Reve: Reimagine Reality
AI tool for creating and editing images. You can combine elements from multiple images, including adding a character to a scene. There's a free plan with limitations which should be enough to test it.
Blog posts
Reality Check - AI Photo Detection Game
Think you're good at identifying AI images? Try this weekly quiz to test your accuracy. In the week 1 quiz, I correctly identified 75% of the images.
The Missing Feedback Problem: When Intellectual Knowledge Just. Isn’t. Enough.
Julie Dirksen shares examples of the disconnect between what we know we should do and what are physical reality tells us. Delayed or absent feedback makes behavior change hard. Making progress, consequences, or feedback more visible and vivid can help.
"That’s interesting, because I’ve seen a consistent thread in most behavior change challenges: delayed or absent feedback. What it comes down to is that your intellectual knowledge is telling you one thing, but your physical environment is telling you something else. This has important implications for learning design. If we can’t just rely on intellectual knowledge, we need to give people the feeling of consequences or outcomes. That influences design choices—how visceral the experience is, how vivid the consequences are, and what kind of feedback people get."
Home | AI or Not
Free AI detection tool (with more info for paid plans). It was accurate for the images I uploaded to test. I would be cautious of using this to detect AI text though; all of these tools have a lot of false positives and false negatives.
AI Vector: Convert PNG to SVG Online Instantly
AI Vector is a free tool to convert PNG images to SVG format quickly.
On Working with Wizards - by Ethan Mollick
Ethan Mollick writes about the shift from using AI as co-intelligence to how AI is becoming a "wizard" that can do complex work as if by magic. This raises some important points about the challenges of working with AI, especially agentic AI where we have no transparency on the process. Even if we plan to have a human verify the AI's work, that verification is challenging. Do you have the right people with the right skills to verify it?
You don’t know how the AI made the choices it made, nor can you confirm that everything is completely correct. We're shifting from being collaborators who shape the process to being supplicants who receive the output. It is a transition from working with a co-intelligence to working with a wizard.
So what do we do with our wizards? I think we need to develop a new literacy: First, learn when to summon the wizard versus when to work with AI as a co-intelligence or to not use AI at all.
Second, we need to become connoisseurs of output rather than process. We need to curate and select among the outputs the AI provides, but more than that, we need to work with AI enough to develop instincts for when it succeeds and when it fails. We have to learn to judge what's right, what's off, and what's worth the risk of not knowing. This creates a hard problem for education: How do you train someone to verify work in fields they haven't mastered, when the AI itself prevents them from developing mastery? Figuring out how to address this gap is increasingly urgent.
The paradox of working with AI wizards is that competence and opacity rise together. We need these tools most for the tasks where we're least able to verify them.
70+ AI art styles to use in your AI prompts
A large collection of AI art styles and examples to help you prompt better AI images.
Exploring AI Art Styles: A Comprehensive List with Examples
Examples of a wide range of AI art styles so you can get inspiration and learn how to describe what you want in prompts.
For those who have gotten hired in the last year, can you share how you got the job?
Kim Scott asked about how people are actually getting hired in the current job market. Some of the responses are exactly what you'd expect (networking, portfolios, LinkedIn profiles), but there were some other tips such as making sure to apply early to jobs soon after they're posted .
Creating AI Art Responsibly: How to Navigate AI Legal Risks
These recommendations are a good starting point for thinking about how to use AI ethically and to reduce your risk.
Set Clear AI Use Guidelines
Choose Tools That Protect You
Be Careful What You Prompt
Use Approved References
Review Before Release
Seek Expert Guidance, Mitigate AI Legal Risks
WaveSpeedAI
WaveSpeed gives you access to multiple different image and video generation tools by paying for credits based on what you actually use. This looks like a promising option to test out tools or generate a few videos without committing to a larger subscription.
MeiGen-AI/InfiniteTalk
MeiGen-AI/InfiniteTalk is an open source AI video generation tool that supports image-to-video and video-to-video generation. This tool can create longer video clips, not just the 5-10 seconds of many other tools. It's open source, so this link goes to the Github for the project with instructions to install it locally. For a local model, the results look very promising. Installing and running it will take some technical proficiency though.
Our approach to energy innovation and AI’s environmental footprint
Google published a technical report on the environmental impact of AI, including calculating the cost of training models (not just individual queries). They reported energy use much lower than many earlier estimates, partly due to improvements in efficiency.
Over a 12-month period, while delivering higher-quality responses, the median energy consumption and carbon footprint per Gemini Apps text prompt decreased by factors of 33x and 44x, respectively. Based on our recent analysis, we found that our work on efficiency is proving effective and the energy consumed per median prompt is equivalent to watching television for less than nine seconds.
