science, cognitive biology, data science, and other related areas of research for an iterative experimentation process that is challenging and time consuming — that’s why there are only a few players in the market.”

Artificial intelligence predictions 2023 — from information-age.com by Tim Adler
2023 could be the year that artificial intelligence moves from the fringes into the mainstream, as AI becomes widely adopted by healthcare, travel and banking. Five experts give their predictions

Excerpt:

Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence will hit half a billion dollars this year, according to IDC. Five artificial intelligence experts give Information Age their predictions as to how adoption of AI will accelerate in 2023.

.

 

From DSC:
The following article made me again wonder about the place of technology in the access to justice realm.


Legal Tech Startup Lexion Tasks GPT-3 to Help Draft Contracts in Microsoft Word — from voicebot.ai by Eric Hal Schwartz

Excerpt:

Lawyers can ask GPT-3 to help write contracts in Microsoft Word thanks to legal tech startup Lexion’s new AI Contract Assist Word plugin. The new tool offers assistance in drafting and negotiating terms, as well as summarizing the contract for those not versed in legal language and marks the growing interest in applying generative AI within the legal profession.

Lexion’s AI Contract Assistant is designed to compose, adjust, and explain contracts with an eye toward streamlining their creation and approval. Lawyers with the Word plugin can write a prompt describing the goal of a contract clause, and the AI will generate one with appropriate language. 

 

ChatGPT and The Professional’s Guide to Using AI — from linkedin.com by Allie K. Miller

Excerpt:

Real Ways Professionals Can Use ChatGPT to Improve Job Performance
Let’s dive into some real examples of how professionals across sales, marketing, product management, project management, recruiting, and teaching can take advantage of this new tool and leverage it for even more impact in their careers.

Teachers and ChatGPT

  1. Help with grading and feedback on student work.
    Example prompt: “Tell me every grammar rule that’s been violated in this student’s essay: [paste in essay]”
  2. Create personalized learning materials.
    Example prompt: “Help me explain photosynthesis to a 10th grade student in a way similar to sports.”
  3. Generate lesson plans and activities.
    Example prompt: “Create an activity for 50 students that revolves around how to learn the different colors of the rainbow.” or “Generate a lesson plan for a high school English class on the theme of identity and self-discovery, suitable for a 45-minute class period.”
  4. Write fake essays several reading levels below your class, then print them out, and have your students review and edit the AI’s work to make it better.
    Example prompt: “Generate a 5th grade level short essay about Maya Angelou and her work.”
  5. Providing one-on-one support to students.
    Example prompt: “How can I best empower an introverted student in my classroom during reading time?”

From DSC:
I haven’t tried these prompts. Rather I post this because I’m excited about the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help people teach and to help people to learn.

 

FutureFit AI:

Using AI to help workers navigate their careers
We use advanced labor market data and ethical machine learning algorithms to identify an individual’s ‘starting point’ in the labor market, recommend best fit career path ‘destinations’, and build a personalized roadmap of learning, resources, and work opportunities to successfully guide them from point A to point B in their career


From DSC:
This is a likely component of the Learning from the [Class]room vision that I’ve been tracking for several years now.

Learning from the living class room


 
Imagine my delight when co-founder of Coursera Daphne Koehler came into my office in 2012 to explain the radical concept behind her new business. What if you could Partner with the World’s best universities and professors to provide FREE online courses? Like other successful FREEMIUM models, you monetize the platform downstream by creating massive network effects and convert a small percentage to paying customers (we had invested in other successful FREEMIUM models such as Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and Snap, so why wouldn’t that work here?)

Today, over 113 million learners from around the world access the platform to gain knowledge, to earn certificates and get diplomas from the top universities.

The Coursera ride has been amazing for most of the past decade, with over 100 million students, 200 universities and 5000 courses on the platform. And while the vast majority of the students on Coursera don’t pay a dime, the company has built a business with over $500 million in revenue and nearly a $2 billion market cap today.

Estimates are for the company to do $520 million in revenue in 2022, up from $415 million in 2021 and estimated $623 million in 2023. Coursera is losing money currently but has $424 million in cash and could turn profitable if it prioritized that and sells at 1.3x 2023 sales.

