emerging technologies

Voice Banks (preserving our voices for AI) [Kubicki]

On 05/12/2024, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, digital audio, digital video, emerging technologies, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, society, by Daniel Christian

Voice Banks (preserving our voices for AI) — from thebrainyacts.beehiiv.com by Josh Kubicki

The Ethical and Emotional Implications of AI Voice Preservation

Legal Considerations and Voice Rights
From a legal perspective, the burgeoning use of AI in voice cloning also introduces a complex web of rights and permissions. The recent passage of Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, which allows legal action against unauthorized recreations of an artist’s voice, underscores the necessity for robust legal frameworks to manage these technologies. For non-celebrities, the idea of a personal voice bank brings about its own set of legal challenges. How do we regulate the use of an individual’s voice after their death? Who holds the rights to control and consent to the usage of these digital artifacts?

To safeguard against misuse, any system of voice banking would need stringent controls over who can access and utilize these voices. The creation of such banks would necessitate clear guidelines and perhaps even contractual agreements stipulating the terms under which these voices may be used posthumously.

Should we all consider creating voice banks to preserve our voices, allowing future generations the chance to interact with us even after we are gone?

Microsoft’s new ChatGPT competitor… — from The Rundown AI

The Rundown: Microsoft is reportedly developing a massive 500B parameter in-house LLM called MAI-1, aiming to compete with top AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

2024 | The AI Founder Report | Business Impact, Use cases, & Tools — from Hampton; via The Neuron

Hampton runs a private community for high-growth tech founders and CEOs. We asked our community of founders and owners how AI has impacted their business and what tools they use

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s inside:

The budgets they set aside for AI research and development
The most common (and obscure) tools founders are using
Measurable business impacts founders have seen through using AI
Where they are purposefully not using AI and much more

2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report from Microsoft and LinkedIn
AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part Employees want AI, leaders are looking for a path forward.

Also relevant, see Microsoft’s web page on this effort:

To help leaders and organizations overcome AI inertia, Microsoft and LinkedIn looked at how AI will reshape work and the labor market broadly, surveying 31,000 people across 31 countries, identifying labor and hiring trends from LinkedIn, and analyzing trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals as well as research with Fortune 500 customers. The data points to insights every leader and professional needs to know—and actions they can take—when it comes to AI’s implications for work.

Information Age vs Generation Age Technologies for Learning — from opencontent.org by David Wiley

Remember (emphasis DSC)

the internet eliminated time and place as barriers to education, and
generative AI eliminates access to expertise as a barrier to education.

Just as instructional designs had to be updated to account for all the changes in affordances of online learning, they will need to be dramatically updated again to account for the new affordances of generative AI.

The Curious Educator’s Guide to AI | Strategies and Exercises for Meaningful Use in Higher Ed — from ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub by Kyle Mackie and Erin Aspenlieder; via Stephen Downes

This guide is designed to help educators and researchers better understand the evolving role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in higher education. This openly-licensed resource contains strategies and exercises to help foster an understanding of AI’s potential benefits and challenges. We start with a foundational approach, providing you with prompts on aligning AI with your curiosities and goals.

The middle section of this guide encourages you to explore AI tools and offers some insights into potential applications in teaching and research. Along with exposure to the tools, we’ll discuss when and how to effectively build AI into your practice.

The final section of this guide includes strategies for evaluating and reflecting on your use of AI. Throughout, we aim to promote use that is effective, responsible, and aligned with your educational objectives. We hope this resource will be a helpful guide in making informed and strategic decisions about using AI-powered tools to enhance teaching and learning and research.

Annual Provosts’ Survey Shows Need for AI Policies, Worries Over Campus Speech — from insidehighered.com by Ryan Quinn
Many institutions are not yet prepared to help their faculty members and students navigate artificial intelligence. That’s just one of multiple findings from Inside Higher Ed’s annual survey of chief academic officers.

Only about one in seven provosts said their colleges or universities had reviewed the curriculum to ensure it will prepare students for AI in their careers. Thuswaldner said that number needs to rise. “AI is here to stay, and we cannot put our heads in the sand,” he said. “Our world will be completely dominated by AI and, at this point, we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Is GenAI in education more of a Blackberry or iPhone? — from futureofbeinghuman.com by Andrew Maynard
There’s been a rush to incorporate generative AI into every aspect of education, from K-12 to university courses. But is the technology mature enough to support the tools that rely on it?

