tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-210770632024-03-18T14:47:20.233+00:00Donald Clark Plan BWhat is Plan B? Not Plan A!Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.comBlogger1366125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-5461649558682437962024-03-13T19:56:00.008+00:002024-03-13T20:07:23.861+00:00AI moves from 2D to 3D<p>Quite remarkable achievement by Deepmind. I wrote about this in my 'Learning in the Metaverse' book and the 2nd Edition of my book on GenAI coming out on May 4. The idea that AI accelerates the move from 2D to 3D.</p><p>This software takes language prompts into actions within 3D worlds. For the first time, the agent actually understands the 3D world in which it operates and can perform tasks just like a human.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">How it works</h3><p>All it needs are images from a screen of the game/environment and text instructions. It can therefor interact with Any virtual environment. Menus, navigation through the environments, actions and interactions with objects are all executed. They partnered with eight games companies to perform different tasks. SIMA is the AI agent that, after training, perceives and also understand a variety of environments, so that it can take actions to achieve an instructed goal.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ujsny4KCVOJO5TdTEkKLm4j9kguo6WPiXp46gB9hlupjAPTch0fWwNNj4eWw2RlYWUJBd8npa6JA3N7qr0QNEULKkyE7XvpFvETmI3k9uOlETCAB6dwyCYaOOEu0D63EnN8OtKmCViE-MpukuN90kuIdE1TobFKoP5I1m9Jmq3p1Wk4Ne1l3cg/s800/1710358725615.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="800" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ujsny4KCVOJO5TdTEkKLm4j9kguo6WPiXp46gB9hlupjAPTch0fWwNNj4eWw2RlYWUJBd8npa6JA3N7qr0QNEULKkyE7XvpFvETmI3k9uOlETCAB6dwyCYaOOEu0D63EnN8OtKmCViE-MpukuN90kuIdE1TobFKoP5I1m9Jmq3p1Wk4Ne1l3cg/w400-h210/1710358725615.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Transfer</h3><p>Even more remarkable is the fact that agents seem to transfer learning, so playing in one environment helps it succeed in others.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiflDmN60VTXztccY9s14j0VemgbgPCvqxi6yDdeQtskp0LmFK9ueWce3edcwB_r-SfnivOYykKAiofCVZmR7tZPQ3Urjw9c_pY7DP4dWtqvtNfHK6wD4F_LJHRvdB-_hjqxh_9yyWFMXHBtHp1Q4zCn42XvQx-IOB8_cKKPVPOXF6GpHzdxWgtXg/s1598/Screenshot%202024-03-13%20at%2019.58.06.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="754" data-original-width="1598" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiflDmN60VTXztccY9s14j0VemgbgPCvqxi6yDdeQtskp0LmFK9ueWce3edcwB_r-SfnivOYykKAiofCVZmR7tZPQ3Urjw9c_pY7DP4dWtqvtNfHK6wD4F_LJHRvdB-_hjqxh_9yyWFMXHBtHp1Q4zCn42XvQx-IOB8_cKKPVPOXF6GpHzdxWgtXg/w400-h189/Screenshot%202024-03-13%20at%2019.58.06.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Multimodal now also 3D</h3><p>Far too much debate around AI focus on text only LLM capabilities and not their expansion into multimodal capabilities, now including 3D worlds. The goal is to get agents to perform things in the virtual and/or real 3D world intelligently like a human.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Applications</h3><p>Its obvious application is in performing risky tasks in high-risk environments but also in any 3D world. It can also be used in online 3D worlds to help with training. The early signs of a tutor within these worlds or buddy, patient, employee or customer in training. </p><p>Its obvious application is in performing risky tasks in high-risk environments but also in any 3D world. It can also be used in online 3D worlds to help with training. The early signs of a tutor within these worlds or buddy, patient, employee or customer in training.