Big Ideas is Education Week’s annual special report that brings the expertise of our newsroom—and occasionally those beyond our newsroom—to bear on the challenges you might be facing in your classroom, school, or district. Big Ideas questions the status quo and explores opportunities to help you build a better, more just learning environment for all students. Browse our collection.
With the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), designers now have access to a wide array of free AI-powered tools that streamline their creative process, enhance productivity, and add a touch of uniqueness to their designs. In this article, we will explore ten such free AI tools websites for graphic designing that have revolutionized the way designers approach their craft.
Generative Art in Motion— from heatherbcooper.substack.com by Heather Cooper Animation and video tools create an explosion of creative expression
Google will soon require that political ads using artificial intelligence be accompanied by a prominent disclosure if imagery or sounds have been synthetically altered.
AI-generated election ads on YouTube and other Google platforms that alter people or events must include a clear disclaimer located somewhere that users are likely to notice, the company said in an update this week to its political content policy.
Whilst we typically cover a single ‘prompt’ to use with ChatGPT, today we’re exploring a new feature now available to everyone: custom instructions.
You provide specific directions for ChatGPT leading to greater control of the output. It’s all about guiding the AI to get the responses you really want.
To get started:
Log into ChatGPT ? Click on your name/email bottom left corner ? select ‘Custom instructions’
We’re excited to introduce you to AI Companion (formerly Zoom IQ), your new generative AI assistant across the Zoom platform. AI Companion empowers individuals by helping them be more productive, connect and collaborate with teammates, and improve their skills.
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Envision being able to interact with AI Companion through a conversational interface and ask for help on a whole range of tasks, similarly to how you would with a real assistant. You’ll be able to ask it to help prepare for your upcoming meeting, get a consolidated summary of prior Zoom meetings and relevant chat threads, and even find relevant documents and tickets from connected third-party applications with your permission.
From DSC: “You can ask AI Companion to catch you up on what you missed during a meeting in progress.”
And what if some key details were missed? Should you rely on this? I’d treat this with care/caution myself.
That’s because, as it turns out, it’s nearly impossible to remove a user’s data from a trained A.I. model without resetting the model and forfeiting the extensive money and effort put into training it. To use a human analogy, once an A.I. has “seen” something, there is no easy way to tell the model to “forget” what it saw. And deleting the model entirely is also surprisingly difficult.
This represents one of the thorniest, unresolved, challenges of our incipient artificial intelligence era, alongside issues like A.I. “hallucinations” and the difficulties of explaining certain A.I. outputs.
This strategic move aims to make the process of creating visuals such as logos, banners, and more, even more simple for businesses and entrepreneurs.
This latest integration could improve the way users generate visuals by offering a streamlined and user-friendly approach to digital design.
From DSC: This Tweet addresses a likely component of our future learning ecosystems:
Excited to introduce YouPro for Education—your AI study buddy.
Access unlimited AI chat + search, unlimited AI writing generations, unlimited AI art generations, supercharged with GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion XL at just $6.99/month for students and teachers. pic.twitter.com/0t8zf0AaLr
That’s why a growing number of researchers—computer scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, linguists—want to overhaul the way they are assessed, calling for more rigorous and exhaustive evaluation. Some think that the practice of scoring machines on human tests is wrongheaded, period, and should be ditched.
“There’s a lot of anthropomorphizing going on,” she says. “And that’s kind of coloring the way that we think about these systems and how we test them.”
“There is a long history of developing methods to test the human mind,” says Laura Weidinger, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. “With large language models producing text that seems so human-like, it is tempting to assume that human psychology tests will be useful for evaluating them. But that’s not true: human psychology tests rely on many assumptions that may not hold for large language models.”
In concert with the fine folks at Datos, whose opt-in, anonymized panel of 20M devices (desktop and mobile, covering 200+ countries) provides outstanding insight into what real people are doing on the web, we undertook a challenging project to answer at least some of the mystery surrounding ChatGPT.
