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The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at a crossroads
Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, ALTC Blog, 2024/03/28

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Amid the 'polycrisis' of income inequality, environmental degradation and disinformation, write Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz, the promise of an open internet benefiting all appears to have failed. "Open movements and open education are constrained by closed, opaque infrastructures, and platform infrastructures and models limit the possibilities of open education practices." There's the increasing encroachment of private enterprise on public education, and of course the rise of artificial intelligence sweeping through entire sectors. Their response, based on their "manifesto for higher education for good", is that "that naming and analysing these issues is essential in moving toward better futures." After this, "actively challenging and resisting that which is untrue and/or unjust is essential in any movement for social change." This leads to "making legitimate and explicit claims to better futures is necessary, both to fuel resistance to dominant narratives and to inspire the production of new visions." This, they argue, "requires all parts of the open education movement to work together: in communities, diverse partnerships, and coalitions... a global alliance of open education networks." Also on video.

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Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Valkey Community
Noah Lehman, Linux Foundation, 2024/03/28

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About a week ago the popular open source database Redis (widely used in cloud environments like AWS) acquired a company called Speedb and in tandem switched from open source to a more restrictive commercial license. This has been a long time coming as both Redis and Mongo have complained about large commercial enterprises taking advantage of the open source projects without giving back. Anyhow, the other shoe dropped today as "the Linux Foundation announced its intent to form Valkey, an open source alternative to the Redis in-memory, NoSQL data store." It is evocative of the creation of the Maria database after MySQL was acquired by Sun (2008) and then Oracle (2010).

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Towards Fairer Horizons: Cooperativist Solutions to Tackle Platform Capitalism
Viraj Desai, Bot Populi, 2024/03/28

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I've been involved in a platform cooperative myself, CoSocial.ca, though to be honest my participation has mainly consisted of me sending some money (I also bank, buy insurance and sometimes shop through cooperatives). I personally think that's fine - despite what Viraj Desai suggests in this article, a cooperative isn't about everybody getting on the same page to "collectively organize against ceaseless data extraction of our habits, spending patterns, and our deepest selves for the profit of platform giants, and surveillance of us and our communities." Not that I'm not in favour, it's just I have my own priorities, and I'm happy to leave these to someone else. No, the platform cooperative is more about you and me and a few hundred of our friends creating our own version of a service (in this case a social network) so we are not dependent on some company. It's where we meet our individual "economy, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise." So a financial contribution works fine; I don't need to get wrapped up in the politics of it, unless I want to.

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Creativity with, or against, the machines?
David White, 2024/03/28

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When I was on a training program in Texas in 1980 I bought an electronic chess playing machine that was better than I was. And make no mistake - I was pretty good at chess. Today, of course, computers can beat any chess player in the world. And yet, humans play chess. One wonders: why? David White doesn't mention chess at all in this article but I think he's asking the same question, only about creativity in general. "What I think I'm seeing is a post-AI shift towards a defence of humanity against technology," he writes. "Or a gentler view might be that it's an assertion of what is unique about being human – an attempt at defining what humans 'bring to the table'." But is it really? He writes, "the new habit of defending, or promoting, humanness by technologists will lead to an increasing understanding of why 'Art School' values around not-knowing, risk, ambiguity, play and general graft are exactly what's needed to continue to expand what it means to be human."

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Share Openly
Ben Werdmuller, Werd I/O, 2024/03/28

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I've adapted Ben Werdmuller's 'Share Openly' service into OLDaily - you'll find a link to share at the end of every post, and if you click it you'll be taken to a service that allows you to share the post on social media. Enjoy, and thanks to Werdmuller for providing this service. 

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Models All the Way Down
Christo Buschek, Jer Thorp, 2024/03/28

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This item comes via Scott Leslie on Mastodon, who calls it an "interesting and gorgeous visual essay on how the datasets and models behind generative imagery LLMs work (and don't)." He's not wrong. The essay analyzes the creation of the LAION-5B datasets containing billions of image-text pairs; these are used for AI image generation. They are not curated by humans: it would take you 781 years to look at each image for one second. The captions from many sites don't describe the images, but instead are intended for commercial SEO purposes. Or are created by some other AI. So what happens is that any human intervention is greatly magnified, and so is any bias that intervention contains. What's most noteworthy, though, is that this analysis was possible only because the LAION-5B datasets are open. We don't know what goes into the proprietary datasets and models.

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Open Source AI Definition - Weekly Update Mar 25
Open Source Initiative, 2024/03/28

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This is the weekly update for the Open Source AI Definition initiative being run by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). I have mixed feelings about OSI (along the lines of "who died and made them king?") but I'll grant that they're influential. Anyhow, the news is that the current definition of "Open AI" is up for review and comment. Read it here. Also relevant are the definition of AI systems adopted by OECD and the definition of AI components, summarized here and available in full here (45 page PDF) beginning on page 13.

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How Is Flocking Like Computing?
Steven Strogatz, Quanta Magazine, 2024/03/28

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Readers know we've touched on this theme over and over through the years. "So, how does the brain represent space-time? And how does that matter in terms of decisions? And what on earth does that have to do with collective behavior of animals? What I realized about five years ago, is that I think there's a deep mathematical similarity." This article looks into the question of how individual starlings - or locusts, or humans - become attuned to each other, explaining self-organization as an evolutionary process, and ponders the resulting "deep geometric principles, about how the brain represents space and also time."

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ChatGPT, Author of The Quixote
Hugo Bowne-Anderson, O'Reilly Media, 2024/03/28

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This is quite a good article explaining why large language models (LLM) do not violate copyright while at the same time suggesting that copyright is the wrong question to ask. "The ability of generative AI to displace creatives is a real threat and I'm asking a real question: do we want to live in a society where there aren't many incentives for humans to write, paint, and make music?" And while the answer to that question is a qualified 'no', how we answer that question matters. Even with very low incentives, we can produce a glut of mostly useless content. Just look at what social media can generate simply by offering minimal psychological rewards. Do we structure the rewards for certain types of content? Sure, we could - but why would anyone pay good money for human content when equally good content can be produced for almost nothing by AI? I think that we're looking at it wrong when we look at rewards and incentives. That's not why we create art anyways.

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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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