In other words, it’s going to mean investing in concepts, not products.

This, to me, is at the heart of an “iPhone mindset” as opposed to a “Blackberry mindset” when it comes to AI in education — an approach that avoids hard wiring in constantly changing technologies, and that builds experimentation and innovation into the very DNA of learning.
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For all my concerns here though, maybe there is something to being inspired by the Blackberry/iPhone analogy — not as a playbook for developing and using AI in education, but as a mindset that embraces innovation while avoiding becoming locked in to apps that are detrimentally unreliable and that ultimately lead to dead ends.

Do teachers spot AI? Evaluating the detectability of AI-generated texts among student essays — from sciencedirect.com by Johanna Fleckenstein, Jennifer Meyer, Thorben Jansen, Stefan D. Keller, Olaf Köller, and Jens Möller

Highlights

Randomized-controlled experiments investigating novice and experienced teachers’ ability to identify AI-generated texts.
Generative AI can simulate student essay writing in a way that is undetectable for teachers.
Teachers are overconfident in their source identification.
AI-generated essays tend to be assessed more positively than student-written texts.

Can Using a Grammar Checker Set Off AI-Detection Software? — from edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young
A college student says she was falsely accused of cheating, and her story has gone viral. Where is the line between acceptable help and cheating with AI?

Use artificial intelligence to get your students thinking critically — from timeshighereducation.com by Urbi Ghosh
When crafting online courses, teaching critical thinking skills is crucial. Urbi Ghosh shows how generative AI can shape how educators can approach this

ChatGPT shaming is a thing – and it shouldn’t be — from futureofbeinghuman.com by Andrew Maynard
There’s a growing tension between early and creative adopters of text based generative AI and those who equate its use with cheating. And when this leads to shaming, it’s a problem.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

This will sound familiar to anyone who’s incorporating generative AI into their professional workflows. But there are still many people who haven’t used apps like ChatGPT, are largely unaware of what they do, and are suspicious of them. And yet they’ve nevertheless developed strong opinions around how they should and should not be used.

From DSC:
Yes…that sounds like how many faculty members viewed online learning, even though they had never taught online before.

AI-based apps starting to remember more about us — in learning-related apps, that’s a good thing!

On 05/03/2024, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, colleges, community colleges, education technology, emerging technologies, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, IT in HE, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, liberal arts, library / librarians, memory, online tutoring, Open AI, personalized/customized learning, platforms, teaching & learning, technologies for your home, tools, United States, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

ChatGPT remembers who you are — from thebrainyacts.beehiiv.com |Brainyacts #191

OpenAI rolls out Memory feature for ChatGPT
OpenAI has introduced a cool update for ChatGPT (rolling out to paid and free users – but not in the EU or Korea), enabling the AI to remember user-specific details across sessions. This memory feature enhances personalization and efficiency, making your interactions with ChatGPT more relevant and engaging.

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Key Features

Automatic Memory Tracking
- ChatGPT now automatically records information from your interactions such as preferences, interests, and plans. This allows the AI to refine its responses over time, making each conversation increasingly tailored to you.
Enhanced Personalization
- The more you interact with ChatGPT, the better it understands your needs and adapts its responses accordingly. This personalization improves the relevance and efficiency of your interactions, whether you’re asking for daily tasks or discussing complex topics.
Memory Management Options
- You have full control over this feature. You can view what information is stored, toggle the memory on or off, and delete specific data or all memory entries, ensuring your privacy and preferences are respected.

Memory is now available to all ChatGPT Plus users. Using Memory is easy: just start a new chat and tell ChatGPT anything you’d like it to remember.

Memory can be turned on or off in settings and is not currently available in Europe or Korea. Team, Enterprise, and GPTs to come. pic.twitter.com/mlt9vyYeMK

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) April 29, 2024

From DSC:
The ability of AI-based applications to remember things about us will have major and positive ramifications for us when we think about learning-related applications of AI.

Shares of two big online education stocks tank more than 10% as students use ChatGPT — from cnbc.com by Michelle Fox; via Robert Gibson on LinkedIn

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence appears to be taking a toll on the shares of online education companies Chegg and Coursera.

