Eight Suggestions about AI for Those Teaching this Fall  

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The challenges that generative AI poses to teaching requires campus-wide faculty discussions. Most students will have to use generative AI when they move into their careers, and it would be a shame for them to graduate without understanding how to use it and without having wrestled with its ethical limits. As you prepare for your fall classes consider these suggestions: 

Have a Class Discussion. Talk openly and frankly with your students about your expectations regarding the use of generative AI in your classes as well as how you are using it yourself. Invite your students to share with you in an honest discussion about these and related questions. Keep in mind that the line between which AI is acceptable and which is not is often blurry because AI is being integrated into many different apps and programs.

Keep the Door Open. Cultivate an environment in which students will feel comfortable approaching you if they need more direct support—whether from you, their peers, or a campus resource to successfully complete an assignment. Talk to them about their motivations for turning to generative AI: time pressure, curiosity, burn out, etc.  Barnard College 

AI Bias. Make the students aware that AI can reflect societal prejudices. If the AI training sets underrepresent the views of marginalized populations, then the essays they produce may omit those views as well. Bloomberg

Vulnerable Students. Consider how chatting with AI systems might affect vulnerable students, including those with depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Privacy Issues. It is important for students to be aware that personal information provided to generative AI tools has the potential to be shared with third parties. This can may raise serious privacy concerns for your students and perhaps in particular, those students who are from marginalized backgrounds. Barnard College 

Think Through the Pedagogical Impact. What are the cognitive tasks students need to perform without AI assistance? When should students rely on AI assistance? Where can an AI aid facilitate a better outcome? Are there efficiencies in grading that can be gained? Are new rubrics and assignment descriptions needed? Inside Higher Ed 

A Syllabus Statement. Include a syllabus statement that gives clear guidance regarding your expectations for the use of generative AI in your classes. The Sentient Syllabus Project

AI Detectors. If you plan to put students’ work through an AI detector, please inform them in advance, keeping in mind that a reliable detection tool has yet to be developed. False positives carry real harm when a student is wrongly accused. English language learners, international students, and students with learning challenges might write in a style that instructors wrongly assume is AI when it is not. Washington Post

“There’s more of a danger in not teaching students how to use AI. If they’re not being taught under the mentorship of scholars and experts, they may be using it in ways that are either inappropriate or not factual or unethical.” Johanna Inman, quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Stop chasing originality

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The quest for originality is a distraction. It usually leads to a self-obsessive focus on saying what’s never been said when all that really matters is saying what you believe, saying what you feel, and saying what you mean. When you first start doing this, you might not sound very original, but this process is precisely how you find your voice. 

TK Coleman, 5 Ways to Steal Like An Artist

8 Articles about Detecting AI

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The artist is a collector

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An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love. There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

Austin Kleon, How to Steal Like an Artist

8 insightful quotes about AI Bias

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In an analysis of thousands of images created by Stable Diffusion, we found that image sets generated for every high-paying job were dominated by subjects with lighter skin tones, while subjects with darker skin tones were more commonly generated by prompts like “fast-food worker” and “social worker.” Most occupations in the dataset were dominated by men, except for low-paying jobs like housekeeper and cashier. Bloomberg

Eight years ago, Google disabled its A.I. program’s ability to let people search for gorillas and monkeys through its Photos app because the algorithm was incorrectly sorting Black people into those categories. As recently as May of this year, the issue still had not been fixed. Two former employees who worked on the technology told The New York Times that Google had not trained the A.I. system with enough images of Black people. New York Times

MIT student Rona Wang asked an AI image creator app called Playground AI to make a photo of her look "professional." It gave her paler skin and blue eyes, and "made me look Caucasian." Boston Globe 

We have things like recidivism algorithms that are racially biased. Even soap dispensers that don’t read darker skin. Smartwatches and other health sensors don’t work as well for darker skin. Things like selfie sticks that are supposed to track your image don’t work that well for people with darker skin because image recognition in general is biased. The Markup

