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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Gemini Image Editing: A Guide With 10 Practical Examples
This article explains how to use Gemini for image editing with examples, showing what works and what doesn't work. Modifying facial expressions and body poses worked fairly well in this author's testing, making this one option for generating sets of character images.
This is an extensive comparison of the Articulate Suite versus a new competitor, Parta. I haven't tried Parta myself, but it does seem like a tool worth reviewing, especially if you do a lot of development for mobile users. Accessibility is one big drawback with Parta, and I'm not sure it has enough power to do all of the branching and variables features I need. It's good to see what else is available though.
Examples of bias in AI in image generation, recruiting tools, voice recognition, and other areas. The solutions here focus primarily on adjustments of the AI systems and debiasing strategy rather than on the level of individual prompts to improve representation. If you're looking at your overall strategy for AI, how you address bias has to be part of the plan.
Why AI Video Avatars are NOT the Next Big Thing in L&D
Heidi Kirby digs into the research about AI video avatars (excluding the vendor research). The support really isn't there. I've anecdotally seen lots of complaints about how they sit in the uncanny valley. But even as the video avatars get more realistic, is a talking head video really the best instructional method? Of course not! There wasn't a lot of buzz about talking head videos before AI. Why is there so much buzz now? (Interactive video avatars for scenarios are a separate question and not addressed by this article.)
Despite their increasing use, there's limited evidence that AI-generated avatars significantly improve learning outcomes.
While plenty of nonbinary people have names that are traditionally coded as male or female, sometimes more gender neutral names are useful for characters in scenarios.
When graphics improve liking but not learning from online lessons
Sung and Mayer research on different types of graphics and how they affect learning. Graphics improve satisfaction and may improve motivation through affective engagement, even if they're irrelevant. Images are divided into 3 categories: instructive, decorative, and seductive.
Runway Gen-4 offers a more controlled workflow for generating images with consistent characters and scenes. Add either a single reference image of a character or multiple reference images to combine multiple characters in a scene or specify the setting or objects. This is a more complex workflow than just chatting with ChatGPT, but it gives you more precision and more consistent results. This is Runway's documentation on using image references.
Supporting Learning with AI-Generated Images: A Research-Backed Guide - MIT Sloan Teaching & Learning Technologies
Suggestions and examples for using AI-generated images in meaningful ways to support learning, without adding confusing or distracting images. Consider cognitive load and the purpose of your images.
A study by Sung and Mayer (2012) suggests that any graphic in a learning experience will fall into one of these three categories:
Instructive images: These visuals directly support learning and facilitate essential cognitive processing of core concepts. For example, a diagram illustrating Porter’s Five Forces can help students better understand this business strategy framework.
Decorative images: These graphics enhance aesthetics but don’t influence learning. For example, an image of a business handshake can be visually appealing but won’t support or obstruct students’ understanding of negotiation strategies.
Distracting images: Sung and Mayer call this category “seductive” images. While these visuals may relate to the topic, they impede learning because they require extraneous cognitive processing. As an example, consider a complex organizational chart of a full corporation in a lesson on team leadership. The image connects broadly to the lesson but also highlights a lot of irrelevant details, distracting students from the key concepts.
Ethan Mollick shows the progression of AI image and video generation with iterations of a prompt about otters using wifi on a plane. He also explains the difference between diffusion and multimodal image generation models (Midjourney vs ChatGPT). These tools get such different results because the underlying technology and approach is different.
While LLMs generate text one word at a time, always moving forward, diffusion models start with random static and transform the entire image simultaneously through dozens of steps. It is like the difference between writing a story sentence by sentence versus starting with a marble block and gradually sculpting it into a statue, every part of the image is being refined at once, not built up sequentially.
But what makes diffusion models interesting is not their increasing ability to make photorealistic images, but rather the fact that they can create images in various styles.
Unlike diffusion models that transform noise into images, multimodal generation lets Large Language Models directly create images by adding tiny patches of color one after another, just as they add words one after another. This gives AIs deep control over the images it creates.
The advances in AI voices continue to impress me. Rime is aimed more for organizations using AI voices for customer service or live conversations, so it might be useful for voice chat in training applications. There's a free plan available to test it out.
AI image generators tend to exaggerate stereotypes
The examples in this article are all from older images, but the problems of bias in AI image generators remain. Unless you are explicitly prompting to avoid stereotypes, AI image generators reflect the bias of the images they trained on. Even if you do prompt to avoid stereotypes, it can still be a problem.
Demystifying LoRAs: What are they and how are they used in Stable Diffusion?
Quick introduction to LoRAs and how they're used for fine tuning image generation in different styles for Stable Diffusion (and other image generators)
How to video from Flora about how to create images with character consistency across different scenes. This is a more time consuming and technical process involving training a LoRA (low-rank adaptation) on an initial set of images for a character. This probably works best with real people, but there may be ways to adapt this workflow for elearning with generated characters. This is more effort than I would do for most projects, but might be worth exploring if I need something higher end for a specific project.
Podcast Transcript AI - Transcribe Any Podcast For Free!
Generate a transcript of any podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Search for the name of the podcast, pick an episode, and get a transcript emailed to you. I wanted to get a transcript of one of my podcast interviews, and this was a quick way to generate one.