Both stocks sank by more than 10% on Tuesday after issuing disappointing guidance in part because of students using AI tools such as ChatGPT from OpenAI.

“Combining AI Literacy with Core Humanities Learning Goals: Practical, Critical, and Playful Approaches”
It was amazing to get to do an in-person keynote at @csunorthridge‘s AI Pedagogy Showcase.
Sharing slides: https://t.co/LDIGAZ3ORO 1/2

— Anna Mills, annamillsoer.bsky.social, she/her (@AnnaRMills) May 3, 2024

Synthetic Video & AI Professors — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
Are we witnessing the emergence of a new, post-AI model of async online learning?

TLDR: by effectively tailoring the learning experience to the learner’s comprehension levels and preferred learning modes, AI can enhance the overall learning experience, leading to increased “stickiness” and higher rates of performance in assessments.
…
TLDR: AI enables us to scale responsive, personalised “always on” feedback and support in a way that might help to solve one of the most wicked problems of online async learning – isolation and, as a result, disengagement.
…
In the last year we have also seen the rise of an unprecedented number of “always on” AI tutors, built to provide coaching and feedback how and when learners need it.

Perhaps the most well-known example is Khan Academy’s Khanmigo and its GPT sidekick Tutor Me. We’re also seeing similar tools emerge in K12 and Higher Ed where AI is being used to extend the support and feedback provided for students beyond the physical classroom.

Our Guidance on School AI Guidance document has been updated — from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard

We’ve updated the free 72-page document we wrote to help schools design their own AI guidance policies.

There are a few key updates.

Inclusion of Oklahoma and significant updates from North Carolina and Washington.
More specifics on implementation — thanks NC and WA!
A bit more on instructional redesign. Thanks to NC for getting this party started!

Creating a Culture Around AI: Thoughts and Decision-Making — from er.educause.edu by Courtney Plotts and Lorna Gonzalez

Given the potential ramifications of artificial intelligence (AI) diffusion on matters of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, now is the time for higher education institutions to adopt culturally aware, analytical decision-making processes, policies, and practices around AI tools selection and use.

The Digital Transformation Journey: Lessons For Lawyers Embracing AI — from abovethelaw.com by Olga V. Mack
The journey from the days of leather-bound law books to the digital age — and now toward an AI-driven future — offers valuable lessons for embracing change.

No One Will Miss The ‘Good Old Days’
I have yet to meet a lawyer nostalgic for the days of manually updating law reports or sifting through stacks of books for a single precedent. The convenience, speed, and breadth of digital research tools have made the practice of law more efficient and effective. As we move further into the AI era, the enhancements in predictive analytics, document automation, and legal research will make the “good old days” of even the early digital age seem quaint. The efficiencies and capabilities AI brings to the table are likely to become just as indispensable as online databases are today.

The Way We ‘Law’ Will Change For The Better
The ultimate goal of integrating AI into legal practice isn’t just to replace old methods with new ones; it’s to enhance our ability to serve justice, increase access to legal services, and improve the quality of our work. AI promises to automate mundane tasks, predict legal outcomes with greater accuracy, and unearth insights from vast data. These advancements will free us to focus more on the nuanced, human aspects of law — strategy, empathy, and ethical judgment.

AI to Help Double Legal Tech Market Over Five Years, Gartner Says — from news.bloomberglaw.com by Isabel Gottlieb (behind a paywall)

Tech to take up a bigger share of in-house legal spend
Generative AI boom has much longer to run

The legal tech market will expand to $50 billion by 2027, driven by the generative artificial intelligence boom, according to an analysis by market research firm Gartner Inc.

That growth, up from about $23 billion in 2022, will be driven by continued law firm spending on AI legal tech, as well as in-house departments allocating more of their overall budgets to technology, said Chris Audet, chief of research in Gartner’s legal, risk and compliance leaders practice. The market size prediction, released publicly on Thursday, comes from a late-2023 analysis for Gartner clients, and the 2022 market size comes from …

Legal Tech Market To See Huge Lift Off Thanks to GenAI — from digit.fyi by Elizabeth Greenberg

The global legal technology market has grown significantly in recent years and generative AI (GenAI) will accelerate this growth, meaning the market will reach $50 billion in value by 2027, according to Gartner.

