If you only read one source, this is an excellent summary of everything you need to know.
The State of AI for August 2023 - Dominik Lukes, Assistive Technology Officer, Univ. of Oxford
(alternatively, read it on Google Docs, with a table of contents)
Podcasts about AI:
NLP’s podcast Is that a fact? informs listeners about news literacy issues that affect their lives through informative conversations with journalists and other experts across a wide range of disciplines.
Derek Bruff shares about assignment makeovers in the AI age on episode 481 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast
Lance is the Director of Digital Pedagogy at College Unbound, a part-time instructor at North Shore Community College, and a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston with a dissertation that is focusing on how scholars engage in academic piracy.
Lance has given talks, written about, and presented at conferences on artificial intelligence generative tools in education, academic piracy, open access, OER, open pedagogy, hybrid flexible learning, and digital service learning.
His musings, reflections, and ramblings can be found on his blog, By Any Other Nerd Blog Link as well as on Twitter: @leaton01
Lance recently taught a course on AI and education with students to develop usage policies for College Unbound.
He has recently given talks and workshops in Generative AI:
· Institutional Policy Development for AI Generative Tools in Teaching and Learning (NERCOMP; March 2023)
· ChatGPT, AI Generative Tools and Your Career: Parallels, Possibilities, and Problems (Rhode Island Career Development Association; February 2022)
· The Future’s Already Here: AI Generative Tools and Teaching (NERCOMP; Feb 2023).
His work on generative AI policy development with students was recently featured in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (March 2023),Teaching: What You Can Learn From Students About ChatGPT https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/teaching/2023-03-30
Elements of AI - University of Helsinki
Free course for learning about AI in general.
What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? - Stephen Wolfram
Learn the details about how it works. Based on his book of the same name.
ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from - Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review
Useful history.
The Acceleration of Artificial Intelligence - Anna-Sofia Lesiv
An interesting summary of the development of today’s generative AI. It’s useful for understanding the 2017 breakthrough (transformer architecture) that led to so much that’s happening now.
A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work - Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott
Learn about word vectors, transformers, and more.
Generative AI exists because of the transformer - Visual Storytelling Team and Madhumita Murgia, Financial Times
Useful explanation with helpful visuals.
Why does chatGPT make up fake academic papers? - Twitter thread by David Smerdon, Univ. of Queensland
Very good explanation.
Large language models from scratch and Large Language Models: Part 2 (videos) - Graphics in 5 Minutes on YouTube
Transformers, Explained - Google Cloud Tech on YouTube
Learn more about transformer architecture.
What is Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) - Alex McFarland
Useful explanation.
It’s worth reading these policies and FAQs from OpenAI:
Learn prompting - free online course, self-paced
Prompt engineering for ChatGPT - Coursera course by Dr. Jules White, Vanderbilt University
How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide - Prof. Ethan Mollick
Useful list of tips and examples.
Three ways to leverage ChatGPT and other generative AI in research - Times Higher Education
Ideas for using ChatGPT for (1) to determine a hypothesis or question; (2) research method: follow an accepted research method or invent a new method or algorithm to conduct an investigation that resolves or answers the question; and (3) research output: formulate, evaluate, and document the solution to enable further research.
More Recent articles
Teaching: Using AI tools to develop critical-thinking skills - The Chronicle of Higher Ed August 15, 2024
Teachers Are Using AI to Create New Worlds, Help Students with Homework, and Teach English - The Markup
Hear from teachers around the world about how they are using AI in teaching.
We need to address the generative AI literacy gap in higher education - Inside Higher Ed
A faculty member from Arizona State University discusses how they are focusing on improving generative AI literacy in faculty, staff and students.
Incorporating Generative AI in Teaching and Learning: Faculty Examples Across Disciplines - Columbia Center for Teaching & Learning
At Columbia University, faculty across disciplines provide a glimpse into their approaches as they experiment with AI in their classrooms and teach AI literacy to their students. Lots of examples here.
Cheating Fears Over Chatbots Were Overblown, New Research Suggests (NYT December 2023)
Suspicion, Cheating and Bans: A.I. Hits America’s Schools (The Daily: podcast episode)
Hear directly from students and one instructor about how they use ChatGPT for their work.
Teaching: Will ChatGPT Change the Way You Teach? (Chronicle Teaching)
How to thoughtfully incorporate ChatGPT into course discussions and assignments to encourage critical thinking from students in their engagement with these tools.
