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AI Insights

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I recently got some insight on my AI insights from an AI.

I decided to ask ChatGPT:

I’ve written a fair bit about AI, see tags: https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/
and https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/tag/ai/, please share with me:
1. What is a prediction I most likely will get right.
2. Where am I missing the mark?
3. What’s the most uniquely insightful idea that I’ve shared? 

Here is ChatGPT‘S response… and I find it quite insightful:

I enjoyed thinking about this because your AI writing has a recognizable worldview. It isn’t a collection of disconnected opinions—there are a handful of core principles that recur across many posts. 

What follows isn’t a prediction of whether you’ll be “right” or “wrong.” It’s my best assessment of which ideas I think are most robust, and where I think your model of the future could be incomplete.

1. The prediction you’re most likely to get right

Your prediction that AI’s greatest near-term impact will come from amplifying ordinary people—not from becoming an autonomous supervillain.

This idea appears repeatedly in your writing.

Rather than worrying primarily about “AI takes over the world,” you focus on AI enabling:

  • bioterrorism,
  • industrial-scale scams,
  • personalized fraud,
  • cybercrime,
  • misinformation,
  • one malicious individual having disproportionate power.

I think history is already bending in your direction.

Technology almost always scales existing human intent before it replaces humans.

The printing press spread propaganda before democracy.
The internet scaled fraud before education.
Social media amplified outrage before civic engagement.

I suspect AI will follow the same pattern.

I think twenty years from now people may look back and realize that “AI as force multiplier for humans” was a more important story than “AI replacing humans.”

That feels like one of your strongest forecasts. 

2. Where I think you’re missing the mark

Interestingly, I don’t think you’re too pessimistic.

I think you’re not pessimistic enough about adaptation.

Your writing often assumes exponential technological improvement translates fairly directly into exponential societal disruption.

Technology often is exponential.

Institutions rarely are.

People aren’t either.

For example:

Autonomous driving may become technically solved long before regulators, insurers, unions, municipalities, and consumers allow full replacement.

Likewise, AI lawyers, teachers, doctors and programmers may become technically capable years before society reorganizes around that capability.

You’ve written about the “frog in the pot.”

I wonder if there’s another metaphor:

society as a giant flywheel.

The flywheel eventually turns—but much more slowly than the engine powering it.

A second place I think you’re underestimating something:

Humans don’t optimize as much as economists think they do.

Many of your work-related predictions assume organizations will aggressively replace humans because it’s economically rational.

Sometimes they will.

But humans also buy:

  • trust,
  • relationships,
  • status,
  • ritual,
  • authenticity.

Coffee shops still exist despite home espresso machines.

Live concerts thrive despite Spotify.

Teachers continue to matter despite YouTube.

I think there will be more “human luxury markets” than your writing currently anticipates.

Ironically, AI may increase the value of demonstrably human experiences.

3. The most uniquely insightful idea you’ve shared

This one surprised me.

I don’t think it’s UCI over UBI.

I don’t think it’s AI risk.

I don’t even think it’s “This is the worst AI it will ever be.”

Those are all interesting.

The idea I keep coming back to is this:

Students choose. AI delivers.

It’s deceptively simple.

But it’s actually a profound inversion of how educators have framed educational technology for decades.

Most discussions ask:

“What should teachers do?”

Your framing asks:

“What kind of learner will this student choose to become?”

That’s a much deeper question.

Because AI is fundamentally an amplifier.

It amplifies curiosity.

It amplifies laziness.

It amplifies expertise.

It amplifies ignorance.

The technology isn’t making the decision.

The learner is.

I think that’s an idea with legs well beyond education.

You could almost generalize it into a broader principle:

Humans choose. AI delivers.

That might become one of the defining philosophical ideas of the AI era.

It explains why the same technology can simultaneously create brilliant research, convincing fraud, deeper learning, and effortless cheating.

It’s a remarkably compact framework. 

One more observation

Reading a large cross-section of your AI posts, I noticed something that I hadn’t fully appreciated before.

You’re not really writing about AI.

You’re writing about human agency in an AI world.

The recurring characters in your essays aren’t GPT, robots, or neural networks.

They’re:

  • the student deciding whether to think,
  • the teacher deciding what to assess,
  • the scammer deciding whom to target,
  • the policymaker deciding what to regulate,
  • the employer deciding what work is worth paying for.

AI is almost always the catalyst, not the protagonist.

I actually think that’s the thread you could develop even more.

Many writers ask, “What will AI become?”

Your more distinctive question is:

“What kinds of people will AI encourage us to become?”

I think that’s your most original contribution—not because nobody else has ever asked it, but because it’s the lens that quietly ties together almost everything you’ve written on the subject. It’s a more enduring question than whether a particular model reaches AGI in 2028 or 2032, because it remains relevant regardless of how quickly the technology advances.