</p><p><a href="https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/sima-generalist-ai-agent-for-3d-virtual-environments/">Full paper</a><br /><br /></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-58217665665938892482024-03-13T12:38:00.013+00:002024-03-13T13:19:14.679+00:00The Strange Case of Altman V Board at OpenAI revealed<p>The New Yorker article on the drama at OpenAI has uncovered, not only the timeline but the dynamics of the drama. It was a plot worthy of an episode in Succession. Kendall Roy is Sam Altman, a charismatic, persuasive and experienced tech entrepreneur. Logan Roy is Microsoft, looking to get some zest into the business, as it has lost its mojo. Then there are the bit players, the winners and losers. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNmMPtfpHlFW9yOzbvP5yGEqqhdjNaGA_IrUSGs8Tb226HS_poPevRQvcbH5eoXWpWeJGbuAgyxqZ4vJyOODGut00skWQATzdJbuxB6AgCvw2l3bAPaaWeXI5fpBGa2y2mGD44_v3Ppqa2j1FDt8T1sip6ZKhnG6yrsqnlNQ8LPTGIgiFs2VeJRg/s760/Sam%20Altman%20Helen%20Toner%20Reuters%20CSET.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="760" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNmMPtfpHlFW9yOzbvP5yGEqqhdjNaGA_IrUSGs8Tb226HS_poPevRQvcbH5eoXWpWeJGbuAgyxqZ4vJyOODGut00skWQATzdJbuxB6AgCvw2l3bAPaaWeXI5fpBGa2y2mGD44_v3Ppqa2j1FDt8T1sip6ZKhnG6yrsqnlNQ8LPTGIgiFs2VeJRg/s320/Sam%20Altman%20Helen%20Toner%20Reuters%20CSET.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Helen Toner, was the 'Effective Altruism' academic, with no real AI or technical experience, who had to apologise to the board for writing opinion piece articles criticising the organisation in which she was a board member. She apologised but Altman clearly had no time for her antics. He tried to get her ousted from the Board, playing them off against each other. It happens – I’ve seen it. Some on the board were inexperienced in business and couldn’t cope with the pressure, clearly tangled up in academic debates about AGI, an insider said “<i>Every step we get closer to A.G.I., everybody takes on, like, ten insanity points</i>.” The board felt threatened, panicked and sacked Altman. BIG MISTAKE<p></p><p style="text-align: left;">Establishing that there was “no malfeasance” Microsoft went apeshit, Altman took Brockman with him, the staff revolted. This was a battle between lightweight academics and experienced AI and business brains. Used to ruling the roost in the their world, and with more than a little of the arrogance that comes with academic status, they completely misjudged the situation and overplayed their hand. In the end it was a rout. The board “agreed to leave” (cough), Altman was reinstated, and the usual inquiry was ordered (always a sop). As one tech journalist noted "<span style="background-color: white; color: #242424;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i>A clod of a board stays consistent to its cloddery</i>.”</span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2R_z5XYZymTaBgWHooKzwq4NPR68FctrlPvecRTGXnYqeGIz36W6ls5oUQI1a1zvnNIQhyphenhyphenmZB0BBcvLFnuVsqWrGd0je8CEA0O303-ULQsfoansrD63COmhzbR4tlaF9B_9g1bu_1vLsR3nZIOMoaKmXlCIxKAgfHUcn4YsIEuZqgpfw28C89Yg/s712/Screenshot%202024-03-13%20at%2012.26.36.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="346" data-original-width="712" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2R_z5XYZymTaBgWHooKzwq4NPR68FctrlPvecRTGXnYqeGIz36W6ls5oUQI1a1zvnNIQhyphenhyphenmZB0BBcvLFnuVsqWrGd0je8CEA0O303-ULQsfoansrD63COmhzbR4tlaF9B_9g1bu_1vLsR3nZIOMoaKmXlCIxKAgfHUcn4YsIEuZqgpfw28C89Yg/s320/Screenshot%202024-03-13%20at%2012.26.36.png" width="320" /></a></div>Two other fascinating characters in all this are Kevin Scott, the Microsoft AI guy, and Mira Murati, the ex-Tesla Albanian, tech savvy and known to be unflappable. They both came from tough, poor backgrounds and hold the belief that this tech really is a leveller - we'll see. They steered all of this to its conclusion. <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQPI7c3Ezm3eK6A3zjj765omXwsx-YIZBCrHYShUheaomhn2PWrICUlXnoFRKQNlHGHvv9o0gDz2gOZg2RjqrfT2xKH2eWy2S6TjVkr1zlsMjv4Dxol7V1hlxgSzwRGWiHNJD8tK0dMvCcOJ1MGsUBAWzrfCPZJIbGAhXdRTl7cIC8Cg35vuU9hA/s700/Lawrence_Summers_2012.