NSWEduChat, an AI tool for Australian teachers in NSW

Showing all posts about artificial intelligence

NSWEduChat, an AI tool for Australian teachers in NSW

27 September 2024

Australian teachers in NSW, now have access to NSWEduChat, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, intended to help educators get a grip on AI tools:

The tool aims to provide additional support to staff in developing and delivering teaching experiences, easing workload demands, and empowering users to advance their AI skills in a safe environment.

The NSW Department of Education however urges caution while using the tool, reminding teachers the bot may not always be accurate, a government health warning, if ever there were one:

NSWEduChat can simulate many tasks that a human might perform but may not always be accurate. School leaders, teachers and trained, experienced employees in non-teaching positions should apply professional judgment when using NSWEduChat.

It sounds like NSWEduChat will eventually be available for students to use, something that is currently being trialled. A student roll-out will only happen once safety and privacy matters have been worked through.

AI is changing the way photos are classified, photos or memories

26 September 2024

The iPhone 16, Apple’s latest smartphone, has arrived on shop shelves. There are four versions of the device: 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max. In time all will feature Apple Intelligence, Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) offering, which will be “deeply integrated” into iOS18 and other Apple operating systems. From what I can gather, Apple Intelligence features will be rolled out over time, presumably by way of incremental updates to iOS18, and beyond.

One of the iPhone 16’s — specifically the Pro and Pro Max models — big talking points though, has been the inclusion of a physical shutter button (although Apple calls it “camera control”) for the camera. It means people will be able to tilt their phone into (what I’ll call) landscape mode, and have the device mimic cameras of old.

Of course, photos can still be taken in portrait orientation using the button. There are a number of other major new camera and photo settings, but Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, suggests the new camera/photo features alone may be reason enough to consider buying a 16.

There’s also speculation as to the difference Apple Intelligence will make to photos taken, going forward. A yet to arrive feature, called “Clean Up”, which like the “Magic Eraser” function on Google phones, will allow people to alter, with the aid of AI, their iPhone photos. They’ll be able to remove (and add) objects and people. It’s going to be a game-changer. So much so, that some smartphone images are being referred to as memories:

I asked Apple’s VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack about Google’s view that the Pixel camera now captures “memories” instead of photos, and he told me that Apple has a strong point of view about what a photograph is — that it’s something that actually happened.

This distinction is significant. Old school images, raw and unedited, recording an instant in time, will continue to be referred to as photos. This will be a journalistic application. Images edited by way of AI, meanwhile, will become more appropriately considered memories.

Clean Up or Magic Eraser can be used to remove that inadvertently photo-bombing stranger who strays into the background of a family group shot, thus preserving the memory of the moment as those present would like to remember it.

Photos or memories. It seems all very inconsequential, a small step even — I’m merely scratching the surface here — but another of the many changes AI technologies are bringing our way.

LinkedIn is collecting user data for AI training

20 September 2024

Professional social network (assuming there’s such a thing) LinkedIn has started collecting user data to train its own AI bot.

No surprise there.

They’ve apparently auto opted all members in, whether they like it or not.

No surprise there.

Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, has posted instructions on how to opt-out, on X/Twitter.

I deactivated my LinkedIn account — after my then GP, of all people, invited me to join — well over ten years ago.

The disassociated podcast, web design in the wild west of 1997

20 September 2024

I’ve always thought setting up a podcast show would be fun. But, you know, I have no proper recording equipment, nor any idea what sort of subject matter such a “show” would feature. So the idea has sat dormant all these years.

But yesterday, I learned about NotebookLM, Google’s “personalized AI research assistant”, while reading a blog post by Robert Birming. Among NotebookLM’s features, is the ability to take some text, say a blog post, load said text into NotebookLM, and then apply the “Audio Overview” function.

Curious to try it, I took a post I wrote in 2022, about my early experiences of building websites, uploaded the text to NotebookLM, and waited for the result. This quite fun fireside chat, between the two “hosts”, a woman and a man, is what emerged:

The “hosts” confused me with the author of a book I referenced in my post, Jay Hoffmann, but, some people call me Jay, so not all is lost.