AI text may be biased toward established scientific ideas and hypotheses contained in the content on which the algorithms were trained. Science.org

No doubt AI-powered writing tools have shortcomings. But their presence offers educators an on-ramp to discussions about linguistic diversity and bias. Such discussions may be especially critical on U.S. campuses. Inside Higher Ed

Major companies behind A.I. image generators — including OpenAI, Stability AI and Midjourney — have pledged to improve their tools. “Bias is an important, industrywide problem,” Alex Beck, a spokeswoman for OpenAI, said in an email interview. She declined to say how many employees were working on racial bias, or how much money the company had allocated toward the problem. New York Times

As AI models become more advanced, the images they create are increasingly difficult to distinguish from actual photos, making it hard to know what’s real. If these images depicting amplified stereotypes of race and gender find their way back into future models as training data, next generation text-to-image AI models could become even more biased, creating a snowball effect of compounding bias with potentially wide implications for society. Bloomberg

Adapting to Change

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Understand the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present movement. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to changing circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be. The more we lose ourselves in predigested theories and past experiences, the more inappropriate and delusional our response.

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

13 creative things people are trying to get AI to do

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Can AI Read my mind?

A.I. Is Getting Better at Mind-Reading In a recent experiment, researchers used large language models to translate brain activity into words. – New York Times

Can AI translate the Bible?

USC researchers use AI to help translate Bible into very rare languages – Religious News Service

Can AI make astrological readings?

Is A.I. the Future of Astrology? – New York Times

Can AI Do your taxes?

Ready for AI to help you do your taxes? Taxfyle’s got you covered – Refresh Miami

How about answering questions from a ‘biblical’ perspective?

Christian creators build chatbots with ‘biblical’ worldview – Religious News Service

Can AI change the way wars are fought?

Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of AI Weapons – New York Times

Can AI replace humans?

We Went to the Fast-Food Drive-Through to Find Out – Wall Street Journal

Can AI build websites?

Mobile website builder Universe launches AI-powered designer – Tech Crunch

Can AI write sermons?

Start-up AI Platform Aims to Help Pastors Make the Most of Their Sunday Sermons – Christian Standard 

Can AI write a song?

We asked Google’s new AI music bot to write us a song. We instantly regretted it – Science Focus

Can AI pilot airplanes or drones?

AI pilots, the future of aerial warfare – Air Force Tech

Can AI bring historical figures to life?

AI Chatbots Now Let You Talk to Historical Figures Like Shakespeare and Andy Warhol – My Modern Met 

Can AI create decent headshots?

I Used AI To Create My Professional Headshots And The Results Were Either Great Or Hilarious – Digg

Lasting Love

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Lasting love is a passion that grows. The more we know the person, the more deeply we love him. There are a few who are struck like lightning. The minute they see someone they hear violins. This usually happens only in the movies. As one writer has suggested, it has to be “love at first sight” in a show that only has two hours to run.

Surveys continuously support love by growth. The overwhelming majority say they did not “fall in love” all at once. They met a person and found him attractive or interesting. Whatever caught their attention made them want to learn more. Possibly they met the person again or went on a date. At any rate, something started to grow. The person became more interesting.

Some people are frustrated because falling in love wasn’t like a divine revelation or a heart seizure. Consequently they even wonder if it is real. Such “falling” is a romantic dream that most of use have never experienced. But love which takes time can be the most enduring kind.

It is a question of expectation. Those who expect love to be automatic and instantaneous are often disappointed. It is more realistic to expect love to grow into full bloom as you live together in marriage. Then, rather than looking for an ideal experience, both lovers expect to change and grow.

William Coleman from his book Engaged

10 articles about AI limitations

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Practice Like you Play

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Officers are trained to take a gun from an assailant in close quarters, a maneuver they practice by role-playing with a fellow officer. It requires speed and deftness: striking an assailant's wrist with one hand to break his grip while simultaneously wrestling the gun free with the other. It's a move that officers have been in the habit of honing through repetition, taking gun, handing it back, and taking it again.