 

ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education — from ditchthattextbook.com by Matt Miller
AI just stormed into the classroom with the emergence of ChatGPT. How do we teach now that it exists? How can we use it? Here are some ideas.

Excerpt:
Now, we’re wondering …

  • What is ChatGPT? And, more broadly, what are chatbots and AI?
  • How is this going to impact education?
  • How can I teach tomorrow knowing that this exists?
  • Can I use this as a tool for teaching and learning?
  • Should we block it through the school internet filter — or try to ban it?

Also relevant/see:

We gave ChatGPT a college-level microbiology quiz. It blew the quiz away. — from bigthink.com by Dr. Alex Berezow
ChatGPT’s capabilities are astonishing.

Key takeaways:

  • The tech world is abuzz over ChatGPT, a chat bot that is said to be the most advanced ever made.
  • It can create poems, songs, and even computer code. It convincingly constructed a passage of text on how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, in the voice of the King James Bible.
  • As a PhD microbiologist, I devised a 10-question quiz that would be appropriate as a final exam for college-level microbiology students. ChatGPT blew it away.

ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think — from theatlantic.com by Ian Bogost
Treat it like a toy, not a tool.

Excerpt:

On the one hand, yes, ChatGPT is capable of producing prose that looks convincing. But on the other hand, what it means to be convincing depends on context. The kind of prose you might find engaging and even startling in the context of a generative encounter with an AI suddenly seems just terrible in the context of a professional essay published in a magazine such as The Atlantic. And, as Warner’s comments clarify, the writing you might find persuasive as a teacher (or marketing manager or lawyer or journalist or whatever else) might have been so by virtue of position rather than meaning: The essay was extant and competent; the report was in your inbox on time; the newspaper article communicated apparent facts that you were able to accept or reject.

I Would Have Cheated in College Using ChatGPT — from eliterate.us by Michael Feldstein

Excerpt:

These lines of demarcation—the lines between when a tool can do all of a job, some of it, or none of it—are both constantly moving and critical to watch. Because they define knowledge work and point to the future of work. We need to be teaching people how to do the kinds of knowledge work that computers can’t do well and are not likely to be able to do well in the near future. Much has been written about the economic implications to the AI revolution, some of which are problematic for the employment market. But we can put too much emphasis on that part. Learning about artificial intelligence can be a means for exploring, appreciating, and refining natural intelligence. These tools are fun. I learn from using them. Those two statements are connected.

Google to Rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT? New AI Bot for Chats in 2023, CEO Claims to Use it for Search — from techtimes.com by Isaiah Richard
Google to expand its Search engine with AI for 2023, but not in a creepy way.

Excerpt:

Google is planning to create a new AI feature for its Search engine, one that would rival the recently released and controversial ChatGPT from OpenAI. The company revealed this after a recent Google executive meeting that involved the likes of its CEO Sundar Pichai and AI head, Jeff Dean, that talked about the technology that the internet company already has, soon for development.

Employees from the Mountain View giant were concerned that it was behind the current AI trends to the likes of OpenAI despite already having a similar technology laying around.


And more focused on the business/vocational/corporate training worlds:

Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces — from techcrunch.com by Ingrid Lunden

There are a lot of knowledge management, enterprise learning and enterprise search products on the market today, but what Sana believes it has struck on uniquely is a platform that combines all three to work together: a knowledge management-meets-enterprise-search-meets-e-learning platform.

Exclusive: ChatGPT owner OpenAI projects $1 billion in revenue by 2024 — from reuters.com by Jeffrey Dastin, Krystal Hu, and Paresh Dave

Excerpt:

Three sources briefed on OpenAI’s recent pitch to investors said the organization expects $200 million in revenue next year and $1 billion by 2024.

The forecast, first reported by Reuters, represents how some in Silicon Valley are betting the underlying technology will go far beyond splashy and sometimes flawed public demos.

“We’re going to see advances in 2023 that people two years ago would have expected in 2033. It’s going to be extremely important not just for Microsoft’s future, but for everyone’s future,” he said in an interview this week.


Addendum on 12/21/22:

ChatGPT and higher education: last week and this week — from bryanalexander.org by Bryan Alexander

 
 
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