Adobe is working on generative AI video manipulation — from theverge.com by Umar Shakir The company revealed Project Fast Fill, a new way to remove people, add objects, and replace colors in videos using generative AI and text-prompt interactions.
Adobe is showing off a new generative fill feature, Project Fast Fill, that can easily add or remove objects in videos with the power of AI. It’s one of several new, wild, experimental AI featuresannounced today at the company’s MAX conference. Project Fast Fill has the ability to swap in clothing accessories on people in motion or remove tourists from the background of a landscape pan.
Next month Microsoft Corp. will start making its artificial intelligence features for Office widely available to corporate customers. Soon after, that will include the ability for it to read your emails, learn your writing style and compose messages on your behalf.
From DSC: As readers of this blog know, I’m generally pro-technology. I see most technologies as tools — which can be used for good or for ill. So I will post items both pro and con concerning AI.
But outsourcing email communications to AI isn’t on my wish list or to-do list.
In this second edition, award-winning educator Sue Ellen Christian offers students an accessible and informed guide to how they can consume and create media intentionally and critically.
The textbook applies media literacy principles and critical thinking to the key issues facing young adults today, from analyzing and creating media messages to verifying information and understanding online privacy. Through discussion prompts, writing exercises, key terms, and links, readers are provided with a framework from which to critically consume and create media in their everyday lives. This new edition includes updates covering privacy aspects of AI, VR and the metaverse, and a new chapter on digital audiences, gaming, and the creative and often unpaid labor of social media and influencers. Chapters examine news literacy, online activism, digital inequality, social media and identity, and global media corporations, giving readers a nuanced understanding of the key concepts at the core of media literacy. Concise, creative, and curated, this book highlights the cultural, political, and economic dynamics of media in contemporary society, and how consumers can mindfully navigate their daily media use.
This textbook is perfect for students and educators of media literacy, journalism, and education looking to build their understanding in an engaging way.
Canva’s new AI tools automate boring, labor-intensive design tasks — from theverge.com by Jess Weatherbed Magic Studio features like Magic Switch automatically convert your designs into blogs, social media posts, emails, and more to save time on manually editing documents.
Now that you know the three factors that shape career opportunities: work (changes in the way work gets done), worker (which skills will become valuable), and workplace (a workplace is an ecosystem in which the skills will get applied), how can you use this framework to create your own career strategy?
NOTES:
Technology literacy is the third-fastest growing core skill.
Curiosity and lifelong learning come in at #4.
Addendum on 10/9/23:
Data for the People — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain (emphasis from DSC):
The Big Idea: Texas isn’t the only state where these data systems are starting to bear fruit for students and workers. Many states are now investing in digital tools to help residents connect to jobs, demonstrate their skills, and participate in training programs. A few, particularly Alabama, are close to offering fully functioning learning and employment records, or LERs, to millions of residents.
To use Sherpa, an instructor first uploads the reading they’ve assigned, or they can have the student upload a paper they’ve written. Then the tool asks a series of questions about the text (either questions input by the instructor or generated by the AI) to test the student’s grasp of key concepts. The software gives the instructor the choice of whether they want the tool to record audio and video of the conversation, or just audio.
The tool then uses AI to transcribe the audio from each student’s recording and flags areas where the student answer seemed off point. Teachers can review the recording or transcript of the conversation and look at what Sherpa flagged as trouble to evaluate the student’s response.
AI Meets Med School— from insidehighered.com by Lauren Coffey Adding to academia’s AI embrace, two institutions in the University of Texas system are jointly offering a medical degree paired with a master’s in artificial intelligence.
The University of Texas at San Antonio has launched a dual-degree program combining medical school with a master’s in artificial intelligence.
Several universities across the nation have begun integrating AI into medical practice. Medical schools at the University of Florida, the University of Illinois, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Stanford and Harvard Universities all offer variations of a certificate in AI in medicine that is largely geared toward existing professionals.
“I think schools are looking at, ‘How do we integrate and teach the uses of AI?’” Dr. Whelan said. “And in general, when there is an innovation, you want to integrate it into the curriculum at the right pace.”
