24 Free Online AI Classes of Note

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AI & Critical Thinking

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There’s a concern that generative AI “bypasses reflection and criticality." The conclusion is then that teaching, therefore, must remain the same, AI must be resisted, and critical thinking must take place in the same way it always has—as if there is something sacred about the particular process that teachers are familiar with and invested in continuing.  

Instead, assignments need to take into account the tools available to the student. With AI options, critical thinking shifts toward new places. Offloading part of the work to AI is fine — provided the mental engagement still takes place elsewhere. The problem is not including AI in the mix, but trying to force old pedagogical methods onto new paradigms. 

A couple of decades ago, some professors told students not to use the internet because doing so would cut out some of the critical thinking and learning process, gained from trudging to the library and looking things up in printed books. Having information at their fingertips was a learning shortcut. Actually, the real issues remained the same: learning what counted as reputable sources, making defendable claims, and expressing that information in a lucid and compelling way. 

Stephen Goforth

“Tinder for Nazis” hit by data leak with help from AI

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“An investigative journalist has infiltrated a white supremacist dating website. The researcher then created a website where 8,000 of the leaked profiles are on a map, exposing users from different regions of the world. She says, ‘Imagine calling yourselves the ‘master race’ but forgetting to secure your own website – maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination.’” She appeared before a German audience, dressed as the Pink Power Ranger, and systematically deleted the site. -more info: CyberNews & Metro UK

Ambiguity and Narrative

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The discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrariness is equally powerful, or more so, in our need for a rational understanding of our lives. We strive to fit the events of our lives into a coherent story that accounts for our circumstances, the things that follow us, and the choices we make. Each of us has a different narrative that has many threads woven into it from our shared culture and experience of being human, as well as many distinct threads that explain the singular events of one's personal past. All these experiences influence what comes to mind in a current situation and the narrative through which you make sense of it: why nobody in my family attended college until me. Why my father never made a fortune in business. Why I'd never want to work in a corporation, or, maybe, why I would never want to work for myself. We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one. The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effort shaping new memories to fit our establish constructs of the world and ourselves. The narrative of memory becomes central to our intuitions regarding the judgments we make and the actions we take. Because memory is a shape-shifter, reconciling the competing demands of emotions, suggestions, and narrative, it serves you well to stay open to the fallibility of your certainties: even your most cherished memories may not represent events in the exact way they occurred.

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

AI Definitions: Knowledge Collapse

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Knowledge Collapse – A gradual narrowing of accessible information, along with a declining awareness of alternative or obscure viewpoints. With each training cycle, new AI models increasingly rely on previously produced AI-generated content, reinforcing prevailing narratives and further marginalizing less prominent perspectives. The resulting feedback loop creates a cycle where dominant ideas are continuously amplified while less widely-held (and new) views are minimized. Underrepresented knowledge becomes less visible – not because it lacks merit, but because it is less frequently retrieved and less often cited. (also see “Synthetic Data”)

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She Wrapped Him Swaddling Clothes

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And she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them (Luke 2:7 NIV)

“She wrapped him in cloths.” Literally, he was wrapped in strips of cloth to keep him warm. The old King James translation uses the memorable phrase “swaddling clothes.”   

Do you think he cried? When you think of the manger and the child, do you imagine him crying?   

Mary put diapers on God.

The mention of a manger is where we get the idea he was born in a stable. Often, stables were caves, with feeding troughs for animals … mangers.  It was probably dark and dirty. This is not the way the messiah was expected to appear. How often our expectations and God’s reality are not in sync. How often he appears in unexpected places. 

15 Surprising Things AI can do now

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AI Definitions: Steganography

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Steganography (pronounced STEG-an-ography, like the “Steg” in “stegasaurus”) - A method of tracking images by embedding an invisible code into the pixels that is invisible to humans but will travel along with the image during its lifetime. The marked images can be traced back to the original source with high level of accuracy because the code is embedded directly into the image’s pixels. Because the watermarks live directly in the visual part of the image itself, they are nearly impossible to remove, surviving common image-related manipulation such as aggressive cropping and taking screen shots of the image. If you’ve created an AI image recently, you’ve almost certainly used steganography without even knowing it. Most major AI image generation companies now use the tech. Companies are adding a poisoning application to these images. If someone should try to use them for deepfakes, the user will find them garbled and unusable.

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