And that’s where web standards come in. Hoffman [er, Lampard] talks about using HTML 3.2. Early on he was a rebel, but a structured one.

Update: thanks to long-time disassociated reader, and one-time collaborator CoffeeGirl (AKA Stephanie), for this version of the podcast (dare I call it a remix?) based on my post about web design in 1997. This is a little more on point. #DeepDiveNinetiesWeb

This little snippet is fantastic:

Back then, choosing a domain name was a statement. You were declaring your independence from traditional media.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. For the record, I didn’t get the disassociated domain name until 1998, and when I did, it was disassociated.com.au. I tried to obtain the . com extension, but someone else had it. They contacted me, offering it for sale (at a premium), which I declined. Later, when the name became available in early 2003, I grabbed it.

Facebook has been scraping the pages of Australians since 2007

12 September 2024

Jake Evans, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent.

For sure, Facebook operates a little differently in Australia. According to information provided by Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s global privacy director, who was speaking at an Australian parliamentary inquiry into AI adoption, the social network has been collecting user data since 2007.

Only Facebook members who set their profiles to private, were spared. Australians, unlike residents of the European Union who are protected by strong privacy laws, also do not have the option to opt-out of having their data collected, if they elect to make their Facebook page publicly visible.

One can only wonder what sense Meta’s AI technologies made of the content posted by Australians to their Facebook pages, and what conclusions they drew about us.

Authors slam NaNoWriMo neither for nor against AI stance

9 September 2024

National Novel Writing Month, AKA NaNoWriMo, the popular, twenty-five year old, write a fifty-thousand word novel in thirty-days challenge, infuriated authors last week, after organisers appeared to support the use of AI tools by participants. While they didn’t specifically endorse apps such as ChatGPT, they did not rule them out either:

NaNoWriMo neither explicitly supports nor condemns any approach to writing, including the use of tools that leverage AI.

NaNoWriMo’s neutral stance however has upset many writers. Not only do they feel generative AI tools threaten their livelihoods, some have also seen their own works used to “train” AI chatbots, usually without their permission or knowledge.

To these authors, the neutral position represents support of this conduct. But like many segments of society, NaNoWriMo, and its community of amateur and professional writers, have been grappling with the advent of AI technologies. Organisers say their (since amended) AI policy was intended to put an end to what had become inflammatory discussion on the topic:

In early August, debates about AI on our social media channels became vitriolic. It was clear that the intimidation and harassment we witnessed were causing harm within our community of writers. The FAQs we crafted last week were written to curtail those behaviors.

I don’t really know much about the NaNoWriMo community, but with over half a million members globally, it surely represents a wide and varied group of writers. Although some six-hundred NaNoWriMo manuscripts have gone on to be published, for many participants the writing challenge is simply a fun way to pass some time. The majority are not looking for publishing deals. I’d venture to say some participants may not be the greatest of writers. Others might struggle, for whatever reasons, to put a story idea they have, into words.

NaNoWriMo is saying they don’t have a problem with some of their members using AI tools, if it helps them with the process, be that drafting or proofreading. But they make an obvious caveat:

If using AI will assist your creative process, you are welcome to use it. Using ChatGPT to write your entire novel would defeat the purpose of the challenge, though.

I’m not in favour of using AI apps in any creative endeavours, particularly writing. Personally, I don’t think AI has any place in NaNoWriMo, for the precise reason organisers have stated above. AI defeats the purpose. But we’re getting to the point where it’s going to be hard to tell what work has been AI assisted, and what hasn’t. Plagiarism tools may be effective, but not if the AI apps stay one-step ahead. Imposing a ban on AI apps seems pointless. AI is here to stay, and is only going to more deeply embed itself in our lives. This is what we need to expend our energies on navigating.

The photorealistic AI-generation revolution is here

29 August 2024

Chris Welch, a writer for The Verge, on the new “reimagine” feature, that shipped with Google’s recently launched Pixel 9 smartphones. Long story short, “reimagine” allows someone to edit/enhance any photo, anyway they choose:

With a simple prompt, you can add things to photos that were never there. And the company’s Gemini AI makes it look astonishingly realistic. This all happens right from the phone’s default photo editor app. In about five seconds.