Until one of their officers, on a call in the field, took the gun from an assailant and handed it right back again. In a mutual astonishment the officer managed to re-seize the gun and hang onto it. The training regime had violated the cardinal rule that you should practice like you play, because you will play like you practice.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

9 AI Predictions

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The Information Riot

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The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information.

On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive.

Nicholas Carr
The Shallows

 

10 Media Webinars in the next two weeks covering journalism, AI, funding, law, science & more

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 Mon, July 31 - SPJ Sports event with Thomas Rongen 

What: Thomas Rongen will discuss his work and calling Messi's first game within Major League Soccer.

Who: Thomas Rongen, Soccer Broadcaster

When: 7 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Society of Professional Journalists

More Info

 

Wed, Aug 2 – The Path Forward: Artificial Intelligence

What: The recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and why the tech industry is at an inflection point.

Who: Longtime Silicon Valley executive Marissa Mayer; Lori Montgomery Business Editor, The Washington Post

When: 3 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Washington Post

More Info

 

Wed, Aug 2 – Covering Contaminated Sites in Your Community

What: Tips on the ways journalists can report on contaminated sites by incorporating local voices who have been personally impacted by the pollution that created the contaminated sites, and the knowledge of experts who lay out how future extreme weather events fueled by climate change may threaten to further spread that pollution if clean-up is not done quickly and thoroughly.

Who: Jordan Gass-Pooré, Creator/Host, "Hazard NJ" podcast (NJ Spotlight News/NJ PBS)

When: 1 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Society of Environmental Journalists

More Info

 

Wed, Aug 2 - Data Visualization with Business Intelligence Tools

What: Data visualization options with major Business Intelligence (BI) tools, PowerBI and Tableau. 

Who: Tech Impact Senior Consultant Erica Blake

When: 2 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Techimpact

More Info

 

Thu, Aug 3 - Chat GPT Content Creation & Custom Bots for Newspapers

What: This webinar is designed to empower newspaper publishers with the knowledge and skills needed to harness the power of Chat GPT

Who: Matt Larson, the president & CEO of Our-Hometown.com

When: 1 pm Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: $35 (registration deadline July 31)

Sponsor: Online Media Campus

More Info

 

Mon, Aug 7 – Media Law Office Hours

What: This open group session allows journalists with legal questions to help find answers on issues related to the First Amendment, Freedom of Information, copyright, defamation, or other media law matters. 

Who: Attorney Matthew Leish

When: 5 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free to members

Sponsor: The Deadline Club

More Info

 

Tue, Aug 8 - Science Essentials for Local Reporters

What: The key do’s, don’ts, and pitfalls to watch for when including science in your news reporting. Among the topics covered:  Knowing whether and how science can enhance your story; Different kinds of studies and what each can—and cannot—reveal; Practical tips for identifying credible scientist-sources and interviewing them; and How to get the essentials from scientific reports, studies, and press releases.

Who: Former longtime Washington Post science reporter Rick Weiss and Ph.D. neuroscientist Dr. Tori Fosheim

When: 2 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Society of Environmental Journalists

More Info

 

Tue, Aug 8 - Working with a World-Class AI Grant Writing Assistant

What: How artificial intelligence will affect grant proposals and grant writing.

Who: Philip Deng Grantable.co  CEO

When: noon

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: TechSoup

More Info

 

Wed, Aug 9 - The AI Tools Marketers Actually Need Right Now

What: Unpack how incorporating AI-driven technology may be easier than you think. You’ll find out:  Why machine learning and generative AI help marketers deliver personalized campaigns at scale. How marketing automation tools are incorporating AI technology.  Advice for leveraging AI in your marketing today and in the future

Who: Vicki Brown VP, Principal Analyst  Forrester; Elizabeth Jacobi Founder  MochaBear Marketing; John Humphrey Head of Data  Platform Product Intuit Mailchimp   