“GenAI has huge potential for bringing more automation to the legal space,” said Chris Audet, chief of research in the Gartner for legal, risk & compliance leaders practice.

“Rapid GenAI developments, and the widespread availability of consumer tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, will quickly increase the number of established legal technology use cases, in turn creating growing market conditions for an increasing number of legal-focused tools.”

“New technologies can fundamentally change the way legal organizations do business, and GenAI has enormous potential to do this,” an analyst at Gartner said.

Revolutionizing Legal Tech in 48 Hours — from law.stanford.edu by Monica Schreiber
At CodeX Hackathon, SLS Students Help Create Award-Winning AI Tools to Help Veterans and Streamline M&A

Disabled veterans seeking to file claims with the Veterans Administration are faced with multiple hurdles and reams of paperwork. Many vets resort to paying third-party companies thousands of dollars to help them with the process.

What if there were a way to streamline the claims process—to condense burdensome information gathering and data inputting into a linear, simplified set of tasks guided by a chatbot? How long would it take to roll out a tool that could accomplish that?

The answer: about 48 hours—at least for an interdisciplinary team of students from Stanford University’s schools of Law, Business, and Computer Science collaborating feverishly during Codex’s Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon held recently on campus.

What If Your Law Firm Had A Blank Page For Legal Tech? — from artificiallawyer.com

f law firms had a blank page for legal technology and innovation, what would they do?

While organisations across all sectors are getting to grips with the opportunities and risks posed by genAI, forward-thinking law firm leaders are considering what it means for their businesses – today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.

But some firms remain constrained by yesterday, due to legacy processes, ways of working and mindsets. To create the conditions for change, firms need to adopt a ‘blank page’ approach and review all areas of their businesses by asking: if we were starting afresh, how would we design the organisation to future-proof it to achieve transformative growth with genAI at the core?

From DSC:
This sentence reminds me of the power of culture:

But some firms remain constrained by yesterday, due to legacy processes, ways of working and mindsets.

Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Sarah Glassmeyer — from legaltalknetwork.com by Dennis Kennedy, Tom Mighell, and Sarah Glassmeyer

What if, instead of tech competence being this scary, overwhelming thing, we showed lawyers how to engage with technology in a more lighthearted, even playful, way? The reality is—tech competency doesn’t have an endpoint, but the process of continuous learning shouldn’t be dull and confusing. Sarah Glassmeyer joins Dennis and Tom to talk about her perspectives on technology education for attorneys, the latest trends in the legal tech world and new AI developments, and growing your knowledge of technology by building on small skills, one at a time.
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How Legal Technology Can Add Value to an M&A Practice — from lexology.com

Following is a primer on some of the A.I.-driven legal technologies, from contract review and automated due-diligence solutions to deal collaboration and closing-management tools, that can drive productivity and efficiency during the four phases of an M&A transaction, as well as enhance market insight and client service.

“The Verge: What’s Next in AI?” + other items re: AI in general

On 05/01/2024, in 21st century, art, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, business, change, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communications, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, creativity, digital audio, digital photography, digital video, education, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, future, game-changing environment, generational differences, Google, health, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, intelligent systems, Microsoft, multimedia, Open AI, society, technologies for your home, technology (general), the downsides of how people use tech, United States, vendors, by Daniel Christian

The Verge | What’s Next With AI | February 2024 | Consumer Survey

DC: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

It brings to mind #AI and #robotics and the #military — hmmmm…. https://t.co/1J4XKiHRUl

— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) April 25, 2024

Microsoft AI creates talking deepfakes from single photo — from inavateonthenet.net

The Great Hall – where now with AI? It is not ‘Human Connection V Innovative Technology’ but ‘Human Connection + Innovative Technology’ — from donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com by Donald Clark

The theme of the day was Human Connection V Innovative Technology. I see this a lot at conferences, setting up the human connection (social) against the machine (AI). I think this is ALL wrong. It is, and has always been a dialectic, human connection (social) PLUS the machine. Everyone had a smartphone, most use it for work, comms and social media. The binary between human and tech has long disappeared.