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="500" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQPI7c3Ezm3eK6A3zjj765omXwsx-YIZBCrHYShUheaomhn2PWrICUlXnoFRKQNlHGHvv9o0gDz2gOZg2RjqrfT2xKH2eWy2S6TjVkr1zlsMjv4Dxol7V1hlxgSzwRGWiHNJD8tK0dMvCcOJ1MGsUBAWzrfCPZJIbGAhXdRTl7cIC8Cg35vuU9hA/w157-h179/Lawrence_Summers_2012.jpg" width="157" /></a></div>The board all went, apart from Adam D’Angelo, co-founder and CEO of Quora. A computer scientist and hugely successful entrepreneur. <br /><br /><div>Larry Summers was brought in. Fascinating choice, ex-academic, president of Harvard but sacked during an early salvo in the culture wars and now soaked in economics, politics and business. He’s one of the best connected figures in America. <div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimKJCBORQ6BRTJ-qwym1eUGk_j1VNU0tmbYmSgfgcLJEEkKG7Qz2rNvC5Bc2g3FEYE_mb3vV_mWIQKYUpruiajYeozzKGi_wvwShs-BglYt-iXMF4eQ2BVoRZ1lAaH-W9d0LNuye64iGKvJeKEjuzaCtv7nsZYpkg8qcL0s9N4XgEzdPWKr-SetA/s4704/Bret_Taylor.webp" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4704" data-original-width="3456" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimKJCBORQ6BRTJ-qwym1eUGk_j1VNU0tmbYmSgfgcLJEEkKG7Qz2rNvC5Bc2g3FEYE_mb3vV_mWIQKYUpruiajYeozzKGi_wvwShs-BglYt-iXMF4eQ2BVoRZ1lAaH-W9d0LNuye64iGKvJeKEjuzaCtv7nsZYpkg8qcL0s9N4XgEzdPWKr-SetA/w150-h204/Bret_Taylor.webp" width="150" /></a></div>The board has also been considerably expanded with a range of professional expertise; Bret Taylor is the Chair, a real heavyweight:</div><div>Creator of Google Maps</div><div>CTO at Facebook</div><div>Chair of Twitter</div><div>Co-CEO at Salesforce. </div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUOf7dG5uOlnBbcAK4u-76YwJxsCzWSShxAgyhhbDC8lL0x9IbM3EDbyqIWyEQSYhGjUP1HBK_oTjZwf9rKYrF54CE8oRvf-mN-M3kG6bcKT574FAofdEURYhJjc0iP9hEFSgog-10qRuFP6w1Uczr8dZZEdUfj44IUrNqa2pfWH1ZtJgX0QmBQA/s1158/Screenshot%202024-03-13%20at%2013.02.16.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="1158" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUOf7dG5uOlnBbcAK4u-76YwJxsCzWSShxAgyhhbDC8lL0x9IbM3EDbyqIWyEQSYhGjUP1HBK_oTjZwf9rKYrF54CE8oRvf-mN-M3kG6bcKT574FAofdEURYhJjc0iP9hEFSgog-10qRuFP6w1Uczr8dZZEdUfj44IUrNqa2pfWH1ZtJgX0QmBQA/s320/Screenshot%202024-03-13%20at%2013.02.16.png" width="320" /></a></div>He has brought in:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122;"><span style="background-color: white;">Sue Desmond -Hellman Former CEO of Gates Foundation, physician and experienced corporate board member</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122;"><span style="background-color: white;">Nicole Seligman heavyweight global lawyer</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122;"><span style="background-color: white;">Fidji Simo and other tech entrepreneur </span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122;"><span style="background-color: white;">....and, of course, the King id dead Long live the King!</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122;"><span style="background-color: white;">.....Samuel Altman.</span></span></span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQUvLTyFuRAvDJVS2PhaoLkzGpkjcUR57njejZIhKcfwkfsW5G0bMFTP7VIh70S7BZLfuokk0MbdeTGFAWwqdfVSHxBMeJyrh1kht4d59182hm7IONe6cHhcafKx26sES7FmUZnt1Zi6XkhIQAeLk1EcU-bxZV4U7Eg_qLImOcw1agWeZhlhJ-_g/s400/WYGE5NGW_400x400.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="400" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQUvLTyFuRAvDJVS2PhaoLkzGpkjcUR57njejZIhKcfwkfsW5G0bMFTP7VIh70S7BZLfuokk0MbdeTGFAWwqdfVSHxBMeJyrh1kht4d59182hm7IONe6cHhcafKx26sES7FmUZnt1Zi6XkhIQAeLk1EcU-bxZV4U7Eg_qLImOcw1agWeZhlhJ-_g/w171-h171/WYGE5NGW_400x400.jpg" width="171" /></a></div>One figure lurks behind all of this, the genius that is Ilya Sutskever. He knows more about AI than anyone there and created the software yet survives as he IS OpenAI. Like the mad-genius Oracle, sitting quietly in the middle watching all of this, above all of these petty squabbles. He is now back to his day job – changing the world. <p></p></div></div><div><br /></div><div>PS</div><div>Thanks to Peter Shea for helping me with this piece.