Tag Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Infinite within the finite

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Civilization is built on infinite growth within a finite system. Until our values move away from a focus on consumerism and wealth accumulation, we are never going to get to either environmental/planetary or human well-being. The energy demands are just too great and simultaneously too destructive.

Will AI solve or magnify these problems? I fear it will indeed magnify them. It’s not just the energy demands of these Artificial Intelligence machines that’s the issue, it’s the promise of more goods at a cheaper price. It’s the promise of every gadget you desire, affordably made by automated, robotic systems in dark factories by intelligent robots that don’t need the lights on. It’s the promise of a luxury electric car for $15,000-20,000; a $5,000 robot that does all your chores at home; a 3D printer that can manufacture high quality, factory grade products in the comfort of your own home. All that’s needed are the resources to build these things… unlimited resources being taken from a planet with limited resources.

That’s right, to make this amazing, almost limitless future possible, we just need infinite resources from a finite planet. Meanwhile, wealth accumulation is being concentrated, the middle class is shrinking, and we are madly extracting resources from the earth, with little concern over the environmental impact.

It’s. Just. Not. Sustainable.

An AI advertisement

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I scrolled past this add a few times before paying any attention to it. But then it gave off an uncanny valley feeling that made me look a little closer. I think it was the very staged first question that bothered me most, and yesterday I finally took the time to watch it through a critical lens. It’s an ad for a Tai Chi app, but I cropped the video to hide the brand because I don’t want to amplify it, I want to critique it.

Here is the ad:

And here are a list of telltale things that suggest it is AI.

1. Look at the opening image. The woman is talking at a 90° angle to the stage, and there is no one at the podium below her.

2. The ‘expert’ is a perfectly chiseled man who is never named. No recognition of him as an expert in the field… because he’s fictitious.

3. Obviously fake audience members. The first image shows a blurred bearded man who doesn’t seem real to me. The second image has a man wearing a partial microphone like the expert.

4. The painfully fake script.

“Isn’t a gym better?”

“Gym doesn’t work after 40.”

This isn’t necessarily evidence of AI, it could just be bad writing, but it comes off feeling very wrong and unnatural. It’s like there was an intent in the text to make the expert sound like English is his second language but his voice doesn’t carry that same suggestion.

5. Comments are turned off. There is no benefit in having viewers outing the ad as fake. It’s better to allow the ad to fool more people without being called out.

The reality is that I could pick this ad out as fake, but that’s only because it was done poorly. We are going to see a lot more ads done this way and they are going to be good enough to fool us completely. It’s just a matter of time, and that time is approaching very quickly.

AI Infiltration

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Do you want an AI to be able to read and reply to your email? Wouldn’t that be great? Yes, but I’m not doing it!

My personal email is a gateway to everything I do on the web, and that includes my digital banking. It also includes access to EVERY web tool that I use. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve used ‘Forgot my password’ on a website, or an app, and retrieved that information in my email. So, my email gives me, and anyone or anything that has my password a lot of control over the online tools that I regularly use.

As an aside, this is why two-factor authentication is so important, it protects you from someone having full control of everything you do online, simply by having access to your email. Yet, to me, this protection isn’t enough to allow me to give an AI agent access to my email. To me, this is allowing too much access to my whole digital life.

It’s not the reading of my email I’m concerned about. And frankly, I’d love to have an AI respond to basic email communication on my behalf, or to add items to my calendar for me. That would be great. But to do that I’m essentially saying to an AI company, “I’m an open book, go ahead and read me in order to train your AI model.’ And I’m also allowing an Agent full access to my digital life.

What happens when a ‘helpful’ agent decides that in order to help me it needs access to my online banking to make a purchase? Or worse yet, what happens when an AI is injected with a virus designed to collect my passwords and to update this passwords, then delete the ‘Forgot password’ emails so I don’t even know they were changed.

We’ve already seen countless examples of people being able to trick an AI into giving access to programming information that should have been kept private. Or people convincing an AI to respond to inappropriate questions it was trained not to respond to. Knowing this is not terribly hard to do, what makes you believe an AI agent with full access to your email, your life online, can’t be convinced or exploited to share your information and access in a way that will completely compromise you and your personal information?