Techno-Social Engineering: Why the Future May Not Be Human, TikTok’s Powerful ForYou Algorithm, & More — from by Misha Da Vinci

Things to consider as you dive into this edition:

As we increasingly depend on technology, how is it changing us?
In the interaction between humans and technology, who is adapting to whom?
Is the technology being built for humans, or are we being changed to fit into tech systems?
As time passes, will we become more like robots or the AI models we use?
Over the next 30 years, as we increasingly interact with technology, who or what will we become?

It’s been an insane week for AI (part 2)

Here are 14 most impressive reveals from this week:

1/ China just released OpenAI’s Sora rival “Vidu” which can create realistic clips in seconds.pic.twitter.com/MnTv9Wxpef

— Barsee ? (@heyBarsee) April 27, 2024

Reid Hoffman meets his AI twin

On 04/30/2024, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, communications, content development, aggregation, repositories, digital audio, digital video, education, education technology, educational games / serious games, emerging technologies, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, future, game-changing environment, higher education, history, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, interactivity, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, liberal arts, lifelong learning, Microsoft, multimedia, Natural Language Processing (NLP), platforms, play, United States, universities, user experience (UX), vision/possibilities, youth, by Daniel Christian

Description:

I recently created an AI version of myself—REID AI—and recorded a Q&A to see how this digital twin might challenge me in new ways. The video avatar is generated by Hour One, its voice was created by Eleven Labs, and its persona—the way that REID AI formulates responses—is generated from a custom chatbot built on GPT-4 that was trained on my books, speeches, podcasts and other content that I’ve produced over the last few decades. I decided to interview it to test its capability and how closely its responses match—and test—my thinking. Then, REID AI asked me some questions on AI and technology. I thought I would hate this, but I’ve actually ended up finding the whole experience interesting and thought-provoking.

From DSC:
This ability to ask questions of a digital twin is very interesting when you think about it in terms of “interviewing” a historical figure. I believe character.ai provides this kind of thing, but I haven’t used it much.

Are we ready to navigate the complex ethics of advanced AI assistants? [Maynard]

On 04/29/2024, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, computer science, emerging technologies, Emotion, ethics, Google, learning agents, morals/values, platforms, policy, privacy, programming, society, vendors, by Daniel Christian

Are we ready to navigate the complex ethics of advanced AI assistants? — from futureofbeinghuman.com by Andrew Maynard
An important new paper lays out the importance and complexities of ensuring increasingly advanced AI-based assistants are developed and used responsibly

Last week a behemoth of a paper was released by AI researchers in academia and industry on the ethics of advanced AI assistants.

It’s one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful papers on developing transformative AI capabilities in socially responsible ways that I’ve read in a while. And it’s essential reading for anyone developing and deploying AI-based systems that act as assistants or agents — including many of the AI apps and platforms that are currently being explored in business, government, and education.

The paper — The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants — is written by 57 co-authors representing researchers at Google Deep Mind, Google Research, Jigsaw, and a number of prominent universities that include Edinburgh University, the University of Oxford, and Delft University of Technology. Coming in at 274 pages this is a massive piece of work. And as the authors persuasively argue, it’s a critically important one at this point in AI development.

From that large paper:

Key questions for the ethical and societal analysis of advanced AI assistants include:

What is an advanced AI assistant? How does an AI assistant differ from other kinds of AI technology?
What capabilities would an advanced AI assistant have? How capable could these assistants be?
What is a good AI assistant? Are there certain values that we want advanced AI assistants to evidence across all contexts?
Are there limits on what AI assistants should be allowed to do? If so, how are these limits determined?
What should an AI assistant be aligned with? With user instructions, preferences, interests, values, well-being or something else?
What issues need to be addressed for AI assistants to be safe? What does safety mean for this class of technologies?
What new forms of persuasion might advanced AI assistants be capable of? How can we ensure that users remain appropriately in control of the technology?
How can people – especially vulnerable users – be protected from AI manipulation and unwanted disclosure of personal information?
Is anthropomorphism for AI assistants morally problematic? If so, might it still be permissible under certain conditions?
…

“The AI Tools in Education Database” + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 04/23/2024, in adjunct faculty, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, assessment, colleges, communications, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, education, education reform, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, face-to-face, faculty, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, K-12 related, learner profiles, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, lifelong learning, mathematics, more voice more choice more control, motivation, pedagogy, project-based learning, reinvent, skills, student-related, teachers, tools, United States, universities, vendors, youth, by Daniel Christian

The AI Tools in Education Database — from aitoolsdirectory.notion.site; via George Siemens

Since AI in education has been moving at the speed of light, we built this AI Tools in Education database to keep track of the most recent AI tools in education and the changes that are happening every day. This database is intended to be a community resource for educators, researchers, students, and other edtech specialists looking to stay up to date. This is a living document, so be sure to come back for regular updates.