<br /><br />alsomoriginal article - well worth a read but paywalled <br />https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/the-inside-story-of-microsofts-partnership-with-openai?fbclid=IwAR2kmNi0LLc3FaXY6s2C08YCaDS88hD4mBFauylAIJCgzJ4lBnHqyZ-ts6Y<br /><br /></div>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-27631297945921342662024-03-06T11:10:00.011+00:002024-03-11T14:37:29.144+00:00Are the LMS & VLE dead! Accenture and Udacity draw new line in sand<h3 style="text-align: left;">Dead fish market</h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd1PP0nSlg-uuazOrfAzZ7vmz7dnnzGwOV1q64tJ6XlAbZtEKwOx19hzHDeW1hPFGPsOVTa3HA_kDYhCHD1dDKoo81ij06_rF9pan-YBM096szWDvlRZWtjv2STFfo_rnm3pKT735F2mDMu9XRQhLOzDC-f8UBvNA-l70RqHa6hnw6-H8I6uSGwA/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-03-06%2011.27.31%20-%20Adjusting%20the%20previous%20image,%20change%20the%20year%20on%20the%20gravestone%20inscription%20to%20reflect%20a%20different%20time%20range.%20The%20new%20inscription%20should%20read_%20'LMS%20&.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd1PP0nSlg-uuazOrfAzZ7vmz7dnnzGwOV1q64tJ6XlAbZtEKwOx19hzHDeW1hPFGPsOVTa3HA_kDYhCHD1dDKoo81ij06_rF9pan-YBM096szWDvlRZWtjv2STFfo_rnm3pKT735F2mDMu9XRQhLOzDC-f8UBvNA-l70RqHa6hnw6-H8I6uSGwA/w200-h200/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-03-06%2011.27.31%20-%20Adjusting%20the%20previous%20image,%20change%20the%20year%20on%20the%20gravestone%20inscription%20to%20reflect%20a%20different%20time%20range.%20The%20new%20inscription%20should%20read_%20'LMS%20&.webp" width="200" /></a></div>I have been saying for some time that the VLE and LMS market is in for a dramatic shift. These are two very different markets with two separate sets of products, both global and lucrative. Both are also crammed with legacy technologies and both encourage old and 'not fit for purpose' standards, like SCORM (not even supported), that cripple their ability to adapt to AI-driven approaches to learning. The sector is a bit of a dead fish.<p></p><p>The LMS and VLE market is set for a change, as new AI platforms emerge. The investors are ready, the need is there, we are now moving into the phase when they will be built. It will take time, as incumbents are locked in, often on 3 year licence deals, and they are integrated but things will change. They always do.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Investor hiatus</h3><p>Investors have been in a hiatus, waiting to see how things shake out. Guess what - they’re starting to shake out. AI is not just the new kid on the block, it is the only new kid on the block. It is THE technology of the age. The top 7 tech stocks, all AI companies, now have a combined market capitalisation of $12.5 trillion, more than the collective gross domestic product of New York, Tokyo, LA, Paris, London, Seoul, Chicago, San Francisco, Osaka, Dallas and Shanghai. This is no fad, neither is it the future – it is now.</p><p>The analysts are also all at sea with their grids and lack of foresight. In truth investors that bought into the LMS market are struggling to realise the revenues and profits. Some very large companies are struggling with their shareprice and meeting revenue and profit expectations. Even at the medium and lower levels, there is suspicion that value is falling. The learning content creation companies should be using AI (and are) and so prices will plummet. It is difficult to see why investors would put big valuations on dated content or bespoke production. Would you invest in a video production learning company having seen Sora? A major Hollywood investor has just pulled $850 million from a studio build. Investors in online learning will be thinking along the same lines.