Chat GPT chose us

A couple Fridays ago the school got a call from a guy with an Australian accent. He said he was a former school principal who now does consulting promoting progressive and innovative practices in schools. He said he knew it was short notice but he was in town and could he visit our school. I had time at the end of the day and invited him to visit. He Uber’ed in from Vancouver and after a quick chat we had a tour, talked to a couple teachers, and a few students.

He got to see the tail end of a presentation and hear some of the feedback our students gave. Then we went back to my office for a chat. So I asked him, how did you choose Inquiry Hub as a school to visit? He said that he has been working with AI recently and he had put all the factors he looks for in progressive schools, and asked Chat GPT which school he should visit. Inquiry Hub came up.

I find it fascinating that we were found this way. A chance encounter created by an LLM.

Having AI write my blog for me

This is NOT something I plan on doing. I was just interested in seeing what Chat GPT (on the Bing interface) could write in my style. The first blog topic it suggested wasn’t great. It suggested: The Rise of Micro-Entrepreneurship: Empowering Individuals in a Digital Age”

The article was just that, an article, not a Daily-Ink, a ‘let me tell you about this topic’ essay. So then my next prompt was: ‘try a lighter topic please’. (I tend to use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in my prompts.) This was what Chat GPT came up with:

The Art of Finding Joy in the Little Things

In a world that’s always racing to the next big thing, it’s easy to overlook the small moments that make life truly special. But what if I told you that the secret to happiness might just be hiding in those tiny details we often take for granted?

Take a moment and think about the last time you paused to watch a sunset, or how you felt when you caught the scent of fresh rain on pavement. Remember the warmth of a cozy blanket on a chilly evening, or the infectious laughter of a child. These instances may seem insignificant, but they hold the essence of joy.

It’s in these moments that we find a connection to the world around us. A beautiful melody, a kind word from a stranger, or the perfect cup of coffee can uplift our spirits and remind us that joy doesn’t require grand gestures; it’s all around us, waiting to be noticed.

So, let’s celebrate the little victories, like finding a forgotten bill in your pocket or hitting all green lights on your way home. Let’s find joy in the everyday – in the quiet morning hours before the world wakes up, in the pages of a good book, or in the comfort of our favorite shoes.

Life is a collection of moments, and the happiest people aren’t those who chase after extraordinary experiences, but those who find delight in the ordinary. So here’s to the little things – may they continue to inspire us and bring a touch of magic to our everyday lives.

Embrace the little joys, and watch as they transform your perspective on life!

There are a couple parts that feel like my voice, but not enough of it that I’d mistake this as my own writing. Still, this is much better than ‘The Rise of Micro-Entrepreneurship’… and more in line with a few topics I’ve written about.

I find myself using AI a lot more, but I won’t be using it to write my Daily-Inks. I want this space to be one where I express my thinking, my learning, my voice. For me, the art of finding joy is in a little process called writing, not prompting.

Conversational AI interface

A future where we have conversations with an AI in order to have it do tasks for us is closer than you might think. Watch this clip, (full video here):

Imagine starting you day by asking an AI ‘assistant’, “What are the emails I need to look at today?” Then saying something like, “Respond to the first 2 for me, and draft an answer for the 3rd one for me to approve. And remind me what meetings I have today.” All while on the treadmill, or while shaving or even showering.

The AI calculates your calories used on your treadmill, and tracks what you eat, and even gives suggestions like, “You might want to add some protein to your meal, may I suggest eggs, you also have some tuna in the pantry, or a protein shake if you don’t want to make anything.”

Later you have the ever-present the AI in the room with you during a meeting and afterwards request of it, “Send us all a message with a summary of what we discussed, and include a ‘To Do’ list for each of us.”

Sitting for too long at work? The AI could suggest standing up, or using the stairs instead of the elevator. Hungry? Maybe your AI assistant recommends a snack because it read your sugar levels off of your watch’s health monitor, and it does this just as you are starting to feel hungry.

It could even remind you to call your mom, or do something kind for someone you love… and do so in a way that helps you feel good about it, not like it’s nagging you.

All this and a lot more without looking at a screen, or typing information into a laptop. This won’t be ready by the end of 2024, but it’s closer to 2024 than it is to 2030. This kind of futuristic engagement with a conversational AI is really just around the corner. And those ready to embrace it are really going to leave those who don’t behind, much like someone insisting on horse travel in an era of automobiles. Are you ready for the next level of AI?

New learning paradigm

I heard something in a meeting recently that I haven’t heard in a while. It was in a meeting with some online educational leaders across the province and the topic of Chat GPT and AI came up. It’s really challenging in an online course, with limited opportunities for supervised work or tests, to know if a student is doing the work, or a parent or tutor, or Artificial Intelligence tools. That’s when a conversation came up that I’ve heard before. It was a bit of a stand on a soapbox diatribe, “If an assignment can be done by Chat GPT, then maybe the problem is in the assignment.”