Another Workshop for Faculty and Staff — from aiedusimplified.substack.com by Lance Eaton
A recent workshop with some adjustments.

The day started out with a short talk about AI (slides). Some of it is my usual schtick where I do a bit of Q&A with folks around myths and misunderstandings of generative AI in order to establish some common ground. These are often useful both in setting the tone and giving folks a sense of how I come to explore generative AI: with a mixture of humor, concern, curiosity, and of course, cat pics.

From there, we launched into a series of mini-workshops where folks had time to first play around with some previously created prompts around teaching and learning before moving onto prompts for administrative work. The prompts and other support materials are in this Workshop Resource Document. The goal was to just get them into using one or more AI tools with some useful prompts so they can learn more about its capabilities.

The Edtech Insiders Rundown of ASU+GSV 2024 — from edtechinsiders.substack.com by by Sarah Morin, Alex Sarlin, and Ben Kornell
And more on Edtech Insiders+, upcoming events, Gauth, AI Reading Tutors, The Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute, and TeachAI Policy Resources

Alex Sarlin

4. Everyone is Edtech Now
This year, in addition to investors, entrepreneurs, educators, school leaders, university admins, non-profits, publishers, and operators from countless edtech startups and incumbents, there were some serious big tech companies in attendance like Meta, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Tiktok, and Canva. Additionally, a horde of management consultancies, workforce organizations, mental health orgs, and filmmakers were in attendance.

Edtech continues to expand as an industry category and everyone is getting involved.

Ep 18 | Rethinking Education, Lessons to Unlearn, Become a Generalist, & More — Ana Lorena Fábrega — from mishadavinci.substack.com by Misha da Vinci

It was such a delight to chat with Ana. She’s brilliant and passionate, a talented educator, and an advocate for better ways of learning for children and adults. We cover ways to transform schools so that students get real-world skills, learn resilience and how to embrace challenges, and are prepared for an unpredictable future. And we go hard on why we must keep learning no matter our age, become generalists, and leverage technology in order to adapt to the fast-changing world.

Misha also featured an item re: the future of schooling and it contained this graphic:

Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI — from theverge.com by Jess Weatherbed

The Texas Tribune reports an “automated scoring engine” that utilizes natural language processing — the technology that enables chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand and communicate with users — is being rolled out by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to grade open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exams. The agency is expecting the system to save $15–20 million per year by reducing the need for temporary human scorers, with plans to hire under 2,000 graders this year compared to the 6,000 required in 2023.

Debating About AI: An Easy Path to AI Awareness and Basic Literacy — from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard
If you are an organization committed to AI literacy, consider sponsoring some debate topics and/or debates next year and expose thousands of students to AI literacy.

Resolved: Teachers should integrate generative AI in their teaching and learning.

The topic is simple but raises an issue that students can connect with.

While helping my students prepare and judging debates, I saw students demonstrate an understanding of many key issues and controversies.

These included—

*AI writing assessment/grading
*Bias
*Bullying
*Cognitive load
*Costs of AI systems
*Declining test scores
*Deep fakes
*Differentiation
*Energy consumption
*Hallucinations
*Human-to-human connection
*Inequality and inequity in access
*Neurodiversity
*Personalized learning
*Privacy
*Regulation (lack thereof)
*The future of work and unemployment
*Saving teachers time
*Soft skills
*Standardized testing
*Student engagement
*Teacher awareness and AI training; training resource trade-offs
*Teacher crowd-out
*Transparency and explainability
*Writing detectors (students had an exaggerated sense of the workability of these tools).

Beyond the Hype: Taking a 50 Year Lens to the Impact of AI on Learning — from nafez.substack.com by Nafez Dakkak and Chris Dede
How do we make sure LLMs are not “digital duct tape”?

[Per Chris Dede] We often think of the product of teaching as the outcome (e.g. an essay, a drawing, etc.). The essence of education, in my view, lies not in the products or outcomes of learning but in the journey itself. The artifact is just a symbol that you’ve taken the journey.