When: 1 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Intuit Mailchimp

More Info

 

Thu, Aug 10 - Writing a Successful Environmental Story

What: The do’s and don’ts about submitting a grant application and how to pitch an environmental

Who: Augustine Kasambule, Pulitzer Center Staff; Adrienne Engono Epse Moussang, Congo Basin RJF Advisory Committee member; Madeleine Ngeunga, Rainforest Investigations Fellow

When: 7 am, Eastern 

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Pulitzer Center

More Info 

24 Data Science & AI Articles from July 2023

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The future space economy could encompass activities that currently aren’t being pursued at scale, such as in-orbit manufacturing, power generation, & space mining, as well as scalable human spaceflight 

Will the future be filled with “networks of autonomous drones, deployed around the globe, helping humans keep conflict in check … or maybe the skies will darken with attack swarms”

A basic explanation of geospatial data & geospatial technology—how they are used and their limitations

Our hesitation, perceived or otherwise, to move forward with military applications of artificial intelligence will be punished

Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of AI Weapons 

The AI-powered, totally autonomous future of war Is here

Experts imagine what artificial intelligence could mean for the future of satellites, space entrepreneurship, and government defense systems 

How much coding is needed in a data science career?

10 Specific Predictions about AI

A look at what sets Meta’s Llama 2 apart from its predecessor & other large language models—here’s the technical details & implications for data scientists

US sharpens military space race plan as Space Force is challenged to compete with China  

A review of major data science and AI developments during the first half of 2023

What’s missing from ChatGPT and other LLMs?

How does Bayesian inference work when estimating noisy interactions?

A US Army project called "Real-Time Threat Forecasting" hopes to create AI that can forecast enemy actions just minutes before the enemy actually does it—and continuously update that forecast as adversaries change their tactics

OpenAI rolls out a ChatGPT Plus feature called the Code Interpreter that can write and execute python code, and can work with file uploads

A primer on large language models

The latest trends in artificial intelligence and deep learning from the metaverse to quantum computing

“I don't think generative AI will displace predictive analytics"

Understanding the difference between advanced and predictive analytics

The advantages of Causal AI over traditional machine learning

Most of the large language models developed in China are nearly 2 years behind the US—a gap that would be a challenge to close even if American firms had to adjust to regulation

A Chinese satellite manufacturer and constellation operator says it has successfully demonstrated space-to-ground high-speed laser communications— transmitting data 10x faster thanks to lasers

The engineering applications of machine learning and predictive analytics

Your Sweet Spot

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Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality--neither over-stimulating nor understimulating, neither boring nor anxiety-making. You can optimize your life in terms of what personality psychologists call "optimal levels of arousal" and what I call "sweet spots," and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before.

Your sweet spot is the place where you're optimally stimulated. You probably seek it out already without being aware that you're doing so. Imagine that you're lying contentedly in a hammock reading a great novel. This is a sweet spot. But after half an hour you realize that you've read the same sentence five times; now you're understimulated. So you call a friend and go out for brunch--in other words, you ratchet up your stimulation level--and as you laugh and gossip over blueberry pancakes, you're back, thank goodness, inside your sweet spot. But this agreeable state lasts only until your friend--an extrovert who needs much more stimulation than you do--persuades you to accompany her to a block party, where you're now confronted by loud music and a sea of strangers.

Your friend's neighbors seem affable enough, but you feel pressured to make small talk above the din of music. Now--bang, just like that--you've fallen out of your sweet spot, except this time you're overstimulated. And you'll probably feel that way until you pair off with someone on the periphery of the party for an in-depth conversation, or bow out altogether and return to your novel.

Imagine how much better you'll be at this sweet-spot game once you're aware of playing it. You can set up your work, your hobbies, and your social life so that you spend as much time inside your sweet spot as possible."