I’m not convinced the risk is worth the reward. As I use AI more, I’m using it as a tool to help me understand and connect to the world in better, more efficient ways. But I’m not ready to let AI into my email and into my digital life. I’m wondering when the horror stories of full identity theft are going to start to happen? And I’m guessing these stories are going to start with, “I gave an AI agent access to my email.”

Will AI undermine social media?

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What if AI created media completely changes our online habits? I’ve already noticed that I’m disappointed when I realize a video that caught my attention is not real… That it’s not (for example) a video catching a house cat scaring away a bear from a child, but rather an AI imagined scenario. Right now that’s about 5-10% of me feed, but what happens when that percentage is over 50%?

Am I going to pay as much attention to what I watch and read when I know more than half of my feed is artificially concocted to attract and hold that attention? Will the appeal be there?

I’m already gravitating to podcast conversations, and a smaller communities of people I actually know, as places to get new information from, will my social media stream look the same as it does today? Or will it shrink away from seeking new, but likely artificially created information, to smaller communities that I know are real?

And how will this affect younger generations and their addictions to their phones? Maybe it will just redirect their attention to seeking real connections, but they’ll still do that digitally, not changing habits as much as where their attention goes. But maybe, just maybe, AI infiltration or perhaps I should say infestation, of social media will see us all living a little further away from our screens.

Stories that define us

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I heard a quote, not from the original source, which said young people today are going to be the first generation to die with more memories of other people than memories of themselves.

Social media has become so pervasive and so consumed that people spend more time watching other people do things than doing things themselves. And now it’s getting even more extreme with AI videos becoming a large part of social media, with some videos being obviously artificial, but many more seeming real… I fear that not only are people growing up living the stories of other people, but also living invented stories simply to keep them watching. Sure I can say the same about television. I still have memories of watching Gilligan’s Island, Get Smart, Hogan’s Heroes, Looney Tunes cartoons, and yes, even The Brady Bunch. Television gave us stories long before social media. But there was always a hard ending time for tv shows, or at least until the, ‘Same bat time, same bat channel,’ the next day or next week.

The entertainment stories now are not formatted the same. They aren’t designed to hold your attention for 20 to 22 minutes out of a half hour with commercial breaks. Instead, they are like an unlimited stream of commercial breaks. Quick soundbites to grab your attention. Short bursts of information, excitement, or extravagance. All designed to keep you watching the next clip, and the next, and the next. Soon an afternoon that could have been spent creating your own memories has disappeared and memories of other people (real or invented) sharing their experiences becomes the only thing you have to remember.

What are the stories that are defining us today? How are they different than ones previously shared? Are they making our lives richer, or slowing replacing our lives? At the end of a week, how much of your life are you remembering and how many stories that you share and talk about are actually not your stories at all?

AI Assisted Letters of Reference

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As principal, I frequently get asked to write letters of reference or requests to fill out reference questionnaires. Something that I’ve always done is asked for a ‘brag sheet’ so that I don’t end up forgetting something about the person I’m writing the reference for. An example is that I might forget that a student was a major organizer of an event we ran, or I might have forgotten about their service they do for the community outside of school.

Recently I have been using AI to assist me, specifically Google’s Notebook LM. What I did was I took 8 old reference letters that I wrote and changed the names so that there was no reference to the actual student I wrote them for, and I inputted these into the notebook as style references. For one of them I also included a brag sheet.

Now when a student gives me a brag sheet, I write a prompt that says to write a reference letter for the scholarship I specify, giving criteria for the scholarship, sharing the brag sheet, and asking for it to be written in the exact style of the 8 examples I shared, using the information from the brag sheet.

At this point the reference letter is over 90% complete. A few changes by me and the whole process is done in about 10 minutes (this includes a name change because I don’t put the new student’s name in either). Normally, this would take me over a 1/2 hour and sometimes longer to ensure that I’m hitting all the chords relating to both the brag sheet and the scholarship requirements.

