SAIL #16: HAC, Galactica, Art
Hi all,
Welcome to the weekly Sensemaking, AI and Learning (SAIL) newsletter!
First, if you haven't down so, have a look at our upcoming online conference on AI and Learning. Registration is free and the event is fully online: https://empoweringlearners.ai/
Education:
As noted last week, AI is presenting challenges to universities and the prospect of student use of AI to write essays. Perhaps the takeaway should be to reflect on what university is and what it should be in the future: "AI might spur us to recognise genuine knowledge, so that, as the university of the future embraces technology, it appreciates anew what makes us human."
For that matter, what might a "new kind of university look like"? A group of profs is playing around with the idea.
Human and Artificial Cognition: This article has taken a while, but we address the challenges that exist in that "in between space" where we need to negotiate what a human does...and what the machine does. We will need to negotiate this relationship in essentially every human knowledge task.
AI Advancement
Meta announced a new initiative called Galactica to help scientists: “Galactica models are trained on a large corpus comprising more than 360 millions in-context citations and over 50 millions of unique references normalized across a diverse set of sources. This enables Galactica to suggest citations and help discover related papers.”
Not everyone liked it: "the risk of misuse when humans adopt Galactica’s results unquestioned, for example out of convenience, and thereby consciously or unconsciously increase the quantity and quality of misinformation in the scientific process."
It lasted three days.
While the goal of AI has always been intelligence, its rapid adoption now seems more linked to practical use with less of an explicit focus on the actual intelligence: "The sudden interest in practical AI stems from big (tech) companies’ tendency to appropriate everything that promises to be good business."
Art
If you're in NYC, it might be worth a trip to MOMA: "This constant self-tuning makes the exhibit even more like a real being, a wonderful monster that reacts to its environment by constantly shapeshifting into new art."
Given the rapid progress of generative AI, can a future artist/architect/creative flourish without basic AI literacy?: "He went on to recommend jumping in as fast as humanly possible to understand how the tools work and for illustrators to use their abilities to augment these designs. Experience will now help artists learn how to better describe an image to the machine."
Military
Few areas will make greater use, with greater public outcry, of AI than the military. This is a recent example. There will be more.