The process of learning — the exploration, challenges, and personal growth that occur along the way — is where the real value lies. For instance, the act of writing an essay is valuable not merely for the final product but for the intellectual journey it represents. It forces you to improve and organize your thinking on a subject.

This distinction becomes important with the rise of generative AI, because it uniquely allows us to produce these artifacts without taking the journey.

As I’ve argued previously, I am worried that all this hype around LLMs renders them a “type of digital duct-tape to hold together an obsolete industrial-era educational system”.

Speaking of AI in our learning ecosystems, also see:

On Building a AI Policy for Teaching & Learning — from by Lance Eaton
How students drove the development of a policy for students and faculty

Well, last month, the policy was finally approved by our Faculty Curriculum Committee and we can finally share the final version: AI Usage Policy. College Unbound also created (all-human, no AI used) a press release with the policy and some of the details.

To ensure you see this:

Usage Guidelines for AI Generative Tools at College Unbound
These guidelines were created and reviewed by College Unbound students in Spring 2023 with the support of Lance Eaton, Director of Faculty Development & Innovation. The students include S. Fast, K. Linder-Bey, Veronica Machado, Erica Maddox, Suleima L., Lora Roy.

ChatGPT hallucinates fake but plausible scientific citations at a staggering rate, study finds — from psypost.org by Eric W. Dolan

A recent study has found that scientific citations generated by ChatGPT often do not correspond to real academic work. The study, published in the Canadian Psychological Association’s Mind Pad, found that “false citation rates” across various psychology subfields ranged from 6% to 60%. Surprisingly, these fabricated citations feature elements such as legitimate researchers’ names and properly formatted digital object identifiers (DOIs), which could easily mislead both students and researchers.
…
MacDonald found that a total of 32.3% of the 300 citations generated by ChatGPT were hallucinated. Despite being fabricated, these hallucinated citations were constructed with elements that appeared legitimate — such as real authors who are recognized in their respective fields, properly formatted DOIs, and references to legitimate peer-reviewed journals.

Forbes 2024 AI 50 List: Top Artificial Intelligence Startups — from forbes.com by Kenrick Cai

The artificial intelligence sector has never been more competitive. Forbes received some 1,900 submissions this year, more than double last year’s count. Applicants do not pay a fee to be considered and are judged for their business promise and technical usage of AI through a quantitative algorithm and qualitative judging panels. Companies are encouraged to share data on diversity, and our list aims to promote a more equitable startup ecosystem. But disparities remain sharp in the industry. Only 12 companies have women cofounders, five of whom serve as CEO, the same count as last year. For more, see our full package of coverage, including a detailed explanation of the list methodology, videos and analyses on trends in AI.

Adobe Previews Breakthrough AI Innovations to Advance Professional Video Workflows Within Adobe Premiere Pro — from news.adobe.com

New Generative AI video tools coming to Premiere Pro this year will streamline workflows and unlock new creative possibilities, from extending a shot to adding or removing objects in a scene
Adobe is developing a video model for Firefly, which will power video and audio editing workflows in Premiere Pro and enable anyone to create and ideate
Adobe previews early explorations of bringing third-party generative AI models from OpenAI, Pika Labs and Runway directly into Premiere Pro, making it easy for customers to draw on the strengths of different models within the powerful workflows they use every day
AI-powered audio workflows in Premiere Pro are now generally available, making audio editing faster, easier and more intuitive

Also relevant see:

Adobe Announces New AI Tools For Premiere Pro — from forbes.com by Mark Sparrow
Adobe adds more AI and Udio upends AI music — from heatherbcooper.substack.com by Heather Cooper
Is Sora coming to Premiere Pro?

The pace of AI and Robotics has been incredible.

So, I share the most important research and developments every week.

Here’s everything that happened and how to make sense out of it:

— Brett Adcock (@adcock_brett) April 14, 2024

AI Resources and Teaching [Kent State U] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 04/16/2024, in adjunct faculty, art, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, computer science, content development, aggregation, repositories, design, digital audio, digital learning, digital storytelling, digital video, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, faculty, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, Google, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, IT in HE, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, liberal arts, media/film, Microsoft, multimedia, music, Natural Language Processing (NLP), new media literacies, online media, online tutoring, Open AI, open courseware and systems, pedagogy, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, teaching & learning, tools, United States, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

AI RESOURCES AND TEACHING (Kent State University) — from aiadvisoryboards.wordpress.com

AI Resources and Teaching | Kent State University offers valuable resources for educators interested in incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their teaching practices. The university recognizes that the rapid emergence of AI tools presents both challenges and opportunities in higher education.

