An interesting list of other current AI tools that aren’t GPT!
https://aisupremacy.substack.com/p/top-ai-powered-tools-not-named-chatgpt
Detecting the non-human
Sniffing out GPT
An app that measures “burstiness” and “perplexity” to detect a GPT source.
However,
” … it does not work well with essays written by good writers. It false flagged so many essays as AI-written.”
Space War
Simple collection of links about the exploitation of near-earth Space
Tests are dead?
“…for educators, the technology opens the door to widespread cheating on homework and take-home assignments, and many have been scrambling to rethink the nature of assessment or otherwise discourage students using the tool.”
“… ChatGPT is capable of passing — or at least nearly passing — the US medical licensing exams, according to researchers in the US who put it to the test.”
Tesla vs. ‘Tesla’
The lives of Nicola Tesla (the real one) and ‘Tesla’ (the cosplay one) share a striking similarity. Tesla was very clever. His early inventions were decisive. He had an engineer’s fascination for how natural forces work but he had a prophet’s view of electrical energy. His later life was a decline into unfulfilled visions and penury, possibly one result of the loss of his life’s work in a catastrophic fire.
Cultural transmission
The Hebrew University has discovered an ivory comb from 1700 BCE that is inscribed with a plea to rid oneself of lice. The inscription reads:
“May this [ivory] tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
Isn’t cultural transmission amazing!
Dangerous images
It passed me by until I saw this:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/20232755/chilling-ai-predicts-god-creepy-images/
With the obvious problem of pornographic imagery as well as issues such as taboo religious iconography, do image GPTs have contraints to limit the content of images they generate? (And if so how do we decide that?)
Didn’t see that coming …
A new job is appearing (you know, one those jobs we don’t yet know exists).
What is this new job?
*drum roll*
A designer of prompts for GPT machines (and whatever might follow them …).
What are the essential aptitudes do you think? Are they general, specific to a particularlar machine or a bit of both?
East is a Big Bird
I watched ‘Moana‘ the other night. Artistically beautiful but debatable cultural politics (for example see here).
I note this because it reminded me about ‘East is a Big Bird’ by Thomas Gladwin that I read ‘back in the day’ (It was published in 1970).
I just picked it up again after the film. A book of its time. It begins with a question that was hot then (in the 1960s): why do schools “…keep penalizing children for the poverty into which they have unwillingly been born…” He investigates this with a ‘study’ of the lives and seafaring expertise of pacific islanders while living among them.
How does this answer the queation … ? … read the book!
It’s a relevant question for educators today. The rise of endemic homelessness (which really began to take off under Thatcher) and widespread food and energy poverty is visible to all yet denied by politicians. Food and warmth – in a rich society such as ours everyone has some right to expect these.
In education, however, we seem to continue on basically the same path as Gladwin had observed (as did many educators at the time). While too many of today’s children endure the misery of poverty, national policy in education has been devoted into ensuring that the ineffective becomes more efficient, i.e. educating kids (and adults) in the same old discriminatory manner. We had hoped that was on the way out at the the end of the 1970s …
How wrong we were … *sobs quietly*
Postscipt: don’t take tis the wrong way. Terrific work is done all day and every day by thousands of teachers fighting the circumstances that constrain both them and their charges are in …
EdTech and Social Control
Sorry the post title is a bit OTT, but it’s direct (until I find a better one)!
- Starting point is Basil Bernstein who said, ,to paraphrase, ‘all society is pedagogical’. Something like that. There used to be a word in common use in the 70s: ‘socialisation’. Not much now.
- It is useful because it implies an active process on integration. It is therefore pedagogical because it involves the transmission of social and cultural mores. However, the word ‘socialisation’ alone does not imply any particular character of the integration. It is simply a process, how we become participants in any kind of community no matter how good … or how bad, as large as a nation, or smaller than a household.
- Socialisation is ongoing, lifelong. It never stops so that over time, for example, values that were once held true can become transgressive.
- There is no clear boundary, nor can there be, between daily life in a community and the place that technology plays in enabling, disrupting, ‘nudging’, or sometimes blocking activities.
- This is a dynamic process for all technologies which can be both a result of earlier social situations as well as a cause of social change.
- Change is usually incremental (or ‘normal’ in a Kuhnian sense) and occasionally revolutionary (‘extraordinary’ in a Kuhnian sense).
- Edtech is intimately woven into the lifelong socialisation of all members of a society
Notes:
Thomas Hillman (@thomhillman) tweeted at 7:05 am on Fri, Apr 01, 2022:
People often ask me how the platformization of education is different from educational technology in general. The big difference is that the center of coordination changes. We’ve moved from technology in classrooms to classrooms in technology. #edtech (https://twitter.com/thomhillman/status/1509773871901196289?t=dAIoKvfwLYYkQP_dCAEhXQ&s=03)