The Educator's Notebook

A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Topic: tech/AI

A.I. Updates

    • 74 Million
    • 08/07/24
    “Snapchat last year said that after just two months of offering its chatbot My AI, about one-fifth of its 750 million users had sent it queries, totaling more than 10 billion messages. The Pew Research Center has noted that 59% of Americans ages 13 to 17 use Snapchat.”
    • Digital Education Council
    • 08/07/24
    “86% of students globally are regularly using AI in their studies, with 54% of them using AI on a weekly basis… Despite their high rates of AI usage, 1 in 2 students do not feel AI ready.”
    • Marc Watkins
    • 08/02/24
    “It is increasingly looking like generative AI won’t become intelligent to achieve true AGI, but human beings will still put their trust into these black box systems and may one day be willing to cede autonomy and critical decision-making to an algorithm. To those who scoff at this, and I imagine there are many, know […]
    • Twitter/Allie Miller
    • 07/21/24
    “1) more examples are often better, aim for as many as is reasonable 2) randomly order the examples (don’t end with several negatives) 3) aim for balanced data distribution, preferably similar to in-the-wild distribution 4) ensure examples are labeled correctly 5) choose a common format for all examples 6) pick similar examples to your test […]
    • SSRN
    • 07/18/24
    “Consistent with prior work, our results show that access to GPT-4 significantly improves performance (48% improvement for GPT Base and 127% for GPT Tutor). However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction for GPT Base). That is, access to GPT-4 […]
    • TeachAI
    • 07/16/24
    “At a time when the entire education community is grappling with how to realize the benefits of AI while mitigating the risks, the briefs that compose Guidance on the Future of Computer Science Education in an Age of AI serve as the beginning of a discussion rather than definitive answers. The briefs offer preliminary insights […]

ADMISSIONS

ADOLESCENCE

    • 74 Million
    • 08/07/24
    “Snapchat last year said that after just two months of offering its chatbot My AI, about one-fifth of its 750 million users had sent it queries, totaling more than 10 billion messages. The Pew Research Center has noted that 59% of Americans ages 13 to 17 use Snapchat.”
    • Marc Watkins
    • 08/02/24
    “It is increasingly looking like generative AI won’t become intelligent to achieve true AGI, but human beings will still put their trust into these black box systems and may one day be willing to cede autonomy and critical decision-making to an algorithm. To those who scoff at this, and I imagine there are many, know […]
    • The Verge
    • 05/04/24
    “Aaron is one of many young users who have discovered the double-edged sword of AI companions. Many users like Aaron describe finding the chatbots helpful, entertaining, and even supportive. But they also describe feeling addicted to chatbots, a complication which researchers and experts have been sounding the alarm on… For many Character.AI users, having a […]
    • New York Times
    • 04/08/24
    “Using artificial intelligence, middle and high school students have fabricated explicit images of female classmates and shared the doctored pictures.”

AI

ARTS

ASSESSMENT

CREATIVITY

    • Science Daily
    • 07/12/24
    • Maha Bali
    • 06/22/24
    “Human creativity augmented with AI would only be beneficial, IMHO, if the weight of human judgment before and after AI use is high. In the same way it’s important to make a mental calculation of something before you put it into the calculator so that you know roughly what should come out, I think with […]
    • Reuters
    • 12/15/23
    “U.S. District Judge William Orrick dismissed some claims from the proposed class action brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, including all of the allegations against Midjourney and DeviantArt. The judge said the artists could file an amended complaint against the two companies, whose systems utilize Stability’s Stable Diffusion text-to-image technology. Orrick also […]
    • The Algorithmic Bridge
    • 09/15/23
    “One explanation is that we like imperfection. AI may not be foolproof (yet) but it lives in an always-optimizing state that drives it toward a kind of flawlessness—too alien, too artificial—out of reach for us always-flawed humans. And we happen to like flawed humans do stuff: Carlsen and Kasparov, however brilliant, still make mistakes, yet […]
    • Goodwin Law
    • 08/24/23
    “On August 18, 2023, the US District Court for the District of Columbia (the Court) ruled in Thaler v. Register of Copyrights that an AI-generated work “absent any guiding human hand” is not protected by copyright, explaining that “[h]uman authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.” …This said, the Court was mindful of AI-focused questions that are sure […]

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

HUMANITIES

    • EdWeek
    • 04/28/24
    • TechCrunch
    • 12/15/23
    ““With Open Empathic, our goal is to create an AI that goes beyond understanding just words,” Schuhmann added. “We aim for it to grasp the nuances in expressions and tone shifts, making human-AI interactions more authentic and empathetic.””
    • Stanford
    • 12/15/23
    “Values centered on individual experience, such as personal agency, enjoyment, and stimulation, are undeniably important and central requirements for any social media platform. It shouldn’t be surprising that reward hacking only on individual values will lead to challenging societal-level outcomes, because the algorithm has no way to reason about societies. But then, what would it […]
    • Ars Technica
    • 12/15/23
    “Starhaven recently wrote, “My new morning driving routine involves chatting with ChatGPT through my car speaker/Airplay, as if I were hanging on the phone with my mum.” He talked about working through ideas vocally. “Sometimes you just wanna share your unhinged thoughts with a friend—though, maybe not at 7 in the morning,” he wrote. “So […]
    • Rest of World
    • 09/20/23
    • Economist
    • 04/28/23
    “Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults… The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared […]

LANGUAGE

LEADERSHIP

PD

PEDAGOGY

READING/WRITING

STEM

SUSTAINABILITY

TECH

TECH/AI

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT AND LAW

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

WORKPLACE

    • One Useful Thing
    • 09/16/23
    “We also found something else interesting, an effect that is increasingly apparent in other studies of AI: it works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, 43%, when they got to use AI. The top […]

TECH/AI: GENERAL