What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing - NOEMA
While AI can speed up the writing process, it doesn’t optimize quality — and it endangers our sense of connection to ourselves and others.
pinboarded
How to spot deepfakes created by AI image generators
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
bigscience/bloom · Hugging Face
or BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model: BLOOM is an autoregressive Large Language Model (LLM), trained to continue text from a prompt on vast amounts of text data using industrial-scale computational resources. As such, it is able to output coherent text in 46 languages and 13 programming languages that is hardly distinguishable from text written by humans. BLOOM can also be instructed to perform text tasks it hasn't been explicitly trained for, by casting them as text generation tasks.
French adaptation of OERu course builds technical capability for OER capacity development in multiple languages – OER Foundation
The OER Foundation contributed to an initiative led by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) in partnership with UNESCO and L’Université Numérique (The Digital University in France) to adapt the OERu’s Open education, copyright, and open licensing in a digital world (LiDA103) micro-course into French to support capacity development in OER for Francophone countries. The OER Foundation (OERF) has recently published “Éducation ouverte, droit d’auteur et licences ouvertes Creative Commons dans un monde numérique” – the French version of the OERu’s LiDA103 English course. The English text of the course was originally translated by UNESCO followed by a technical and cultural validation conducted by L’Université Numérique. Further consultation was conducted with the French-speaking group of OER experts, the Virtual Workshop on OER for Francophone Africa, French speaking experts of the UNESCO OER Dynamic Coalition within the framework of the OER Francophone Africa Project coordinated by the ICDE. The OER Foundation provided technology support for publishing the adapted course materials online using its open digital learning ecosystem. The course will be delivered using the OERF’s technology platform.
Open Logic Project – Open Source, Customizable, Advanced Logic Text
The Open Logic Project is a collection of teaching materials on mathematical logic aimed at a non-mathematical audience, intended for use in advanced logic courses as taught in many philosophy departments. It is open-source: you can download the LaTeX code. It is open: you’re free to change it whichever way you like, and share your changes. It is collaborative: a team of people is working on it, using the GitHub platform, and we welcome contributions and feedback. And it is written with configurability in mind.
Viberary
Viberary is a side project that I created to find books by vibe. I built it to satisfy an itch to do ML side projects and navigate the current boundary between search and recommendations. It's a production-grade compliment to my recent deep dive into embeddings. This project is a lot of fun, but conclusively proves to me what I've known all along about myself: reaching MLE (machine learning enlightenment) is the process of working through modeling, engineering,and UI concerns, and connecting everything together - the system in production is the reward. And, like any production-grade system, machine learning is not magic. Even if the data outputs are not deterministic, it takes thoughtful engineering and design choices to build such a system, something that I think gets overlooked these days in the ML community. I hope with this write-up to not only remind myself of what I did, but outline what it takes to build a production machine learning application, even a small one with a pre-trained model, and hope that people scope their efforts accordingly.
A.I. Pop Culture Is Already Here | The New Yorker
Last month, a YouTube user named demonflyingfox uploaded a video titled “Harry Potter by Balenciaga.” It showed characters from the Harry Potter films—Hagrid, Ron, Hermione, Snape, McGonagall, Dobby—as gaunt models with aggressive cheekbones (slightly yassified), dressed in gothic capes and leather jackets. Set against a catwalk-worthy electronica beat, the actors blink, nod, and speak lines from the books which have been remixed with fashion references. “You are Balenciaga, Harry,” Hagrid says, instead of breaking the news that Harry is a wizard. The video is strange and hilariously sinister. In three weeks, it has received almost five million views; a sequel, released less than a week ago, has netted more than a million and a half. Pop-culture mashups of one famous thing with another are an archetype of Internet meme-making. What’s unusual about “Harry Potter by Balenciaga” is that it was generated with artificial-intelligence tools. As the video’s creator, the Berlin-based photographer Alexander Niklass, who made the demonflyingfox channel, told me, the video demonstrates a newfound ability of A.I. to “create filmlike moments.”
Pluralistic: The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (09 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The problem with artificial intelligence? It’s neither artificial nor intelligent | Evgeny Morozov | The Guardian
Let’s retire this hackneyed term: while ChatGPT is good at pattern-matching, the human mind does so much more
Life In West America – BrainDrops collection by Roope Rainisto
Life In West America is a post-photography project delving deep into the complexities of the American landscape: the land as a concept, as an ideal, and into the stories and identities of the people inhabiting this vast landscape. Drawing inspiration from the early days of American color photography, the collection combines the visual language of traditional photography with the limitless artifice of AI. We go on a road trip that is both nostalgic and futuristic, inviting the viewers to question their perceptions of reality. One day in the future AI-based generative models will learn and observe the rules of reality, becoming experts. Today diffusion-based generative methods present a rare example of shoshin – the beginner’s mind, full of possibilities, open to new ideas, capable of evocative dreams. The dreamlike artefacts of generative methods are not hidden but celebrated, creating a pioneering post-photographic visual language. The collection also acts as a time capsule, capturing a fleeting moment of generative technology. One day the beginner will become the expert, and the moment will be lost.