A Survival Guide to AI and Teaching pt.7: Inoculating Our Students (and Ourselves!) Against Mis- and Disinformation in the Age of AI (Temple University)
"Our task as educators is to prepare our students to navigate an information environment characterized by the use of generative AI by inoculating against disinformation, helping them develop the skill and habit of verifying information, and building a conception of the components of a healthy information environment."
AI Guidance (Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning)
Suggestions for how to adapt your teaching in light of quickly developing AI capabilities.
Accessibility Powered by AI: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Universalize Access to Digital Content
Using generative AI to improve accessibility.
AI and the Future of Undergraduate Writing (Chronicle)
Reiterating the importance of focusing on good pedagogy and student engagement rather than fearing ChatGPT.
Critical AI, new interdisciplinary journal (Rutgers and Duke)
Follow the new journal at the link provided, or check out the blog feed site including, “research, reviews, and commentary by interdisciplinary scholars in a wide range of AI-adjacent fields, as well as posts by faculty and students affiliated with the Critical AI @ Rutgers initiative.”
Educator considerations for ChatGPT (Open AI) From the creators of ChatGPT.
Based on feedback from educators from a number of institutions. Covers ethics and literacy, truthfulness, bias, assessment, equity, and more.
Understanding AI Writing Tools and their Uses for Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley. Berkeley Center for Teaching and Learning
How ChatGPT Could Help or Hurt Students With Disabilities (Chronicle)
How to work in collaboration with students to use these tools to support their learning rather than it being used in a panic to plagiarize.
I’m a student. You have no idea how much we’re using ChatGPT (Chronicle)
A student’s perspective on how undergraduates are using ChatGPT. Includes a discussion on how instructors could think about incorporating this tool in assignments while ensuring it’s not possible to use it in other assignments.
Handout: AI and the Future of Teaching and Learning - U.S. Dept of Education, Office of Educational Technology (PDF)
Two-page list of key insights and recommendations from the U.S. Dept. of Education.
The AI Reader: Is there meaning in the machine-generated? (Dirt) On reading AI-generated works, machine creativity, and the spectrum of human authorship for ChatGPT’s impact on how we read and write.
Special issue: Critical AI a Field in Formation, American Literature (Duke) “This special issue provides an overview of the emerging interdisciplinary field of Critical AI, which seeks to demystify artificial intelligence; counter its mythologizing as a marvelous and impenetrable black box; and translate, interpret, and critique its operations, from data collection and model architecture to decision making. Artists and researchers are developing new methods, practices, and concepts for this critical project, which is both historicist and attentive to the institutional, technological, and epistemic transformations still underway.”
How we can teach children so they survive AI – and cope with whatever comes next (George Monbiot) "Schoolchildren should be taught to understand how thinking works, from neuroscience to cultural conditioning; how to observe and interrogate their thought processes; and how and why they might become vulnerable to disinformation and exploitation."
Studies suggest that AI-based chatbots have a positive impact on college students, improving their mental health and overall learning experience. See:
Privacy/Data Privacy
Can ChatGPT-4o Be Trusted With Your Private Data? Wired, July 31, 2024
Copyright issues
Generative AI Meets Copyright - Pamela Samuelson, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley (YouTube)
Recording of a talk she gave, summarizing the outstanding cases. "It will take years for this to be resolved in the courts."
Academic Fracking: When Publishers Sell Scholars Work to AI - Lance Easton, Substack July 2024
Bias
AI expert Meredith Broussard: ‘Racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems’ - The Guardian
Racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems that are baked into our technological systems because they’re baked into society. It would be great if the fix were more data. But more data won’t fix our technological systems if the underlying problem is society.
A Radical Plan to Make AI Good, Not Evil
OpenAI competitor Anthropic, on using AI to train AI (instead of humans). They call it “constitutional AI.”
Identifying AI-created content
Is badging a solution? (badging AI vs badging human created content)
Generative AI is forcing people to rethink what it means to be authentic - The Conversation
ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding (The Guardian) The overlap between journalism and information literacy, fake (generated) news, and learning how to track and identify these coming concerns.
Exploited labor
ChatGPT is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour
Learn more about human contractors working to train AI tools. This is a problem not just for ChatGPT, but for YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Episode 183: AI Hype and the Disciplining of “Creative,” Academic, and Journalistic Labor (Citations Needed podcast) - This episode looks at the extractive nature of AI, the vast human labor hidden behind these tools, profitable & regulation-evasive narratives of AI tech exec doomers, & the environmental damage of the computing resources used.