ChoiceScript tutorial for making casual, phone-friendly, stats-driven storygames. Choice of the Rhetor.
The A.V. Club’s AI-Generated Articles Are Copying Directly From IMDb
I’ve enjoyed human-written A/V Club articles in the past. I see no reason to seek out articles written by bots that copy existing material word-for-word and add no value. The company G/O, mentioned in the clip below, owns the A.V. Club and is behind the shift to bot-authored articles: “A/V Club [sic] licenses content from…
What It Means If You’re A ‘Paragraph Texter’
A very fluffy article that does a good job diving into an everyday thing and sharing expert opinions. While some of these sources are simply random people, others have specialized skills and training that makes their opinions newsworthy enough to provide some substance to a not-exactly-hard-news story. Some of us just can’t get our thoughts…
‘New York Times’ considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl
Be careful of the parts of news stories that rely on ifs and coulds and maybes. Having said that, this is fascinating exploration of what’s at stake. It’s a fact that OpenAI’s business model involved training its large-language model on copyrighted material, without acquiring legal permission to do so, and without any mechanism to share…
What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud?
I’m sad thinking of all the students whose academic careers and personal intellectual growth will suffer because they depend on generative text software — whether or not they get “caught” for plagiarism. In my mind, the fundamental error that almost everyone is making is in believing that Generative AI is tantamount to AGI (general purpose…
How to Keep Students Writing in the Age of AI Tools
In a writing-intensive class, students need to write extensively to the point that the teacher cannot possibly grade all of it. — Edutopia via NCTE Good advice from an article by Kara Douma, reprinted by NCTE. I need to hear that. The referees don’t score every practice. The coaches don’t give you feedback after…
ChatGPT answers more than half of software engineering questions incorrectly
The results showed that out of the 512 questions, 259 (52%) of ChatGPT’s answers were incorrect and only 248 (48%) were correct. Moreover, a whopping 77% of the answers were verbose. […] According to the study, the well-articulated responses ChatGPT outputs caused the users to overlook incorrect information in the answers. “Users overlook incorrect information…
‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models
OpenAI has already taken a toll on human workers. It’s chilling to contemplate that students and creatives are comfortable with relying on this product in any meaningful way. The business model depends on devaluing human labor, and benefitting the powerful. The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts,…
Goodby big Android… hello little budget iPhone SE 3rd.
I just removed from my syllabus template a digitally altered PR image of our school’s namesake St. Elizabeth Ann Seton holding an iPad, because iPads have not been part of the tuition package for a couple years now. I’ve been an Apple user for about 10 years, since Seton Hill instituted its MacBook plan, and…
Elon Musk has officially killed Twitter. The zombie platform lives on as X, a disfigured shell of its former self
Whereas Twitter was once a fountain of authoritative information, X is a platform where trolls can pay a small fee to have their ugly content boosted ahead of reputable sources. X is a platform where identity verification no longer exists and impersonation is only a paid subscription away. X is a platform where journalists are…
How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? | MLA Style Center
We ask students to cite encyclopedia articles, dictionaries, news interviews with experts, and in-person conversations. A generative text-generation tool that scrapes published work and uses a statistical model to emulate a response that mimics the way the humans in its database have responded to similar prompts is formally something like a conversation, and the MLA’s…
Newly acquired technology for teaching writing in the age of AI. (Not for high stakes testing, but rather in-class self-assessment.)
Bing’s AI chatbot helped me solve a technical problem, then showed me manatees, then denied showing me manatees
I was searching for how to change the default font in the WordPress editor, but the answers I was getting were overwhelmingly for how to change what the user sees in published posts, which I already know how to do. Bing’s response was right on target. It probably helped that I knew the specific name…
Trouble importing UMA clothes from Blender 3.6
In Blender3D, I created a jumpsuit, rigged and weighted it with the UMA_Male_Rig, and created a simple animation (right). From within Unity3D, I can see the animation just fine, which seems to tell me the model is properly weighted (lower left). I’ve carefully watched every second of Secret Anorak’s “UMA 201 – Part 5: Converting…
Twitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse | Siva Vaidhyanathan
I joined Twitter for the first time during a session at an academic conference, and since then have mostly used it to keep in touch with academics who share my professional interests. But many of those professional contacts feel about Twitter the way I do, and have moved much (though not all) of their activity…
Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’
How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future? AI will obviously make it easier to produce disinformation—from fake images to deepfakes to fake news. That will affect people’s sense of trust as they’re scrolling on social media. AI can also allow someone to imitate your loved ones, which further erodes people’s…
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is…
Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life
Years ago I spent some time in Second Life, taking my young son to visit a display of NASA rockets and historical sites from classical history, and for my own amusement wandering through a few Star Trek exhibits, and exploring the mostly empty landscapes. My university bought an island, and I was briefly excited at…
‘Anti-dopamine parenting’ can curb a kid’s craving for screens or sweets
A good article about kids and dopamine. Apps and sweets can hijack the neural pathways we need to survive, triggering tantrums and aggression. The problem describes plenty of adults, too! It’s not actually happiness we feel when we fulfill that craving. While she’s staring into the technicolor images, her brain experiences spikes in dopamine, over and…