Speaking of emerging technologies and med school, also see:
— Salma – Midjourney & SD AI Product Photographer (@Salmaaboukarr) September 29, 2023
How to stop AI deepfakes from sinking society — and science — from nature.com by Nicola Jones; via The Neuron Deceptive videos and images created using generative AI could sway elections, crash stock markets and ruin reputations. Researchers are developing methods to limit their harm.
48+ hours since Chat GPT-4V has started rolling out for Plus and enterprise users.
With just under 10 acquisitions in the last 5 years, PowerSchool has been active in transforming itself from a student information systems company to an integrated education company that works across the day and lifecycle of K–12 students and educators. What’s more, the company turned heads in June with its announcement that it was partnering with Microsoft to integrate AI into its PowerSchool Performance Matters and PowerSchool LearningNav products to empower educators in delivering transformative personalized-learning pathways for students.
As readers of this series know, I’ve developed a six-session design/build workshop series for learning design teams to create an AI Learning Design Assistant (ALDA). In my last post in this series, I provided an elaborate ChatGPT prompt that can be used as a rapid prototype that everyone can try out and experiment with.1 In this post, I’d like to focus on how to address the challenges of AI literacy effectively and equitably.
Countries worldwide are designing and implementing AI governance legislation commensurate to the velocity and variety of proliferating AI-powered technologies. Legislative efforts include the development of comprehensive legislation, focused legislation for specific use cases, and voluntary guidelines and standards.
This tracker identifies legislative policy and related developments in a subset of jurisdictions. It is not globally comprehensive, nor does it include all AI initiatives within each jurisdiction, given the rapid and widespread policymaking in this space. This tracker offers brief commentary on the wider AI context in specific jurisdictions, and lists index rankings provided by Tortoise Media, the first index to benchmark nations on their levels of investment, innovation and implementation of AI.
The prospect of AI-powered, tailored, on-demand learning and performance support is exhilarating: It starts with traditional digital learning made into fully adaptive learning experiences, which would adjust to strengths and weaknesses for each individual learner. The possibilities extend all the way through to simulations and augmented reality, an environment to put into practice knowledge and skills, whether as individuals or working in a team simulation. The possibilities are immense.
“AI is real”
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says artificial intelligence will be part of “every single process,” adding it’s already “doing all the equity hedging for us” https://t.co/EtsTbiME1apic.twitter.com/J9YD4slOpv
Part 1: October 16 | 3:00–4:30 p.m. ET
Part 2: October 19 | 3:00–4:30 p.m. ET
Part 3: October 26 | 3:00–4:30 p.m. ET
Part 4: October 30 | 3:00–4:30 p.m. ET
Welcome to The Future of Education with Michael B. Horn. In this insightful episode, Michael gains perspective on mapping AI’s role in education from Jacob Klein, a Product Consultant at Oko Labs, and Laurence Holt, an Entrepreneur In Residence at the XQ Institute. Together, they peer into the burgeoning world of AI in education, analyzing its potential, risks, and roadmap for integrating it seamlessly into learning environments.
Have you ever been in a job interview where you were thrown off by an unexpected question? Questions like, “Why is a manhole cover round?” or “What’s the most crucial part of a sandwich?” or even “What three items would you want if you were stranded on a deserted island?“
Rest assured, it’s unlikely that your job will require you to survive on a deserted island. So, why do interviewers ask such perplexing questions? The truth is, these questions serve a purpose, and it’s not necessarily to hear your answer.
What recruiters are really interested in is what your responses reveal about your character and problem-solving abilities.
Also important and related to one’s career development, see:
But this fall, a few educators are quietly charting a different course they believe could change everything: At least two groups are pushing to create new AI chatbots that would offer teachers unlimited access to sometimes confusing and often paywalled peer-reviewed research on the topics that most bedevil them.
Their aspiration is to offer new tools that are more focused and helpful than wide-ranging ones like ChatGPT, which tends to stumble over research questions with competing findings. Like many juveniles faced with questions they can’t answer, it has a frustrating tendency to make things up.
Then, I turned Custom Instructions on and gave it the same starting prompt. Here are a few of the responses (emphases are mine):
“Purpose:What’s the primary goal of the course? Is it to augment your existing offerings at Every, serve as a standalone product, or something else?”
“Content Depth: Given your love for detailed, intellectual writing, how in-depth will you go on each topic?”
