SAIL: Cooling hype?, Leadership Development, AI Workshops
Welcome to Sensemaking, AI, and Learning - a weekly look at AI progress and possible impact on education.
The generative AI hype (i.e. ChatGPT) has been fascinating to observe from an educational lens. AIED, and to a lesser degree SoLAR and IEDMS, has been assessing AI's impact on learning for decades. Picture a rather packed grand hall with individuals who have developed norms and values and guidelines for how they govern themselves and coordinate their gatherings. A loose composition of many communities, there is a history and memory to their events around shared work. The communities have been around long enough to have processes for enculturating new members. Suddenly, late 2022, a group of rowdy youngsters came in through the side door, hit the open bar, and started preaching as if they had discovered nirvana, oblivious to the long term deep expertise of the existing community. The great edtech to AI ed grift was on!
Over the last week, the tone in media has become somewhat more reserved. The early thrill of an LLM producing reasonably consistent and reasonably coherent text has given way to realizations of the significant failures and errors they can produce. Google and Microsoft have both had a rough week of bad publicity. The contrarians to "deep learning as the solution to all" (notably, Gary Marcus) are getting a window to gloat. This is a pause only, however. The momentum and progress in AI is broader than LLMs. And the potential of AI to enrich the quality of life for many humans and contribute to the advancement of scientific progress is too tantalizing to ignore. Given the media hype, the venture dollars, the growing sophistication of research communities, it's unreasonable to expect the pause to last long. These are growing pains.
AI and Learning:
We (GRAILE) hosted an event last week on ChatGPT and the future of learning. The recording is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7F6VhOkoYc
Block off December 5-7, 2023 for our 4th annual Empowering Learners for the Age of AI conference, held online and in person at ASU: https://empoweringlearners.ai/ . Subscribe to be notified of updates propose a panel that you or your time would like to run.
We will be running numerous in-person workshops throughout 2023, including planned events in Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Washington, Singapore, Frankfurt, and Adelaide. These workshops will target human-AI interactions and address a range of critical domains of impact in learning. Topics will focus on teaching, learning, assessment, curriculum, bias, ethics, and leadership development. If you're interested in hosting an event, please let me know. The workshops are a mix of group brainstorming and presentations by researchers and experts. We have a template for workshop deployment that we're eager to coordinate with universities, conferences, and other interested organizations.
We ran a recent webinar on what leadership needs to know about AI in higher education (https://graile.ai/leadership/). We have had a few universities reach out for in-house workshops. If your organization is interested, please email me.
My class required AI (btw, it's been successful): "Almost everyone’s initial attempts at using AI are bad."
Bias, Ethics, Fairness
A recent Nature article warns of risks: "using conversational AI for specialized research is likely to introduce inaccuracies, bias and plagiarism"
Random Developments:
AI impacting lawyers? "Harvey, which received seed funding from the OpenAI Startup Fund, was founded by a team of former lawyers, engineers and entrepreneurs who share a vision of transforming the legal industry with technology."
Microsoft has had a rough week integrating ChatGPT/Bing. When that happens, we can call it learnings: "Since we made this available in limited preview, we have been testing with a select set of people in over 169 countries to get real-world feedback to learn, improve, and make this product what we know it can be – which is not a replacement or substitute for the search engine, rather a tool to better understand and make sense of the world."
Opinions
Musk thinks things are bad: "One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI."
AI is going to replace many jobs - 85 million of them - in the next two years.
Noam Chomsky is not impressed with ChatGPT
Yann LeCun, head of AI at Meta, is also not impressed.