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that can't stop talking

Buying Happiness

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Not long ago an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank’s rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: a rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That’s not all that surprising; it’s what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. “All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier,” says Norton.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: the happiness will come from the money they don’t yet have. To the general rule that money, above a certain low level, cannot buy happiness there is one exception. “While spending money upon oneself does nothing for one’s happiness,” says Norton, “spending it on others increases happiness.”

Michael Lewis writing in The New Republic

Wonder & Fear

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The emergent properties of the latest large language models — their ability to stitch together what seems to pass for a primitive form of knowledge of the workings of our world — are not well understood. In the absence of understanding, the collective reaction to early encounters with this novel technology has been marked by an uneasy blend of wonder and fear.

It is not at all clear — not even to the scientists and programmers who build them — how or why the generative language and image models work. And the most advanced versions of the models have now started to demonstrate what one group of researchers has called “sparks of artificial general intelligence,” or forms of reasoning that appear to approximate the way that humans think.

Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, a company that creates data analysis software and works with the U.S. Department of Defense, writing in the New York Times

The building blocks

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The stories we create to understand ourselves become the narrative of our lives, explaining the accidents and choices that have brought us to where we are: when I'm good at, what I care about most, and where I'm headed. If you're among the last kid standing on the sidelines as the softball teams are chosen up, the way you understand your place in the world likely changes a little, shaping your sense of ability and the subsequent paths you take. What you tell yourself about your ability plays a part in shaping the ways you learn and perform-how hard you apply yourself, for example, or your tolerance for risk-taking and your willingness to preserve in the face of difficulty.

But differences in skills, and your ability to convert new knowledge into building blocks for further learning, also shape your routes to success. Many of the best managers and coaches in pro sports were mediocre or poor players but happen to be exceptional students of their games.

Each of us has a large basket of resources in the form of aptitudes, prior knowledge, intelligence, interest, and sense of personal empowerment that shape how we learn and how we overcome our shortcomings. Some of these differences matter a lot-for example, our ability to extract underlying principles for new experiences and to convert new knowledge into mental structures.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

8 Great Quotes About Teaching with AI  

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Research shows that when students feel confident that they can successfully do the work assigned to them, they are less likely to cheat. And an important way to boost students’ confidence is to provide them with opportunities to experience success. ChatGPT can facilitate such experiences by offering students individualized support and breaking down complex problems into smaller challenges or tasks. The Conversation 

Rather than trying to stop the tools and, for instance, telling students not to use them, in my class I’m telling students to embrace them – but I expect their quality of work to be that much better now they have the help of these tools. Ultimately, by the end of the semester, I'm expecting the students to turn in assignments that are substantially more creative and interesting than the ones last year’s students or previous generations of students could have created. We Forum

ChatGPT can be directed to deliver feedback using positive, empathetic and encouraging language. Forexample, if a student completes a math problem incorrectly, instead of merely telling the student “You are wrong and the correct answer is …,” ChatGPT may initiate a conversation with the student. The Conversation

“AI can help with lesson planning,” Kerry O’Grady, an associate professor of public relations at Columbia University wrote, “ including selecting examples, reviewing key concepts before class, and helping with teaching/activity ideas.” This, she says, can help professors save both time and energy. Chronicle of Higher Ed

I don’t think that AI is going to necessarily destroy education. I don’t think it’s going to revolutionize education, either. I think it’s just going to sort of expand the toolbox of what’s possible in our classrooms. CalMatters

AI could analyze an individual learner's strengths, weaknesses and learning styles during online training and then recommend the most effective teaching methods and most relevant resources. Eventually, AI-powered virtual assistants could become standard features in learning platforms by providing real-time support and feedback to learners as they progress through their courses. TechTarget

Use these tools to help you understand challenging passages in assigned readings, or to build preliminary foundational knowledge to help you understand more difficult concepts. Don’t use AI to cheat — use it as a tool to help you learn. Chronicle of Higher Ed

As AI-enabled cheating roils colleges, professors turn to an ancient testing method— oral examinations, which date at least to ancient Greece, are getting new attention. Wall Street Journal