SAIL: AI & Learning - Closing out 2022
Welcome to Sensemaking, AI, and Learning (SAIL)!
It has been a year of progress and public awakening to the possible roles of AI in education. Here's a few things to review as the year winds down:
AI in Learning:
We hosted our third annual conference on AI in Learning. We are planning our next year in person at ASU (likely early December, but we'll have this addressed in the next few weeks). Our videos from this year can be access here.
Vitomir Kovanovic has a piece in The Conversation: The dawn of AI has come, and its implications for education couldn’t be more significant
Last week, I had a Conversation piece on a short history of AI and what it needs
Data Blind: Universities Lag in Capturing and Exploiting Data: Yes. This was the motivation we had behind starting learning analytics as a field and the Society of Learning Analytics specifically. However, leadership is the missing key. Which is why we made this a specific focus for GRAILE.
Educators, ever resistant to the idea that AI may fundamentally change certain practices, sees "plagiarism detection" as the needed response to ChatGPT. Instead of, oh, hypothetically, re-thinking what we choose to assess.
General AI
Stanford HAI's most popular talks including foundation model, AI 2022 Index, AI and the Economy.
Google's PaLM has faded from public interest recently as ChatGPT absorbs all the available media attention. However, it's worth keeping eyes open since it has 3xs the parameters of GPT-3 (GPT-4 is expected to have ~5x's the parameters of PaLM, however). Google has been silent, with the occasional statement that it wants to take AI slowly...
Impact of AI
We're trying to figure out what's happening and what it means on multiple fronts: in our work lives, in what we teach, in what our society looks like. Max Roser has a broad overview: "In humanity’s history, there have been two cases of such major transformations, the agricultural and the industrial revolutions."
Can AI pass a radiologist exam? Not quite...but close.
The end of programming: "I believe the conventional idea of "writing a program" is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed."
AI Ethics
Much to discuss about AI Ethics: "critics warn that such models [LLMs] make up answers, without any real understanding or concern about being correct or not."