AI

Anna Mills facilitates the MYFest session held on 2 July 2024. This interactive workshop surveys a range of AI-enabled research assistance apps that aim to help us find and analyze sources. We’ll look at general-purpose ones like Perplexity, ChatGPT4o, and Gemini as well as apps geared to academic research such as Elicit, Consensus, Keenious, ResearchRabbit, SciSpace, Scite_, and Undermind. In what ways do they facilitate source retrieval and analysis, and how can they also mislead us? What does wise use of these tools look like? Session slides here: https://bit.ly/SkepticalAIresearch

Mark Merino facilitates the MYFest session held on 3 July 2024. How can we respond to the terror of AI? Laughter. Play. Let’s explore the possibilities and p...

Would you tango with a robot? Inviting us into the fascinating world of dancing machines, robot choreographer Catie Cuan highlights why teaching robots to mo...

Generative AI, including ChatGPT, has impacted education. It now incorporates image recognition, text-to-speech, and code generation. Three levels for using GenAI in education are outlined in this …

Jon Ippolito facilitates the MYFest session held on 26 June 2024. Sometimes caricatured as mere regurgitators of online content, tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are more like a growing child that is facile at fabricating fresh ideas and novel imagery. A peek under the hood of these models will equip participants to grasp their special brand of creativity, along with their limits in representing diverse perspectives and potential for disinformation.

Jon Ippolito facilitates the MYFest session held on 27 June 2024 with the full title: Thinking Machines? Or Lying, Cheating, and Stealing Machines? This interactive workshop encourages participants to critically examine how and why generative AI tools were designed and what that means for their use in education. Topics of exploration include: Bias, Hallucinations, Exploitation of Human Labor, Data & Privacy, Digital Divide, Academic Integrity, and Intellectual Property Rights. As participants explore each of these topics, they will consider how to bring these critical issues into their practice and how to help prepare students to become critical AI users.

Jon Ippolito facilitates the MYFest session held on 27 June 2024. Maturity, whether in childhood development or in AI use, means knowing when to trust instinctual responses and when to check their unimpeded influence. Drawing on a range of sources from the mathematics of probability to Roman history, this workshop proposes a framework for sifting appropriate uses of AI from those that can cause undue harm, be they in healthcare, business, or education. (Spoiler: it’s not high- versus low-risk tasks!)

Anna Mills facilitates the MYFest session held on 26 June 2024 with the full title: AI for Writing Feedback: Supporting a Human-Centered Writing Process and Building AI Literacy. In this interactive session, we’ll test out various forms of targeted AI writing feedback. How can AI feedback be incorporated to support students’ development of their own voice and ideas and also to give students practice questioning plausible AI advice? Can we put AI in a limited place where it supplements the responses of human readers and stimulates student thinking without telling them what to write? We’ll explore student comments on how it felt to use AI feedback from recent pilots of the teacher-created app MyEssayFeedback.ai.

Jon Ippolito facilitates the MYFest session held on 25 June 2024. In this three-part session series, we use the metaphoric structure: AI as a Growing Child. So in this first session we describe AI’s impact on democracy as the “adolescent phase,” where it can be rebellious and unpredictable. Just as it would be irresponsible to let a young child adolescent play with a firearm, AI and elections are a volatile mix. From deep-faked images of politicians to more subtle threats that can disable government infrastructure, this session demonstrates how AI tools can help saboteurs destabilize democracy. Participants learn the weaknesses of commonly proposed solutions like AI watermarks as well as other solutions with a greater chance of safeguarding the democratic process.

Academic and technologies teams at Barnard College developed an AI literacy framework to provide a conceptual foundation for AI education and programm

Wish your AI content sounded more like you? Want to create AI-written content to match your brand? Discover how to get AI to model your unique voice.

I explore five options for professors considering running student data through AI tools.

A new study shows that many people with autism embrace ChatGPT and similar AI tools for help and advice as they confront problems in their workplaces. But does that use of AI make sense?

Teaching, writing, and AI ideas

The lure of AI "time-saving" tools for teachers

Grief-laden vitriol directed at AI fails to help us understand paths to better futures that are neither utopian nor dystopian, but open to radically weird possibilities.

My sincere thanks to those who helped support the creation of The Beyond ChatGPT series by subscribing to my newsletter. Your continued support has helped me carve out the time to research AI’s impact on skill development this summer. I’m committed to keeping the content of this series open to all. Moving forward, I’ll be revisiting each one of these past essays to explore ways educators can ethically use AI with students to help them learn or ways they can include intentional friction in the learning process to counter AI’s marketing promise of a frictionless learning experience.

If so, here are some resources to help you navigate.

Last week, Federico and I asked Robb Knight to do what he could to block web crawlers deployed by artificial intelligence companies from scraping MacStories. Robb had already updated his own site’s robots.txt file months ago, so that’s the first thing he did for MacStories. However, robots.txt only works if a company’s web crawler is

ChatGPT & Education Designed by Torrey Trust, Ph.D. College of Education University of Massachusetts Amherst @torreytrust | torrey@umass.edu This work is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0, meaning that you can freely use, remix, and share it as long as you give attribution and do not use it for commerc...

AI Text Detectors (aka AI Plagiarism Detectors & AI Content Detectors) Designed by Torrey Trust, Ph.D. College of Education University of Massachusetts Amherst @torreytrust | torrey@umass.edu This work is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0, meaning that you can freely use, remix, and share it as long as...

Over the past several days, we’ve made some changes at MacStories to address the ingestion of our work by web crawlers operated by artificial intelligence companies. We’ve learned a lot, so we thought we’d share what we’ve done in case anyone else would like to do something similar. If you read MacStories regularly, or listen

Turning stories into “Choose your own adventures” This page is to support you with attempting to implement “Interactive Fiction” in an English classroom. Further discussion …

A practical guide on how to 10X your analysis process using free AI tools, based on real use cases

AI and the death of student writing; protesters barricade building at CSU-Los Angeles; the value of learning to do things you’re bad at; and more.