“In terms of human capital development, for instance, AI can be the teacher that helps the national workforce upskill in both AI-related and other domains.”
With the field of artificial intelligence evolving at near breakneck speed, scammers now have access to tools that can help them execute highly sophisticated attacks en masse, warns the co-founder of Web3 security firm Quantstamp.
The intersection of AI and the world of work: Not only are job postings increasing, but we’re seeing more LinkedIn members around the globe adding AI skills to their profiles than ever before. We’ve seen a 21x increase in the share of global English-language job postings that mention new AI technologies such as GPT or ChatGPT since November 2022. In June 2023, the number of AI-skilled members was 9x larger than in January 2016, globally.
The state of play of Generative AI (GAI) in the workforce: GAI technologies, including ChatGPT, are poised to start to change the way we work. In fact, 47% of US executives believe that using generative AI will increase productivity, and 92% agree that people skills are more important than ever. This means jobs won’t necessarily go away but they will change as will the skills necessary to do them.
What if you could have a conversation with your notes?That question has consumed a corner of the internet recently, as companies like Dropbox, Box, Notion, and others have built generative AI tools that let you interact with and create new things from the data you already have in their systems.
Google’s version of this is called NotebookLM. It’s an AI-powered research tool that is meant to help you organize and interact with your own notes.
That got me to thinking…
What if the presenter/teacher/professor/trainer/preacher provided a set of notes for the AI to compare to the readers’ notes?
That way, the AI could see the discrepancies between what the presenter wanted their audience to learn/hear and what was actually being learned/heard. In a sort of digital Socratic Method, the AI could then generate some leading questions to get the audience member to check their thinking/understanding of the topic.
The end result would be that the main points were properly communicated/learned/received.
What if you could have a conversation with your notes?That question has consumed a corner of the internet recently, as companies like Dropbox, Box, Notion, and others have built generative AI tools that let you interact with and create new things from the data you already have in their systems.
Google’s version of this is called NotebookLM. It’s an AI-powered research tool that is meant to help you organize and interact with your own notes.
… Right now, it’s really just a prototype, but a small team inside the company has been trying to figure out what an AI notebook might look like.
The single narrative education system is no longer working.
Its main limitation is its inability to honor young people as the dynamic individuals that they are.
New models of teaching and learning need to be designed to center on the student, not the teacher.
When the opportunity arises to implement learning that uses immersive technology ask yourself if the learning you are designing passes the Ready Player One Test:
Does it allow learners to immerse themselves in environments that would be too expensive or dangerous to experience otherwise?
Can the learning be personalized by the student?
Is it regenerative?
Does it allow for learning to happen non-linearly, at any time and place?
Generative AI will require skills upgrades for workers, according to a report from IBM based on a survey of executives from around the world. One finding: Business leaders say 40% of their workforces will need to reskill as AI and automation are implemented over the next three years. That could translate to 1.4 billion people in the global workforce who require upskilling, according to the company.
10 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Instructional Design — from er.educause.edu by Robert Gibson Artificial intelligence (AI) is providing instructors and course designers with an incredible array of new tools and techniques to improve the course design and development process. However, the intersection of AI and content creation is not new.
What does this mean for the field of instructional and course design? I have been telling my graduate instructional design students that AI technology is not likely to replace them any time soon because learning and instruction are still highly personalized and humanistic experiences. However, as these students embark on their careers, they will need to understand how to appropriately identify, select, and utilize AI when developing course content.
Here are a few interesting examples of how AI is shaping and influencing instructional design. Some of the tools and resources can be used to satisfy a variety of course design activities, while others are very specific.
GenAI Chatbot Prompt Library for Educators — from aiforeducation.io We have a variety of prompts to help you lesson plan and do adminstrative tasks with GenAI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, and Perplexity.
Also relevant/see:
AI for Education — from linkedin.com Helping teachers and schools unlock their full potential through AI
Check out https://t.co/sfWeOiOzP5, “Helping teachers bring AI to the classroom critically, ethically, & responsibly.”