“Guest Contributions: Do you plan to involve guest experts, perhaps even some of your writing heroes or team members like Kate Lee and Evan Armstrong?”
“Time Investment: Given that you’re already grappling with being too opportunistic and dutiful, how will you allocate time for this without sidelining your creative work or burdening yourself?”
AI for comics— from aiandacademia.substack.com by Bryan Alexander Exploring an entertaining new Hugging Face application
As generative AI grows, more uses appear. Beyond text and images, other domains for creation pop up as companies, groups, and individuals try out new functions.
Today’s case in point is AI Comic Factory from Hugging Face.* This service will generate a couple of comic book pages based on your text input. It gives you choices of comic style and page layout as well.
Items from Tom Barrett’ Promptcraft: AI for a better learning ecosystem
How many languages do you speak? Thanks to AI, that number could be as many as seven. Los Angeles-based AI video platform HeyGen has launched a new tool that clones your voice from a video and translates what you’re saying into seven different languages. If that wasn’t enough, it also syncs your lips to your new voice so the final clip looks (and sounds) as realistic as possible.
Microsoft and Project Gutenberg have used AI technologies to create more than 5,000 free audiobooks with high-quality synthetic voices.
For the project, the researchers combined advances in machine learning, automatic text selection (which texts are read aloud, which are not), and natural-sounding speech synthesis systems.
Generative A.I. could reduce the busywork of accessibility
Most digital accessibility issues can be addressed easily with clean code and thoughtful content creation. However, many “easy” fixes still take time to implement, particularly when humans need to be involved.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) function as the international standards of digital accessibility. WCAG includes a number of requirements that require a subjective approach, which can create busywork for developers, designers, and writers.
For example:
WCAG requires text alternatives (alt text) for images and other non-text content. Writing alt text takes a few seconds, but if you’re operating a large eCommerce site with thousands of images, you may need to spend days or weeks adding alt text.
WCAG requires captions and transcripts for video content. If you don’t plan for those features when drafting your videos, you’ll need to write them after-the-fact — and on a lengthy video, that’s a time-consuming process.
WCAG requires content to maintain an appropriate color contrast ratio. Adjusting your website’s CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) isn’t especially difficult, but on a complex website, designers may need to spend hours adjusting each element.
Generative A.I. may be able to address these challenges.
So much of the way that we think about education and work is organized into silos. Sure, that’s one way to ensure a depth of knowledge in a field and to encourage learners to develop mastery. But it also leads to domains with strict boundaries. Colleges are typically organized into school sub-domains, managed like fiefdoms, with strict rules for professors who can teach in different schools.
Yet it’s at the intersections of seemingly-disparate domains where breakthrough innovation can occur.
Maybe intersections bring a greater chance of future work opportunity, because that young person can increase their focus in one arena or another as they discover new options for work — and because this is what meaningful work in the future is going to look like.
From DSC: This posting strikes me as an endorsement for interdisciplinary degrees. I agree with much of this. It’s just hard to find the right combination of disciplines. But I supposed that depends upon the individual student and what he/she is passionate or curious about.
A lot of people have been asking if AI is really a big deal for the future of work. We have a new paper that strongly suggests the answer is YES. .
Consultants using AI finished 12.2% more tasks on average, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly, and produced 40% higher quality results than those without. Those are some very big impacts. Now, let’s add in the nuance.
Ask the Chair: Are Great Chairs Born or Made? — from chronicle.com by Kevin Dettmar (behind a paywall) Higher education is finally getting serious about training new department heads.
Great chairs aren’t born, but made; “trial and error” isn’t actually a professional-development strategy. The provost and deans should recognize that a confident and competent chair makes their job easier, creates a well-functioning department, and buoys faculty, student, and staff morale.
As someone vitally engaged with the chair’s role, I do think we are experiencing a sea-change when it comes to how institutions are preparing chairs. For too long, colleges have treated the position as simply a minor cog in the chain of command. But more and more institutions are now investing in their chairs.
What we teachers desperately need, though, is an ocean of examples and training. We need to see and share examples of generative AI—any type of artificial intelligence that can be used to create new text, images, video, audio, code, or data—being used across the curriculum. We need catalogs of new lesson plans and new curriculum.