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Accenture buys Udacity</h3><p>That brings us to Accenture buying Udacity (for peanuts) and saying they plan to invest $1 billion (yes $1 BILLION) in LearnVantage – an AI-first learning platform. Interesting move. They say it will be an AI platform... then make the mistake of saying it will primarily teach AI. That makes no sense. It is the old thinking of - let’s build a pile of courses. Consultancies don’t build good tech – neither did Udacity - and if Accenture lose their objectivity as solutions consultants then they do themselves damage. You can’t be a consultant then turn and say – by the way the 'optimal' solution is our platform. </p><p>However, this doesn’t really matter, as this is just the first line in the sand in a major market shift. If they don’t succeed, someone else will. The huge tech companies could do this and may well enter the market but their eyes are on bigger fish - productivity tools. They are never good in the learning market. They're not looking for gold, as they make a ton from selling the shovels.</p><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The LMS is dead, long live the LMS! </h3>Some love them, some hate them. Some love to hate them.<p></p><p><b><i>1. Zombie LMS</i></b></p><p>Some organisations have a Zombie LMS. At the very mention of its name, managers and learners roll their eyes. Organisations can get locked into LMS contracts that limit their ability and agility to adopt innovations. Many an LMS lies like an old fossil, buried in the enterprise software stack, churning away like an old heating system – slow, inefficient and in constant need of repair. Long term licences, inertia and the cost of change, see the organisation locked into a barely functional world of half-dead software and courses.</p><p><b><i>2. Functional creep</i></b></p><p>Our LMS does everything. “Social?” “Yes, that as well”. Once the LMS folk get their hooks into you, they extend their reach into all sorts of areas where they don’t belong. Suddenly they have a ‘chat’ offer, that is truly awful – but part of the ‘complete LMS solution’. For a few extra bucks they solve all of your performance support, corporate comms, HR and talent management problems, locking you bit by bit into the deep dungeon they’ve built for your learners, never to see the light again.</p><p><b><i>3. Courses, of course</i></b></p><p>The LMS also encourages an obsession with courses. I’m no fan of Maslow’s clichéd pyramid of needs but he did come up with a great line, ”<i>If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail</i>.” That is precisely the problem with the LMS - give an organisation an LMS and every problem is solved by a ‘course’. This has led to a culture of over-engineered, expensive and long-winded course production that aligned with the use of the LMS and not with organisational or business needs. What we end up with are a ton of crap leadership, DEI and complaince courses.</p><p><b><i>4. Cripples content</i></b></p><p>Throw stuff into some VLEs and LMSs and it spits out some really awful looking stuff. Encouraged to load up half-baked course notes, teachers and trainers knock out stuff that conforms solidly to that great law of content production – GIGO – garbage in garbage out. Graphic, text, graphic, text, multiple-choice question….. repeat. The Disneyfication of learning has happened with tons of hokey, cartoon and speech bubble stuff. Out goes simulations and anything that doesn’t conform to the simple, flat, linear content that your LMS can deliver or even worse.... gamification - some infantile game that feels as though it os designed fro 10 year olds!</p><p><b><i>5. One size fits all</i></b></p><p>With the rise of AI, adaptive and personalised learning, the LMS becomes an irritation. They don’t cope well with systems that deliver smart, personalised learning pathways. The sophisticated higher-level learning experiences are locked out by the limited ability of the LMS to cope with such innovation. The LMS becomes a sort of cardboard SCORM template through which all content must fit. But it’s the ‘learn by doing’, performance support and experiential learning that most LMSs really squeeze out of the mix.