OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Generative AI, Chat GPT, and Learning
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, 2023/03/29

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This article shows how a lot of the recent work in AI (and even web3) is diffusing into mainstream education. Vicki Davis, classroom teacher and longtime education blogger, provides an overview of her explorations into this new world. More edu-AI news: Mitch Weisburgh compares essays written by GPT-4 and Bard. Education Matters is embracing AI-deas. Daily Nous employs a compelling example to show how hard it is to think about a future with AI. New plugins are giving chatGPT eyes and ears and allow it to book a flight, order food, send email, execute Python (and more). A content analysis of news articles on chatGPT in education focuses on academic integrity. Bing/GPT can pass introductory computer science courses. Here's a proof-of-concept (though it doesn't work yet) integration of chatGPT into a Unity editor (Unity is a system used to build virtual reality environments). A look at the labour market impact of GPT and similar tools ("the projected effects span all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure"). ChatGPT as a teaching aid. Making an educational game: what AI accomplished in 30 minutes was superhuman. Finally: build your own chatGPT with SimpleAI or with Alpaca.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter - Future of Life Institute
Future of Life Institute, 2023/03/29

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Making the rounds right now is this petition calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4... to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development." The petition is being advanced by the Future of Life Institute - essentially a collection of some MIT professors, some actors, and Elon Musk - not exactly what I would call a common front for oversight and regulation. So I don't think ethics is the main driver here - it's more likely the fear of being left behind by Microsoft and Google. This sort of moral panic is typical, writes Donald Clark. "Every major shift in technology gets this reaction." And though you'd never know, it's not like nobody has been doing any thinking about the ethics of AI. "In addition to existing regulation, huge teams have been working on regulation in dozens of countries and political blocs, like the EU."

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Exploring the neural mechanisms behind how social networks shape our decisions
Ingrid Fadelli, Medical Xpress, 2023/03/29

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This article summarizes work by Yaomin Jianga, Qingtian Mia and Lusha Zhu on how people learn in social networks. Their paper in Nature Neuroscience is paywalled but you can read the preprint here (23 page PDF). It gets more and more interesting the deeper you delve into it. "The researchers found that when making decisions in networked environments, the extent to which participants updated their beliefs varies according to the network locations of their neighbors. This extent varied based on how connected the participants were to neighbors in their network - something that is very different to belief updating in non-network environments." In social networks, this phenomenon is described by DeGroot learning, in which people "communicate with other agents (where) links between agents (who knows whom) and the weight they put on each other's opinions is represented by a trust matrix ... (which is) in a one-to-one relationship with a weighted, directed graph."

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The Running Conversation in Your Head
Julie Beck, Pocket, The Atlantic, 2023/03/29

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This article follows the thread of a brief Mastodon discussion I had a couple of days ago. It just came out on Pocket today, but was published in the Atlantic in 2016. Charles Fernyhough says, "I think 'thinking' is a tricky word... A certain category of thinking that we call verbal thinking, and that's essentially inner speech, the stuff that we do in words. But I certainly think you can be intelligent and do lots of really clever stuff without language. Babies prove it every day; animals prove it every day... The idea is not that you need language for thinking but that when language comes along, it sure is useful. It changes the way you think, it allows you to operate in different ways because you can use the words as tools."

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Prompt Marketplace: DALL-E, Midjourney, ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion & GPT
PromptBase, 2023/03/29

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New technology, new marketplaces. Here's the pitch: "Prompts are becoming a powerful new way of programming AI models like DALL·E, Midjourney & GPT. However, it's hard to find good quality prompts online. If you're good at prompt engineering, there's also no clear way to make a living from your skills. PromptBase is a marketplace for buying and selling quality prompts that produce the best results, and save you money on API costs." Image: produced by DALL-E when given the text of this OLDaily post as a prompt. Via Mark Oehlert.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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