Happy Monday! There is so much AI news, so I decided this week’s recap will be brief and emphasize multiple modalities: text, audio, and video.
“AI” News
📰 Text
Vicki Davis wrote a great piece, Where AI Fails to Connect, exploring “AI’s” limitations for tasks she hopes to accomplish.
“When I use AI, and it is exposed to truly creative things—novel things—things that everyone isn't saying in a certain way, AI fails. AI omits. AI ignores.” - Vicki Davis.
Her piece reminds me of what Molly White wrote about “AI”, “[AI tools] are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.”
Tech research and consulting firm Gartner says “AI” is hitting the Trough of Disillusionment of their hype cycle.
Generative AI Hype Cycle Is Hitting ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ by Emanuel Maiberg for 404, July 18, 2024.
Finally, Chrome Unboxed, a site dedicated to the Chromebooks ubiquitous in K-12, published, We asked, you answered: nearly 50% of you never use AI at all.
🎧 Audio
Arguing that generative “AI” harms the environment is like arguing that the prosecution of Karen Read was problematic.1 This episode of Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us with guest Dr. Sasha Luccioni explains “AI’s” environmental harms.
Ed Zitron had the authors of the paper ChatGPT is bullshit on his podcast, Better Offline. The episode explains how Large Language Models work and its similarity to bulls***ing.
Content Warning: Frequent use of profanity.
📺 Video
Two recent videos explain how generative “AI” steals from creatives. Incredibly, both reference OpenAI CTO Mira Murati struggling when Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal asked her if Sora trained on YouTube videos.
This video by Proof News demonstrates that “AI” companies have nonconsensually trained their models with YouTube videos.
Search for your YouTube channel to see if it was scraped for “AI” with the Proof News tool. My channel was not, but the French Revolution video I made in collaboration with Ted-Ed was.
Pikat’s video, How AI is stealing your art, is a deep dive into generative “AI” stealing artists’ work.
Continue The Conversation
Does your school or conference need a tech-forward educator who critically examines “AI” and pedagogy? Reach out on Twitter or email mistermullaney@gmail.com.
Post Image: The blog post image is by Ricky Esquivel from Pexels.