</p><p><b><i>6. Compliance hell</i></b></p><p>We all know what happened in compliance training. L&D used the fallacious argument that the law and regulators demand oodles of long courses. In fact, no law and very few regulators demand long, bad, largely useless online courses. This doesn’t work. In fact, it is counterproductive, often creating a dismissive reaction among learners. Yet the LMS encourages this glib solutionism.</p><p><b><i>7. Completion cul-de-sacs</i></b></p><p>With the LMS, along came SCORM, a ‘standard’ that in one move pushed everyone towards ‘course completion’. Learning via an LMS was no longer a joyous thing. It became an endless chore, slogging through course after course until complete. Gone is the idea that learning journeys can be interesting, personal affairs. SCORM is a completion whip that is used to march learners in lock-step towards completion.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><i>8. Limits data</i></b></p><p>Given the constraints of most LMSs, there is the illusion that valuable data is being gathered, when in fact, it’s merely who does what course, when, and did they complete. As the world gets more data hungry, the LMS may be the very thing that stops valuable data from being gathered, managed and used.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><i>To be fair...</i></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">To be fair a VLE or LMS was often the prime mover for shifting people away from pure classroom delivery. This is still an issue in many organisations but at least they effected a move, at the enterprise level, away from often lacklustre and expensive classroom courses. In fact, with blended learning, you can manage your pantheon of delivery channels, including classroom delivery, through your LMS (classroom planning is often included). As enterprise software they also scale, control what can be chaos and duplication, provide consistency and strategic intent. You do need to identify and manage your people, store stuff, deliver stuff and manage data and nn LMS is simply a single integrated piece of software. You may want to do without one but you’ll end up integrating the other things you use – and that will be, a sort of LMS. There are also security issues which they handle </p><p style="text-align: left;">There will always be a need for single solutions. We can seem however that this has descended into the mess that is the all-embracing, death-clutch that is ‘Talent management’.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><p>Organisations need enterprise software. We’ve been through the course repository model, that got stuck in the rut of rather flat e-learning. The new model is more dialogue than monologue. The incumbent VLE and LMS models need to adapt quickly or be replaced by those who do AI well. The VLE and LMS market looks like something out of the early 2000s, that’s because it is something out of that era. Many of these companies started then and having moved from client-server structure to the cloud, still have legacy code and lack the flexibility to work in this new world. My guess is that some stand a chance, many do not. If all you have done is add some prompted creation tools to your offer – forget it.<br /><br />We have a chance to break out of this repository of courses model, crippled by box-ticking compliance, impoverished on data by SCORM to create more dynamic platforms that cope with formal and informal learning, also performance support, Tutorbots and data that informs learning and personal development. AI is the technology that appears to promise some sort of escape velocity from these repositories. You can already feel the blood drain from the old model as the new tools become available and improve so quickly.</p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-30283678709383830802024-03-05T23:33:00.002+00:002024-03-05T23:37:56.791+00:00 Is ‘Deepfake’ hysteria mostly fake news?<p>Deepfakes touch a nerve. They are easy to latch on to as an issue of ethical concern. Yet despite the technology being around for many years, there has been no deepfake apocalypse. The surprising thing about deepfakes is that there are so few of them. That is not to say it cannot happen. But it is an issue that demands some cool head thinking.