That’s quite the leap for generative artificial intelligence, one that’s going to leave the rest of us wondering if what’s depicted in a photo is actual or not.

Threat of AI, demise of blogging, the world in February 2015

15 August 2024

Since re-booting disassociated in May 2022, I’ve been slowly (incredibly slowly) restoring selected posts from the previous version of the blog that was online between 2007 and 2017. The restored posts are tagged legacy, and also include a few posts written prior to 2007, going back to 2003.

On checking as I typed this, I see there are presently seventy-four of the old posts back here now. Considering there were about twelve thousand posts originally, bringing back selected older posts is taking quite some time. I don’t intend to restore every last old post though. Some of them are now quite irrelevant and out-dated, and many include an abundance of dead links and long gone URLs.

If twelve-grand seems a lot, many posts were link-blog style, one-sentence affairs. My priority, when time permits, is bring back more of the article-type posts, such as film reviews. Anyway, to get to my point, a couple of posts I restored from February 2015, a mere nine-and-a-half-years ago now, still seem surprisingly relevant today.

One was about an apparently AI powered then Twitter account, called INTERESTING_JPG, which, although now inactive, remains online. INTERESTING would “look” at popular photos, and describe what it saw. INTERESTING’s accuracy was so-so, to the say the least. While AI is certainly a trending topic today, the concept has of course been present for a long time.

The other post I restored, which was originally published on 16 February 2015, was about the apparent demise of blogging, and personal websites. This not quite four years after the #IndieWeb movement, which is very much based on blogs and personal websites, was founded in 2011.

So there we have it. AI and #IndieWeb, two ideas that been with us for quite some time, but are, in a sense, making waves today.

Create an AI version of yourself on Instagram to do who knows what

14 August 2024

Maybe back in 2006, I was in a discussion with then Australian web designer Jen Leheny, on the then forums of the Australian INfront, a design community we had helped establish in the late 1990’s, about WordPress. I was still using static HTML files to run disassociated, but was considering migrating to the then much in-trend CMS.

Jen said something like: “WordPress is working for me while I sleep.” I was sold. A short time later, I commenced the process of converting disassociated to WordPress.

Fast forward to 2024. A new tool by Meta, being trailed only in America at present, allows Instagram (IG) users to create an AI version of themselves. This… clone, will, says Alex Heath, writing for The Verge, allow IG users “to talk directly with humans in chat threads and respond to comments on their author’s account.”

This will, no doubt, allow harried IG users, influencers particularly, to do two things at once. Create more content. Network. Attend meetings. Take of the business side of their operation. They’ll also be able to sleep, soundly I imagine, in the knowledge the AI version of themselves is working on their behalf, at the same time.

That sounds like the good news, the pluses, of the new technology. As to the downsides. Where do we begin? What, for instance, if an IG AI avatar suggests a follower do something inappropriate, or unlawful? What responsibility might the (human) IG account holder have in that event?

This comes back to what a lot of people see as the incorrect application of AI technologies, including American author Joanna Maciejewska, who would prefer AI did her housework, not her writing. Any IG AI “assistant” should have the same purpose. Shouldn’t the technology be working behind the scenes, rather than taking centre stage?

Only some search engines can access and index Reddit content

30 July 2024

Google, and Brave Search, are apparently the only search engines permitted to crawl Reddit, and index content published there. Other search engines, including Bing and Duck Duck Go, are presently being prevented from accessing the “front page of the internet” forum and discussion website.

Reddit appears to be concerned that search engines other than Google and Brave may use content on their website for training AI chatbots. The move has nothing to do — or so we are told — with a sixty-million dollar deal between Google and Reddit, made earlier this year.

This deal precisely allows Google to use content published on Reddit to train its AI apps though. It seems like it’s ok to take Reddit content for these purposes, so long as you’ve stumped up the cash. I wonder if Reddit members, who wrote the content in the first place, see any of this money.

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