Ideogram Character
This is another tool I'm adding to my list to test out. Give Ideogram a single reference image and then generate multiple remixed images. In the demo, I notice that the expressions don't seem to change much, so that might be a limitation. The basic character creation is free, with additional features for more precise editing on their paid subscription plan.
Is Any AI Use Ethical? – Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Wes Fryer shares his thoughts on differing views of ethics and AI. Wes is not ethically opposed to all AI, but that doesn't mean he supports all AI use blindly either.
I am convinced AI technologies present transformative capabilities as a “cognitive force multiplier,” and have willingly drank a healthy portion of the “AI Kool-Aid” and “AI hype cycle.” I’ve said and still believe that AI represents a transformative leap forward in our shared human history of communication as well as information economy / third wave work. At this point, I am not and do not want to be an “AI conscientious objector,” refusing to voluntarily use it in all contexts. I am an advocate for its ethical and beneficial uses, and plan to remain one.
Taking Blogging Seriously
I think back to the heyday of edublogs when lots of individuals were writing and publishing regularly. I see some of it now in email and LinkedIn newsletters, but so many fewer people write regularly like this. Blogging (like all writing) helps you clarify your thinking. I'm a better ID because I've spent so much time blogging and thinking in public.
Blogging is deeply important to me because it’s a powerful mixture of two ideas: creative expression and finding the others.
WCAG in Plain English - AAArdvark
If you've ever consulted the official Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and felt befuddled by the wording, check out this site. This is a plain English guide to every WCAG standard.
How to spot fake AI photos
Interested in learning how forensics experts can identify AI images? Watch this 12-minute video explaining how image noise, vanishing points, and shadows can help you identify AI-generated images.
What Uses More? Compare the environmental footprint of digital tasks
Stella Lee shared this tool to help you compare the environmental footprint of various digital tasks based on a number of variables.
Better Images of AI
This nonprofit is collecting images that represent AI and technology while avoiding the typical metaphors and tropes. All images are Creative Commons licensed.
Our contribution to a global environmental standard for AI | Mistral AI
Mistral shared their data on emissions, water consumption, and materials consumption for AI use. They also share tips for reducing your environmental impact when using AI, such as using smaller and more specific models.
AI Art Generator: Free Image Generator from OpenArt
OpenArt has an image generator, but they also now have a tool for creating video stories with consistent characters between scenes. If you create a story from scratch, you can generate the images and then use image to video. I'm saving this one as a tool to test out in the future.
Prompts_JoshCavalier.docx
Josh Cavalier's prompts for generating a scenario video with scenes of dialogue between two characters. The images and done in Midjourney. The videos and code to add interactivity are in Gemini (Veo). The whole process took him 35 minutes.
L&D in the Age of AI: Doubling Down on What Makes Us Human
David Kelly shares ideas on human skills like contextual judgment, curation, and connection that are becoming more important in the age of AI.
Real or AI Quiz: Can You Tell the Difference? » Britannica
Test your ability to distinguish between real and AI images with this quiz. I work with AI images a lot, and I still only got 8/10 on this quiz. I appreciate the explanations about what to look for and tips for critical review of media.
Texture and Pattern Repetition: AI sometimes struggles with complex textures or patterns, leading to noticeable repetition or awkward transitions. Students should look for unnatural patterns in textures like hair, skin, clothing, or background elements.
We did it!!!
Mel Milloway shares an example of an interactive avatar for interview practice. Mel has been working out loud throughout the process of building this project to explain her work and the challenges she ran into throughout
Wondershare
Among other tools, Wondershare has tools for creating PDFs, including creating fillable PDF forms. Looks like a good alternative for Adobe Acrobat at a lower price. Thanks Keith Quinn for the recommendation.
This Image Wasn’t a Stock Photo – and It Changed the Way I Build Training
Michelle Bonkosky shares her process for using ChatGPT for generating a unique image for a training workbook. I appreciate how she shows the process of iterating and refining her prompts; that's a key point. She also includes some sample prompts for images for training assets.
AI Co. Anthropic Nabs Partial Fair Use Win in Copyright Case
The headlines about this case will miss a lot of the nuances; it's not a complete win for Anthropic, but it is an important one. The ruling found that training AI on legally obtained copyrighted books is fair use because it's "quintessentially transformative." That doesn't mean that training on pirated books is fair use, and nothing in this ruling explicitly addresses content publicly available online. The output of AI is also an unresolved question; I predict we'll have some rulings that generating text or images that too closely matches existing copyrighted works is not protected. AI tools (especially image generation tools) need guardrails to prevent the generation of copyrighted content.
Updated Template for Writing/Designing Scenario Questions
Will Thalheimer has shared a free template for writing scenario questions. These are more in-depth than my typical examples of one-question mini-scenarios. I like how this template forces you to think about the context and about how to differentiate people who understand the topic from those who don't.