You can submit assignments to their curated collection. From the amazing @SarahWNewman at @metalabharvard. (She also did the Data Nutrition Project).
— Anna Mills, amills@mastodon.oeru.org, she/her (@EnglishOER) August 18, 2023
Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature: it will be able to summarize articles you’re reading on the web, according to a Google blog post. SGE can already summarize search results for you so that you don’t have to scroll forever to find what you’re looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping you out after you’ve actually clicked a link.
Weeks after The New York Times updated its terms of service (TOS) to prohibit AI companies from scraping its articles and images to train AI models, it appears that the Times may be preparing to sue OpenAI. The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT’s dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.
NPR spoke to two people “with direct knowledge” who confirmed that the Times’ lawyers were mulling whether a lawsuit might be necessary “to protect the intellectual property rights” of the Times’ reporting.
So, as educators, mentors, and guides to our future generations, we must ask ourselves three pivotal questions:
What value do we offer to our students?
What value will they need to offer to the world?
How are we preparing them to offer that value?
The answers to these questions are crucial, and they will redefine the trajectory of our education system.
We need to create an environment that encourages curiosity, embraces failure as a learning opportunity, and celebrates diversity. We need to teach our students how to learn, how to ask the right questions, and how to think for themselves.
Leveraging ChatGPT for learning is the most meaningful skill this year for lifelong learners. But it’s too hard to find resources to master it.
As a learning science nerd, I’ve explored hundreds of prompts over the past months. Most of the advice doesn’t go beyond text summaries and multiple-choice testing.
That’s why I’ve created this article — it merges learning science with prompt writing to help you learn anything faster.
Midjourney AI Art for Teachers (for any kind of teacher, not just Art Teachers) — from The AI Educator on YouTube by Dan Fitzpatrick
From DSC: This is a very nice, clearly illustrated, free video to get started with the Midjourney (text-to-image) app. Nice work Dan!
In the new-normal of generative AI, how does one articulate the value of academic integrity? This blog presents my current response in about 2,500 words; a complete answer could fill a sizable book.
Massive amounts of misinformation are disseminated about generative AI, so the first part of my discussion clarifies what large language models (Chat-GPT and its counterparts) can currently do and what they cannot accomplish at this point in time. The second part describes ways in which generative AI can be misused as a means of learning; unfortunately, many people are now advocating for these mistaken applications to education. The third part describes ways in which large language models (LLM), used well, may substantially improve learning and education. I close with a plea for a robust, informed public discussion about these topics and issues.
Many of the more than a dozen teachers TIME interviewed for this story argue that the way to get kids to care is to proactively use ChatGPT in the classroom.
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Some of those creative ideas are already in effect at Peninsula High School in Gig Harbor, about an hour from Seattle. In Erin Rossing’s precalculus class, a student got ChatGPT to generate a rap about vectors and trigonometry in the style of Kanye West, while geometry students used the program to write mathematical proofs in the style of raps, which they performed in a classroom competition. In Kara Beloate’s English-Language Arts class, she allowed students reading Shakespeare’s Othello to use ChatGPT to translate lines into modern English to help them understand the text, so that they could spend class time discussing the plot and themes.
I found that other developed countries share concerns about students cheating but are moving quickly to use AI to personalize education, enhance language lessons and help teachers with mundane tasks, such as grading. Some of these countries are in the early stages of training teachers to use AI and developing curriculum standards for what students should know and be able to do with the technology.
Several countries began positioning themselves several years ago to invest in AI in education in order to compete in the fourth industrial revolution.