</p><p>Deepfakes have been around for a long time. Roman emperors sometimes had their predecessors' portraits altered to resemble themselves, thereby rewriting history to suit their narrative or to claim a lineage. Fakes in print and photography have been around as long as those media have existed.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO5M2oYq7fW3-iVCEkj0TAtWRZQz_Iz-x4t6_xzeR_ZdF2-3ZTpO-ysRMS_c4KmkaN3uX9vdA6e1F08ILPHrybY-a94yfuw7iDMMLTjpwRAvRFzEZ3sbIU27JHPDVYQhdXL7C1XWt8H7jRAfQNo_N0___oPHWqJylF-jq5GBISUQjyEfGJ6baGKg/s262/Dale.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="192" data-original-width="262" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO5M2oYq7fW3-iVCEkj0TAtWRZQz_Iz-x4t6_xzeR_ZdF2-3ZTpO-ysRMS_c4KmkaN3uX9vdA6e1F08ILPHrybY-a94yfuw7iDMMLTjpwRAvRFzEZ3sbIU27JHPDVYQhdXL7C1XWt8H7jRAfQNo_N0___oPHWqJylF-jq5GBISUQjyEfGJ6baGKg/s1600/Dale.png" width="262" /></a></div>In my own field, learning, a huge number have for decades, used this deliberate fake. It is entirely made up, based on a fake citation, fake numbers put on a fake pyramid. Yet I have seen a Vice Principal of a University and no end of Keynotes at conferences and educationalist use it in their presentations. I have written about suck fakery for years and a lesson I learnt a long time ago was that we tend to ignore deepfakes when they suit our own agendas. No one complained when a flood of naked Trump images flooded the web, but if it’s from the Trump camp, people go apeshit. In other words, the debate often tends to be partisan.<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">When did AI deepfakes start?</h3><p>Deepfakes, as they're understood today, refer specifically to media that's been altered or created using deep learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.</p><p>The more recent worries about AI creating deepfakes have been around since 2017 when ‘deepfake’ (portmanteau of deep learning & fake) was used to create images and videos. It was on Reddit that a user called ‘Deepfake’ starting positing videos in 2017 of videos with celebrities superimposed on other bodies.</p><p></p><p>Since then, the technology has advanced rapidly, leading to more realistic deepfakes that are increasingly difficult to detect. This has raised significant ethical, legal, and social concerns regarding privacy, consent, misinformation, and the potential for exploitation. Yet there is little evidence that they are having any effect of either beliefs or elections.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Deliberate deepfakes</h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjISObnKyfvQ2BG3QvRzRikR_Fmchy3QJosMrv4a97lwiz3E_zokm1rguPnzNK29ukaoOfFzEw64yYr0z9mswhT6t_nXrEeg2pAJKL0RAbla1Ni4y3exOBClITTRo_DpERfkrVaLQ-JRgUJOsv7-XRQPDUFm8N1DRlYlErpifDBygd25cm5D8e6Ng/s2234/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.27.47.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1244" data-original-width="2234" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjISObnKyfvQ2BG3QvRzRikR_Fmchy3QJosMrv4a97lwiz3E_zokm1rguPnzNK29ukaoOfFzEw64yYr0z9mswhT6t_nXrEeg2pAJKL0RAbla1Ni4y3exOBClITTRo_DpERfkrVaLQ-JRgUJOsv7-XRQPDUFm8N1DRlYlErpifDBygd25cm5D8e6Ng/s320/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.27.47.png" width="320" /></a></div>The first widely known instance of a political AI deepfake surfaced in April 2018. This was a video of former U.S. President Barack Obama, made by Jordan Peele in collaboration with BuzzFeed and the director’s production company, Monkeypaw Productions. In the video, Obama appears to say a series of controversial statements. However, it was actually Jordan Peele's voice, an impressionist and comedian, using AI technology to manipulate Obama's lip movements to match his speech. We also readily forget that it was Obama who pioneered the harvesting of social media data to target voters with political messaging.