Taking a different tack with this episode, a wonderful chat with the remarkable Mark Stickells, AM, CEO of Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, on AI and the role of Humanities in STEM. "I fundamentally believe knowledge is a human insight. And we work with these tools that are incredibly powerful, but can be incredibly stupid." "We… Continue reading Mark Stickells on AI & the role of Humanities in STEM
Tag: education
Set an AI to Catch an AI
we can't detect AI enabled writing with any reasonable degree of confidence. And no, we can't mark student work with LLMs, or solve real world problems with LLMs, or replace the people doing jobs requiring judgement, compassion, or rationality with LLMs. Not without suffering painful regrets when it comes time to deal with the consequences!
Making Sense of AI
So you haven’t got time to read through hefty books about the AI industry. You’ve had fun with image generators, and you find chatbots useful although occasionally alarming. But there’s information firing at you from all directions, and it’s wildly contradictory, alarming, exciting, and horrifying, all at the same time. What the heck are you supposed to do?
Scaling scams
It's important, when you're making graphs, to think about the story you want to tell with the data, and what type of graph, and what features of the graph, will help you tell that story. Likewise, when you're looking at someone else's graph, we all need to apply that critical data literacy and look at the scale on the y axis, as well as checking the labels, finding out the origin of the data, and considering whether the graph is accurate, a valid way to display that data, and what story it might be trying to tell you.
Ethical uses of AI
There is no ethical way to use AI. At least not the Large Language Models (LLMs) we’re mostly talking about these days when we talk about AI. I’m going to unpack that in a moment, but first let me stress that I am not, for a moment, calling teachers who use AI unethical. The ethical responsibility here does not lie with users of LLMs. It lies firmly with the industry that has created and promoted the use of these machines in wholly unethical ways.