The AI Resources and Teaching page provides educators with information and guidance on various AI tools and their responsible use within and beyond the classroom. The page covers different areas of AI application, including language generation, visuals, videos, music, information extraction, quantitative analysis, and AI syllabus language examples.

A Cautionary AI Tale: Why IBM’s Dazzling Watson Supercomputer Made a Lousy Tutor — from the74million.org by Greg Toppo
With a new race underway to create the next teaching chatbot, IBM’s abandoned 5-year, $100M ed push offers lessons about AI’s promise and its limits.

For all its jaw-dropping power, Watson the computer overlord was a weak teacher. It couldn’t engage or motivate kids, inspire them to reach new heights or even keep them focused on the material — all qualities of the best mentors.

It’s a finding with some resonance to our current moment of AI-inspired doomscrolling about the future of humanity in a world of ascendant machines. “There are some things AI is actually very good for,” Nitta said, “but it’s not great as a replacement for humans.”

His five-year journey to essentially a dead-end could also prove instructive as ChatGPT and other programs like it fuel a renewed, multimillion-dollar experiment to, in essence, prove him wrong.
…

To be sure, AI can do sophisticated things such as generating quizzes from a class reading and editing student writing. But the idea that a machine or a chatbot can actually teach as a human can, he said, represents “a profound misunderstanding of what AI is actually capable of.”

Nitta, who still holds deep respect for the Watson lab, admits, “We missed something important. At the heart of education, at the heart of any learning, is engagement. And that’s kind of the Holy Grail.”

From DSC:
This is why the vision that I’ve been tracking and working on has always said that HUMAN BEINGS will be necessary — they are key to realizing this vision. Along these lines, here’s a relevant quote:

Another crucial component of a new learning theory for the age of AI would be the cultivation of “blended intelligence.” This concept recognizes that the future of learning and work will involve the seamless integration of human and machine capabilities, and that learners must develop the skills and strategies needed to effectively collaborate with AI systems. Rather than viewing AI as a threat to human intelligence, a blended intelligence approach seeks to harness the complementary strengths of humans and machines, creating a symbiotic relationship that enhances the potential of both.

Per Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin, Head of the National Institute on AI in Society at California State University Sacramento.

Two items re: AI and ethics

On 04/12/2024, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), emerging technologies, ethics, legislatures / government / legal, morals/values, policy, psychology, the downsides of how people use tech, United States, by Daniel Christian

Addressing equity and ethics in artificial intelligence — from apa.org by Zara Abrams
Algorithms and humans both contribute to bias in AI, but AI may also hold the power to correct or reverse inequities among humans

“The conversation about AI bias is broadening,” said psychologist Tara Behrend, PhD, a professor at Michigan State University’s School of Human Resources and Labor Relations who studies human-technology interaction and spoke at CES about AI and privacy. “Agencies and various academic stakeholders are really taking the role of psychology seriously.”

NY State Bar Association Joins Florida and California on AI Ethics Guidance – Suggests Some Surprising Implications — from natlawreview.com by James G. Gatto

The NY State Bar Association (NYSBA) Task Force on Artificial Intelligence has issued a nearly 80 page report (Report) and recommendations on the legal, social and ethical impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI on the legal profession. This detailed Report also reviews AI-based software, generative AI technology and other machine learning tools that may enhance the profession, but which also pose risks for individual attorneys’ understanding of new, unfamiliar technology, as well as courts’ concerns about the integrity of the judicial process. It also makes recommendations for NYSBA adoption, including proposed guidelines for responsible AI use. This Report is perhaps the most comprehensive report to date by a state bar association. It is likely this Report will stimulate much discussion.

For those of you who want the “Cliff Notes” version of this report, here is a table that summarizes by topic the various rules mentioned and a concise summary of the associated guidance.

The Report includes four primary recommendations:

Learning Ecosystems

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