Available Light (podcast)
Available Light is a podcast about the culture, history, and madness of photography. Together we explore the people and ideas behind the lens.
AI Inflection Points - Lars Mensel
ChatGPT and high-res image generators like Midjourney have become so good and produce such credible results that more and more AI creations are breaking into the mainstream. Maybe artifacts like Harry Potter by Balanciaga prove that there’s a real demand for those those collective experiences, no matter if they’re fake or real, that drive the cultural conversation.
Towards a Classification of Midjourney’s Uncanny Valley - Lars Mensel
I believe what we’re seeing is the mainstreaming of that particular AI aesthetic, which is a remarkable thing: Just half a year ago, generators like Dall-E barely managed to create credible images, these days, they generate viral bits of pop culture. Meanwhile, the aesthetic has become so familiar that it resonates; to a degree that fashion brands are jumping on the bandwagon. Of course, there’s still something deeply weird here: It’s all so real that it registers as fake. The technology has shed many of the problems that made early2 image obviously wrong, such as twisted limbs and warped fingers, but there are still marquee signs that we’re looking at piece of AI generated art.
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t - Erin Kissane's small internet website
After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird. My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space.
I’m a Luddite (and So Can You!) | The Nib
What the Luddites can teach us about resisting an automated future.
Adding client side search to a static site
Creating a site-search function that doesn't rely on external services. In the bad old days (a.k.a. "a couple of years ago") adding search functionality to a statically-generated site required third-party services that provided a search backend (like Algolia or Elastic or whatever). Thankfully we can now run a (simple) search using only client-side tech thanks to libraries like Fuse.js. As Fuse say in their docs: "you don’t need to setup a dedicated backend just to handle search." So how does it all work? Why do we even want site search functionality? And what are the steps required to add a decent search experience to a statically-generated site like mine?
Create a sign-up for sessions at a conference | Apps Script | Google for Developers
Create an end-to-end event registration system. If you have an event coming up, like a conference, you can set up a new calendar for conference sessions, create a sign-up form, and automatically email attendees personalized itineraries.
Dumb Password Rules
A compilation of 297 sites with dumb password rules.
Generative AI and Education: Adopting a Critical Approach » Bot Populi
Research on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) has witnessed a significant shift with the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) tools. A quick web search can reveal that GenAI is already being used for various purposes in education, such as suggesting ideas, editing texts, creating resources, providing feedback, tutoring, and assisting students with special needs, among many other things. However, concerns arise over accuracy, biases, transparency, data access, ethical issues, and environmental impact of GenAI and its content. A careful assessment of the benefits of GenAI against its disadvantages is necessary to mitigate the drawbacks and to foster the development of more morally- and responsibly-driven GenAI for the future. Educators and policymakers must adopt a critical approach to navigate the GenAI era responsibly.
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The entire story of Twitter under Elon Musk - The Verge
Elon Musk owns Twitter, and his new big idea is charging people to read more than a few hundred tweets per day. Verified Twitter Blue subscribers can read up to 6,000 tweets per day, no one can browse the site without logging in, and unverified accounts are limited to reading 300 tweets per day, which Musk blames on AI startups scraping the site to feed large language models like ChatGPT. How’d we get here?
The Red Hand Files
By Nick Cave: "The Red Hand Files began in September of 2018 as a simple idea – a place where I would answer questions from my fans. Over the years, The Red Hand Files has burst the boundaries of its original concept to become a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency. Hundreds of letters come in each week, asking an extraordinarily diverse array of questions, from the playful to the profound, the deeply personal to the flat-out nutty. I read them all and try my best to answer a question each week. The Red Hand Files has no moderator, and it is not monetized, and I am the only one who has access to the questions that sit patiently waiting to be answered. Thank you all for being a part of what has become, at least for me, a life-changing, soul enriching exercise in commonality and togetherness."
How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide (by Ethan Mollick)
Increasingly powerful AI systems are being released at an increasingly rapid pace. This week saw the debut of Claude 2, likely the second most capable AI system available to the public. The week before, Open AI released Code Interpreter, the most sophisticated mode of AI yet available. The week before that, some AIs got the ability to see images. And yet not a single AI lab seems to have provided any user documentation. Instead, the only user guides out there appear to be Twitter influencer threads. Documentation-by-rumor is a weird choice for organizations claiming to be concerned about proper use of their technologies, but here we are. I can’t claim that this is going to be a complete user guide, but it will serve as a bit of orientation to the current state of AI. I have been putting together a Getting Started Guide to AI for my students (and interested readers) every few months, and each time, it requires major modifications. The last couple of months have been particularly insane. This guide is opinionated, based on my experience, and focused on how to pick the right tool to do things. I have written separately about the kinds of tasks you may want AI to do, which might be useful to read first. h/t Stephen Downes and OLDaily
The Banned Book Club
A project from the Digital Public Library, that uses geolocation to provide readers access to digital versions of books that have been locally banned. Last year, thousands of books were banned at libraries, schools and universities. OUR MISSION IS TO PROVIDE ANYONE WHO IS IN A LIBRARY THAT HAS BANNED A BOOK ACCESS TO THE DIGITAL VERSION FOR FREE. OUR MISSION IS TO PROVIDE ANYONE WHO IS IN A LIBRARY THAT HAS BANNED A BOOK ACCESS TO THE DIGITAL VERSION FOR FREE. Every time a book is banned from a library, we're going to help put it right back. Every time a book is banned from a library, we're going to help put it right back.Every time a book is banned from a library, we're going to help put it right back.