Most of my minor changes are either up or downplaying something from the brag sheet or editing to ensure the reference is in my voice, although this is often already evident based on the examples I provided. My last part of this is copying the text as plain text onto letterhead.

In all honesty, I think these new letters of reference are better than my originals. I often focused on fewer items that I knew about and didn’t give the full scope of the brag sheet. Now I just add a sentence or two about the parts I really know about the student to highlight my connection and understanding of them, and what they do at the school. I feel like my voice comes through and the AI provides more detail than I normally do. So not only is this a great time saver, I’m actually doing a better job to support my students.

Gangsta AI in the hood

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This is next level music production and creation. The quality of this remix is unreal. I think this is one of the best remixes of a song I’ve ever heard… and I’m not even a blues fan.

Here is Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise.

And here is the AI blues version: 

I don’t know how I feel about liking AI created music so much? To me, it’s the creative endeavours of humankind that make us such unique beings in the galaxy, if not the universe.

Then I hear this and I think, we are not alone anymore. I expect AI to ‘out intelligence us’ soon enough, but I wasn’t expecting such a quick transition to ‘out artistically creating us’! Sure this is based on a song by Coolio, which is based on Pastime Paradise by Stevie Wonder…. And so it is not truly original. But we are still in the very early stages of AI musical creativity, and I fear just like we can’t trust video clips anymore without questioning if they are AI, soon we won’t be able to listen to a great new song without wondering which AI model created it?

Loving the song version but feeling like AI is getting pretty gangsta and taking over the formerly human creative hood.

Polished isn’t necessarily true

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There are some very articulate people who sound coherent and convincing, but what they are saying lacks honesty and ultimately truth. Fluency and a good delivery don’t necessarily produce valid points, and don’t necessarily deliver worthwhile ideas.

Now, in the first sentence above, replace the word ‘people’ with ‘Artificial Intelligence’.

Let’s not confuse good delivery of information with accuracy.

The infinite classroom

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I recently heard someone describe AI as the infinite classroom… You can get anytime learning, catered just to you. And for a moment I thought, ‘I remember Google being described like that, and YouTube too.’ Now, I know that the ‘catered to you’ part of Artificial Intelligence is a richer experience than Google or YouTube, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t kind of been here before. The guy went on to say that schools today are irrelevant. He was American and his focus wasn’t K-12 education but rather ‘investing’ $200k+ for a college degree that could be irrelevant by the time you get it.

Still, this made me think of all the digital distractions that make school less appealing and engaging compared to out-of-school offerings and opportunities… From AI providing meaningful, just-in-time learning, to social media, to gaming. Be it for learning or entertainment the competition for attention is significant outside of school.

So how do we engage students in schools when an infinite classroom as well as unlimited distractions are happening outside of schools?

What we shouldn’t do is bring back more traditional testing to ensure students don’t cheat using AI. What we also shouldn’t do is try to compete with the outside world and attempt to make schools more entertaining.

What we should do is create rich experiences where students are exposed to concepts and ideas that they would not have found on their own. We should provide social opportunities to learn together. We should provide opportunities for student voice and choice.

It’s not about competing with the infinite. It’s about cultivating learning experiences where students feel invested in the experience. It’s about fostering curiosity and providing shared learning opportunities that challenge students meaningfully.

In a world of infinite distractions, engagement in schools needs to be community and relationship focused. If it’s just about accumulating information and content, then classrooms as we know them will be no match for the infinite classroom (and unlimited distractions) that out of school opportunities will provide.

Not Ready, and Ready

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I’m not ready to connect AI to my email, to have it view my calendar, to let it automate my communication, or write for me unsupervised. I’m not trusting AI to organize my life in any way.

But…

I am ready to share all my health data. I’m ready for AI to know everything about my health that I can provide it. I want to get a DEXA scan and share it with Chat GPT or some other tool for feedback.

Analyze and diagnose me, but don’t run my life.

That’s my current line… let’s see how it changes in a year.