And we need training on theoretical and practical levels: training to understand what artificial intelligence actually is and where it stands in the development timeline and training about how to integrate it into our classes.
So, my advice to teachers is to use any and all the generative AI you can get your hands on. Then experience—for yourself—verification of the information. Track it back to the source because in doing so, you’ll land on the adjustments you need to make in your classes next year.
From DSC: Interesting.
Learners can now seamlessly transition between AI-powered assistance (AI Tutor) and Live Expert support to get access to instant support, whether through AI-guided learning or real-time interactions with a human expert.
ASSIGNMENT MAKEOVERS IN THE AI AGE WITH DEREK BRUFF — from teachinginhighered.com by Bonni Stachowiak Derek Bruff shares about assignment makeovers in the AI age on episode 481 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast
Comment on this per Derek Bruff:
Why not ask ChatGPT to write what King or X would say about a current debate and then have the students critique the ChatGPT output? That would meet the same learning goals while also teaching AI literacy.
(Be sure to read Asim’s contribution for a useful take.)
Here’s a closer look at the concurrent AI landscape in schools — and a prediction of what the future holds.
So far, high-profile ventures in the instruction realm, such asKyron Learning, have fused teacher-produced, recorded content with LLM-powered conversational UX. The micro-learning tool Nolej references internet material when generating tasks and tests, but always holds the language model closely to the ground truth provided by teachers. Both are intriguing takes on re-imagining how to deliver core instruction and avoid hallucinations (generated content that is nonsensical).
As a result, real-time 3D jobs are among the most in demand within the tech industry. According to Unity’s vice president of Education and Social Impact, Jessica Lindl, demand is 50% higher than traditional IT jobs—adding that salaries for real-time 3D jobs are 60% greater.
“We want to provide really simple on ramps and pathways that will lead you into entry level jobs so that at any point in your career, you can decide to transfer into the industry,” Lindl says.
University World News continues its exploration of generative AI in our new special report on ‘AI and Higher Education’. In commentaries and features, academics and our journalists around the world investigate issues and developments around AI that are impacting on universities. Generative AI tools are challenging and changing higher education systems and institutions — how they are run as well as ways of teaching and learning and conducting research.
My advice for you today is this: fill your LinkedIn-feed and/or inbox with ideas, inspirational writing and commentary on AI.
This will get you up to speed quickly and is a great way to stay informed on the newest movements you need to be aware of.
My personal recommendation for you is to check out these bright people who are all very active on LinkedIn and/or have a newsletter worth paying attention to.
I have kept the list fairly short – only 15 people – in order to make it as easy as possible for you to begin exploring.
It is crucial to recognize that the intrinsic value of higher education isn’t purely in its ability to adapt to market fluctuations or technological innovations. Its core strength lies in promoting critical thinking, nurturing creativity, and instilling a sense of purpose and belonging. As AI progresses, these traits will likely become even more crucial. The question then becomes if higher education institutions as we know them today are the ony ones, or indeed the best ones, equipped to convey those core strengths to students.
Higher education clearly finds itself caught in a whirlwind of transformation, both in its essence and execution. The juxtaposition of legacy structures and the evolving technological landscape paints a complex picture.
For institutional leaders, the dual challenge lies in proactively seeking and initiating change (not merely adapting to it) without losing sight of their foundational principles. Simultaneously, they must equip students with skills and perspectives that AI cannot replicate.
“They begged, bargained with, and berated their instructor in pursuit of better grades — not “because they like points,” but rather, “because the education system has told them that these points are the currency with which they can buy a successful future.””
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.
…
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.
Habit #2: Engage students in a brain dump or two things as an entry ticket or exit ticket. Spend one minute or less having students write down everything (or just two things) they remember from class. The key: Don’t grade it! Keep retrieval practice no-stakes to emphasize it’s a learning strategy, not an assessment strategy.
Teaching from the heart in 13 steps — from timeshighereducation.com by Beiting He Engaging your students through empathy requires teachers to share their own stories and vulnerabilities and foster a safe space for learning. Here, Beiting He offers 13 ways to create a caring classroom
In summary, “I wish” is about proposing positive changes and improvements, while “I wonder” is about asking thoughtful questions to gain insight and foster meaningful conversations within the team.
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