Openness in Education as a Praxis: From Individual Testimonials to Collective Voices - Open Praxis
Why is Openness in Education important, and why is it critically needed at this moment? As manifested in our guiding question, the significance of Openness in Education and its immediate necessity form the heart of this collaborative editorial piece. This rather straightforward, yet nuanced query has sparked this collective endeavour by using individual testimonies, which may also be taken as living narratives, to reveal the value of Openness in Education as a praxis. Such testimonies serve as rich, personal narratives, critical introspections, and experience-based accounts that function as sources of data. The data gleaned from these narratives points to the understanding of Openness in Education as a complex, multilayered concept intricately woven into an array of values. These range from aspects such as sharing, access, flexibility, affordability, enlightenment, barrier-removal, empowerment, care, individual agency, trust, innovation, sustainability, collaboration, co-creation, social justice, equity, transparency, inclusivity, decolonization, democratisation, participation, liberty, and respect for diversity. This editorial, as a product of collective endeavour, invites its readers to independently engage with individual narratives, fostering the creation of unique interpretations. This call stems from the distinctive character of each narrative as they voice individual researchers’ perspectives from around the globe, articulating their insights within their unique situational contexts.
UDL: The UDL Guidelines
The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.
TubeSpanner
The all-in-one tool kit for YouTube content creators
Run of Show 101: How to Make Your Live Stream Run Smoothly
Live streams, your way to real-time audience connection, can become challenging if you don't prepare well. But wait, live streams are made to make our audience connection spontaneous, so why do we need planning and preparation? Because unlike a non-live video, you can't edit live videos. Having a run of show or production schedule for your live stream, helps you figure out what (and who) you will need for your live broadcast to ensure everything is on track. A run of show (ROS) is your go-to document that includes all the information essential to run an event. A vital component of the pre-production phase, a run of show lists everything in detail – from the event's timing to the durations, topics, and speakers. For somewhat complicated and lengthy events, a run of show also mentions cues for the entire set up, besides all the audio, video, and lighting changes. In terms of a live stream, the ROS lays out minute-by-minute detail about the broadcast sequence. It lists details like what to share on the screen, what music to play in the background, and which equipment to use. It can also include floor plans with the room layout and the placement of all the equipment, including cameras, microphones, lighting, catering, etc.
Wikipedia’s value in the age of generative AI by Selena Deckelmann
If there was a generative artificial intelligence system that could, on its own, write all the information contained in Wikipedia, would it be the same as Wikipedia today? This might seem like a philosophical question, but it’s now a very practical one due to recent advances in generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). Because of widespread adoption of generative AI technology designed to predict and mimic human responses, it is now possible to nearly effortlessly create text that seems a lot like it came from Wikipedia. My answer to the question is simple: No — it would not be the same. The process of freely creating knowledge, of sharing it, and refining it over time, in public and with the help of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, has for 20 years fundamentally shaped Wikipedia and the many other Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia contains trustworthy, reliably sourced knowledge because it is created, debated, and curated by people. It’s also grounded in an open, noncommercial model, which means that Wikipedia is free to access and for sharing, and it always will be. And in an internet flooded with machine generated content, this means that Wikipedia becomes even more valuable. In the past six months, the public has been introduced to dozens of LLMs, trained on vast data sets that can read, summarize, and generate text. Wikipedia is one of the largest open corpuses of information on the internet, with versions in over 300 languages. To date, every LLM is trained on Wikipedia content, and it is almost always the largest source of training data in their data sets.
#OA Book: 101 Creative Ideas to Use AI in Education – #creativeHE
This open crowdsourced collection presents a rich tapestry of our collective thinking in the first months of 2023 stitching together potential alternative uses and applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that could make a difference and create new learning, development, teaching and assessment opportunities. Experimentation is at the heart of learning, teaching and scholarship. Being open to diverse ideas will help us make novel connections that can lead to new discoveries and insights to make a positive contribution to our world. Ideas shared may be in its embryonic stage, but worth exploring further through active and creative inquiry.
Generative AI – Ethics all the way down | Open World
Most generative AI tools use data sets scraped from the web and made available for research and commercial development. Some of the organisations creating these data sets are non-profits, others are commercial companies, the relationship between the two is not always transparent. Most of these data sets scrape content directly from the web regardless of ownership, copyright, licensing and consent, which has led to legitimate concerns about all kinds of rights violations. While some companies claim to employ these data sets under the terms of fair use, questions have been raised about using such data for explicitly commercial purposes. Some open advocates have said that while they have no objection to these data sets being used for research purposes they are very concerned about commercial use. Content creators have also raised objections to their creative works being used to train commercial applications without their knowledge or consent. As a result, a number copyright violation lawsuits have been raised by artists, creators, cultural heritage organisations and copyright holders.