AI in Education— from educationnext.org by John Bailey The leap into a new era of machine intelligence carries risks and challenges, but also plenty of promise
In the realm of education, this technology will influence how students learn, how teachers work, and ultimately how we structure our education system. Some educators and leaders look forward to these changes with great enthusiasm. Sal Kahn, founder of Khan Academy, went so far as to say in a TED talk that AI has the potential to effect “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” But others warn that AI will enable the spread of misinformation, facilitate cheating in school and college, kill whatever vestiges of individual privacy remain, and cause massive job loss. The challenge is to harness the positive potential while avoiding or mitigating the harm.
Generative AI and education futures — from ucl.ac.uk Video highlights from Professor Mike Sharples’ keynote address at the 2023 UCL Education Conference, which explored opportunities to prosper with AI as a part of education.
Bringing AI Literacy to High Schools— from by Nikki Goth Itoi Stanford education researchers collaborated with teachers to develop classroom-ready AI resources for high school instructors across subject areas.
To address these two imperatives, all high schools need access to basic AI tools and training. Yet the reality is that many underserved schools in low-income areas lack the bandwidth, skills, and confidence to guide their students through an AI-powered world. And if the pattern continues, AI will only worsen existing inequities. With this concern top of mind plus initial funding from the McCoy Ethics Center, Lee began recruiting some graduate students and high school teachers to explore how to give more people equal footing in the AI space.
As the 2024 campaign season begins, AI image generators have advanced from novelties to powerful tools able to generate photorealistic images, while comprehensive regulation lags behind.
Why it matters: As more fake images appear in political ads, the onus will be on the public to spot phony content.
Go deeper: Can you tell the difference between real and AI-generated images? Take our quiz:
The Chief AI Officer is a relatively new job role, yet becoming increasingly more important as businesses invest further into AI.
Now more than ever, the workplace must prepare for AI and the immense opportunities, as well as challenges, that this type of evolving technology can provide. This job position sees the employee responsible for guiding companies through complex AI tools, algorithms and development. All of this works to ensure that the company stays ahead of the curve and capitalises on digital growth and transformation.
NVIDIA-related items
SIGGRAPH Special Address: NVIDIA CEO Brings Generative AI to LA Show— from blogs.nvidia.com by Brian Caulfield Speaking to thousands of developers and graphics pros, Jensen Huang announces updated GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, NVIDIA AI Workbench, updates NVIDIA Omniverse with generative AI.
Nvidia announced a new chip designed to run artificial intelligence models on Tuesday .
Nvidia’s GH200 has the same GPU as the H100, Nvidia’s current highest-end AI chip, but pairs it with 141 gigabytes of cutting-edge memory, as well as a 72-core ARM central processor.
“This processor is designed for the scale-out of the world’s data centers,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday.
The advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) has paved the way for a new era in warfare. Gone are the days of manned ships and traditional naval operations. Instead, the US Navy’s Task Force 59 is at the forefront of integrating AI and robotics into naval operations. With a fleet of autonomous robot ships, the Navy aims to revolutionize the way wars are fought at sea.
From DSC: Crap. Ouch. Some things don’t seem to ever change. Few are surprised by this development…but still, this is a mess.
Altman, who has become the face of the recent hype cycle in AI development, feels that humans could be persuaded politically through conversations with chatbots or fooled by AI-generated media.
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups. This special summer edition (while we’re producing the State of AI Report 2023!) covers our 7th annual Research and Applied AI Summit that we held in London on 23 June.
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Below are some of our key takeaways from the event and all the talk videos can be found on the RAAIS YouTube channel here. If this piques your interest to join next year’s event, drop your details here.
Gen AI, however, eliminates the lengthy search. It can parse a natural language query, synthesize the necessary information and serve up the answers the agent is looking for in a neatly summarized response, slashing call times dramatically.
Not only do its AI voices sound exactly like a human, but they can sound exactly like YOU. All it takes is 6 (six!) seconds of your voice, and voila: it can replicate you saying any sentence in any tone, be it happy, sad, or angry.
The use cases are endless, but here are two immediate ones:
Hyperpersonalized content.
Imagine your favorite Netflix show but with every person hearing a slightly different script.
Customer support agents.