That’s almost the exact line we started to hear about 15 years ago about Google… I might even have said it, “If you can just Google the answer to the question, then how good is the question?” Back then, this prompted some good discussions about assessment and what we valued in learning. But this is far more relevant to Google than it is to AI.

I can easily create a question that would be hard to Google. It is significantly harder to do the same with LLM’s – Large Language Models like Chat GPT. If I do a Google search I can’t find critical thinking challenges not already shared by someone else. However, I can ask Chat GPT to create answers to almost anything. Furthermore, I can ask it to create things like pro’s & con’s lists, then put those in point form, then do a rough draft of an essay, then improve on the essay. I can even ask it to use the vocabulary of a Grade 9 student. I can also give it a writing sample and ask it to write the essay in the same style.

LLM’s are not just a better Google, they are a paradigm shift. If we are trying to have conversations about how to catch cheaters, students using Chat GPT to do their work, we are stuck in the old paradigm. That said, I openly admit this is a much bigger problem in online learning where we don’t see and work closely with students in front of us. And we are heading into an era where there will be no way to verify what’s student work and what’s not, so it’s time to recognize the paradigm shift and start asking ourselves new questions…

The biggest questions we need to ask ourselves are how can we teach students to effectively use AI to help them learn, and what assignments can we create that ask them to use AI effectively to help them develop and share ideas and new learning?

Back when some teachers were saying, “Wikipedia is not a valid website to use as research and to cite.” Many more progressive educators were saying, “Wikipedia is a great place to start your research,” and, “Make sure you include the date you quoted the Wikipedia page because the page changes over time.” The new paradigm will see some teachers making students write essays in class on paper or on wifi-less internet-less computers, and other teachers will be sending students to Chat GPT and helping them understand how to write better prompts.

That’s the difference between old and new paradigm thinking and learning. The transition is going to be messy. Mistakes are going to be made, both by students and teachers. Where I’m excited is in thinking about how learning experiences are going to change. The thing about a paradigm shift is that it’s not just a slow transition but a leap into new territory. The learning experiences of the future will not be the same, and we can either try to hold on to the past, or we can get excited about the possibilities of the future.

Asimov’s Robot Visions

I’m listening to Isaac Asimov’s book, Robot Visions on Audible. Short stories that center around his Three Laws of Robotics (Asimov’s 3 Laws).

• The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

• The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

• The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These short stories all focus on ways that these laws can go wrong, or perhaps awry is the better term. There are a few things that make these stories insightful but they are also very dated. The early ones were written in the 1940’s and the conventions of the time, including conversational language and sexist undertones, are blatantly exposed as ‘olde’.

It also seems that Asimov made 2 assumptions worth thinking about: First that all robots and Artificial Intelligence would be constructed with the 3 laws at the core of all intelligence built into these machines. Many, many science fiction stories that followed also use these laws. However creators of Large Language Models like Chat GPT are struggling to figure out what guard rails to put on their AI to prevent it from acting maliciously when meeting sometimes scrupulous human requests.

Secondly, a few of the stories include a Robopsychologist, that’s right, a person (always female) who is an expert in the psychology of robots. There would be psychologists whose sole purpose would be to get inside the minds of robots.

Asimov was openly concerned with AI, specifically robots, acting badly, endangering humans, and even following our instructors too literally and with undesirable consequences. But he thought his 3 laws was a good start. Perhaps they are but they are just a start. And with new AI’s coming out with more computing power, more training, and less restrictions, I think Asimov’s concerns may prove prophetic.

The guard rails are off and there is no telling what unexpected consequences and results we will see in the coming months and years.

The easy way out

I love the ingenuity of students when it comes to avoiding work. I remember a student showing me how playing 3 French YouTube videos in different tabs simultaneously somehow fooled the Rosetta Stone language learning software to think he was responding to oral tests correctly. How on earth did he figure that out?

Here’s a video of a kid who, while doing an online math quiz for homework, figured out that if you go to the web browser’s developer ‘inspect element’ tool you can find out the correct answer. Just hover over the code of the multiple choice questions and it highlights the choices and the code tells you if that choice is true or false.

@imemezy

Kids know every trick in the book…i mean computer #computer #maths #homework #madeeasy #lol #children #schoolwork #schools #hack #hacks #tricks #tips #test #exam #learning #learn

♬ original sound – Memezy

If there is an easy way to solve things, students will figure it out.

There isn’t an AI detector that can figure out with full certainty that someone cheated using a tool like Chat GPT. And if you find one, it probably would not detect it if the student also used an AI paraphrasing tool to rework the final product. It would be harder again if their prompt said something like, ‘Use grammar, sentence structure, and word choice that a Grade 10 student would use’.

So AI will be used for assignments. Students will go into the inspector code of a web page and find the right answers, and it’s probably already the case that shy students have trained an AI tool to speak with their voice so that they could submit oral (and even video) work without actually having to read anything aloud.

These tools are getting better and better, and thus much harder to detect.

I think tricks and tools like this invite educators to be more creative about what they do in class. We are seeing some of this already, but we are also seeing a lot of backwards sliding: School districts blocking AI tools, teachers giving tests on computers that are blocked from accessing the internet, and even teachers making students, who are used to working with computers, write paper tests.

Meanwhile other teachers are embracing the changes. Wes Fryer created AI Guidelines for students to tell them how to use these tools appropriately for school work. That seems far more enabling than locking tools down and blocking them. Besides, I think that if students are going to use these tools outside of school anyway, we should focus on teaching them appropriate use rather than creating a learning environment that is nothing like the real world.

All that said, if you send home online math quizzes, some students will find an easy way to avoid doing the work. If you have students write essays at home and aren’t actively having them revise that work in class, some will use AI. Basically, some students will cheat the system, and themselves of the learning experience, if they are given the opportunity to do so.

The difference is that innovative, creative teachers will use these tools to enhance learning, and they will be in position to learn along with students how to embrace these tools openly, rather than kids sneakily using them to avoid work, or to lessen the work they need to do… either way, kids are going to use these tools.

Grammar Police

Today I opened a file in the online version of Microsoft Word and this ‘Editor’ showed up on the right column of the screen:

Of the 4 suggestions, the first one was an acronym that I did not need to explain or change. The second one, conciseness, was a good suggestion. The formality was the use of don’t rather than do not, which I decided to leave in, and the vocabulary suggestion was also something I decided to leave as-is, although the mentioning of it was valid. Had this been a more formal document, I would have made the suggested change.

I find it fascinating that we can now have Artificial Intelligence edit our work as we type. We’ve had it all along with spell and grammar check putting red and blue lines in the text, but this adds a whole new element and nuance to what was previously done. It’s also interesting that ‘Inclusiveness’, and ‘Sensitive Geopolitical References’ were a couple of the refinement options.

I’ve already used Chat GPT to edit an email for me, simply rephrasing what I’d already written, but I haven’t asked it to respond to any emails for me… yet. I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing that right now. But I do like these features that make my writing look better. At some point I know I’ll be putting these blog posts into an AI editor, but for now, I like the process of writing and publishing in a limited time and being both creative and quick. If I start a long editing and proof-reading process for my daily blog, I doubt that I would maintain the daily nature of it. So, I’ll hack away, and you’ll find the occasional errors, and more than occasional run-on sentences. Because while I like these grammar and editing tools, I also like the free-flow of writing and I’m not publishing a book that can’t be edited later when an error is pointed out. For now, I’d rather spend my time thinking and writing, and leave the editing for more formal work. Still, it’s nice to see these tools get better, and I’m sure I’m make more use of them in time.

Basically, right now I’m thinking of these grammar police tools as a traffic stops, and soon I’ll see them as friendly traffic cops helping me get on my way more smoothly.

Use it or fall behind

Check out what Khan Academy has done so far, since getting early access to Chat GPT4 last August.

And here’s what’s coming soon:

The gut reaction to using new technology in education is to ban, block, and/or punish students for ‘cheating’. While I’m not going to link to the many times I’ve already said this, I’ll say it again… the technology is not going away!

So how do we use it effectively, creatively, and for learning? 

That is the question question to ask… and Chat GPT4 and tools like it probably have better answers than you can come up with.

Dinner with the dead

A question Tim Ferris used to regularly ask his podcast guests was, “If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be and why?”

Well now it might be a bit easier to have one of those dinner conversations… even if the person is dead.

Here’s a conversation on AI and education between Bill Gates and Socrates, but first the description of the video:

AI Brings Bill Gates & Socrates Together: A Must-Watch Dialogue on AI. An exclusive video of Bill Gates and ancient philosopher Socrates discussing the potential of artificial intelligence. Don’t miss this groundbreaking fusion of past wisdom and present innovation, reshaping our understanding of AI.

In this video, you will witness a fascinating discussion between Socrates, the Greek philosopher considered one of the greatest thinkers in history, and Bill Gates, the American entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft, one of the most important companies in the world of technology.

Despite belonging to different eras, Socrates and Gates have a lot in common. Both are considered pioneers in their respective fields and have had a significant impact on society.

The AI-generated conversation will allow these two great figures to discuss topics such as technology, ethics, education, and much more. Will Socrates and Bill Gates be able to find common ground in their ideas and thoughts? Find out in this video!

It didn’t need the laugh track, and there is a slight cartoonish feel to the two characters, but this technology is just getting better and better!