We’re talking about ones that are actually helpful, a far cry from the norm!
[NEW] – Joshua Avatar 2.0 ??. Both of these video clips were 100% AI-generated, featuring my own avatar and voice clone. ???
We’ve made massive enhancements to our life-style avatar’s video quality and fine-tuned our voice technology to mimic my unique accent and speech… pic.twitter.com/9EgxRA69dg
Excerpts from the Too Long Didn’t Read (TLDR) section fromAIxEducation Day 1: My Takeaways — from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard (emphasis DSC)
* There was a lot of talk about learning bots.This talk included the benefits of 1:1 tutoring, access to education for those who don’t currently have it (developing world), the ability to do things for which we currently don’t have enough teachers and support staff (speech pathology), individualized instruction (it will be good at this soon), and stuff that it is already good at (24/7 availability, language tutoring, immediate feedback regarding argumentation and genre (not facts :), putting students on the right track, comprehensive feedback, more critical feedback).
* Students are united. The student organizers and those who spoke at the conference have concerns about future employment, want to learn to use generative AI, and express concern about being prepared for the “real world.” They also all want a say in how generative AI is used in the college classroom. Many professors spoke about the importance of having conversations with students and involving them in the creation of AI policies as well.
* I think it’s fair to say that all professors who spoke thought students were going to use generative AI regardless of whether or not it was permitted, though some hoped for honesty.
* No professor who spoke thought using a plagiarism detector was a good idea.
* Everyone thought that significant advancements in AI technology were inevitable.
* Almost everyone expressed being overwhelmed by the rate of change.
We’re rolling out a bunch of small updates to improve the ChatGPT experience. Shipping over the next week:
1. Prompt examples: A blank page can be intimidating. At the beginning of a new chat, you’ll now see examples to help you get started.
2. Suggested replies: Go deeper with…
The movie trailer for “Genesis,” created with AI, is so convincing it caused a stir on Twitter [on July 27]. That’s how I found out about it. Created by Nicolas Neubert, a senior product designer who works for Elli by Volkswagen in Germany, the “Genesis” trailer promotes a dystopian sci-fi epic reminiscent of the Terminator. There is no movie, of course, only the trailer exists, but this is neither a gag nor a parody. It’s in a class of its own. Eerily made by man, but not.
? Trailer: Genesis (Midjourney + Runway)
We gave them everything.
Trusted them with our world.
To become enslaved – become hunted.
We have no choice.
Humanity must rise again to reclaim.
Google just published its 2023 environmental report, and one thing is for certain: The company’s water use is soaring.
The internet giant said it consumed 5.6 billion gallons of water in 2022, the equivalent of 37 golf courses. Most of that — 5.2 billion gallons — was used for the company’s data centers, a 20% increase on the amount Google reported the year prior.
We think prompt engineering (learning to converse with an AI) is overrated. Yup, we said it. We think the future of chat interfaces will be a combination of preloading context and then allowing AI to guide you to the information you seek.
From DSC: Agreed. I think we’ll see a lot more interface updates and changes to make things easier to use, find, develop.
Artificial Intelligence continues to dominate the news. In the past month, we’ve seen a number of major updates to language models: Claude 2, with its 100,000 token context limit; LLaMA 2, with (relatively) liberal restrictions on use; and Stable Diffusion XL, a significantly more capable version of Stable Diffusion. Does Claude 2’s huge context really change what the model can do? And what role will open access and open source language models have as commercial applications develop?
Google Lab Sessions are collaborations between “visionaries from all realms of human endeavor” and the company’s latest AI technology. [On 8/2/23], Google released TextFX as an “experiment to demonstrate how generative language technologies can empower the creativity and workflows of artists and creators” with Lupe Fiasco.
Google’s TextFX includes 10 tools and is powered by the PaLM 2 large language model via the PALM API. Meant to aid in the creative process of rappers, writers, and other wordsmiths, it is part of Google Labs.