<p></p><p>The Obama video was actually created as a public service announcement to raise awareness about the potential misuse of deepfake technology in spreading misinformation and the importance of media literacy. It wasn't intended to deceive but rather to educate the public about the capabilities and potential dangers of deepfake technology, especially concerning its use in politics and media.</p><p>In 2019, artists created deepfake videos of UK politicians including Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, in which they appeared to endorse each other for Prime Minister. These videos were made to raise awareness about the threat of deepfakes in elections and politics</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0eIA-_Cpr7TY5ay708AFz9SOMR4Tbx6bE2_1mYTc6FnwhTW1Zb-sNS6COAlzNK7FVbLD2NkB3igQrqtt4HYD22cGCIZrhdzSc1ADa18PR4Y9F1A3kUKMM-nnD__tzdgIVSolM9XB0MBWD5RNIltPZO4mABvLbMnQfpF2HJOO-FiDrgkVr3ZRXPQ/s1740/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.30.22.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1100" data-original-width="1740" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0eIA-_Cpr7TY5ay708AFz9SOMR4Tbx6bE2_1mYTc6FnwhTW1Zb-sNS6COAlzNK7FVbLD2NkB3igQrqtt4HYD22cGCIZrhdzSc1ADa18PR4Y9F1A3kUKMM-nnD__tzdgIVSolM9XB0MBWD5RNIltPZO4mABvLbMnQfpF2HJOO-FiDrgkVr3ZRXPQ/s320/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.30.22.png" width="320" /></a></div>In 2020, the most notable deepfake video of Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès showed her give a speech where she linked COVID-19 to environmental damage and the need to take action on climate change. This video was actually created by an environmental organization to raise awareness about climate change.<p></p><p>In other words, many of the most notable deepfakes have been for awareness, satire, or educational purposes.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Debunked deepfakes</h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrqKAD6HH-GgIsyEh3u0pXBEB3P2EJzrLM2HujWrtkfi0LswLo4hWVEPjOszYYzjhIQMBzdRcwVgKGPFCD3MLOrfAHQhdnJ6Z3cdxzCURHUMaAa0RZGH3DpPoLRkwcWvYag1C0DFneRti2iNz8hVr8kqIqnzKM2U-G_o7fvRkz4bKPt9ysi6p6A/s1946/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.31.26.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1086" data-original-width="1946" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrqKAD6HH-GgIsyEh3u0pXBEB3P2EJzrLM2HujWrtkfi0LswLo4hWVEPjOszYYzjhIQMBzdRcwVgKGPFCD3MLOrfAHQhdnJ6Z3cdxzCURHUMaAa0RZGH3DpPoLRkwcWvYag1C0DFneRti2iNz8hVr8kqIqnzKM2U-G_o7fvRkz4bKPt9ysi6p6A/s320/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.31.26.png" width="320" /></a></div>Most deepfakes are quickly debunked. In 2022, during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was circulated. In the video, he appeared to be making a statement asking Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms. Deepfakes, like this, are usually quickly identified and debunked, but it shows how harmful misinformation during sensitive times like a military conflict, can be dangerous.<div><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKFr8UC7nDsZmPfT_W62HB1YTwj3HDyAr7O9Gjz1EnKJy8Ka4n43jdl9MGYmGA5IkJBhQChTERjN8rZ17fivdtF0EDs5KtxKefOsppfp1Y22b6rL1knRyZ5wtg3PhJ08ZMr8zHNQfZUL6-REr21ibfVPEJ7DC-j58CxHPrblAs4Rclm3iDdnr9eg/s1660/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.36.24.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1040" data-original-width="1660" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKFr8UC7nDsZmPfT_W62HB1YTwj3HDyAr7O9Gjz1EnKJy8Ka4n43jdl9MGYmGA5IkJBhQChTERjN8rZ17fivdtF0EDs5KtxKefOsppfp1Y22b6rL1knRyZ5wtg3PhJ08ZMr8zHNQfZUL6-REr21ibfVPEJ7DC-j58CxHPrblAs4Rclm3iDdnr9eg/s320/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.36.24.png" width="320" /></a></div>The recent images of Donald Trump were explicitly stated to be deepfakes by their author. They had missing fingers, odd teeth, a long upside down nail on his hand and weird words on hats and clothes, so quickly identified. At the moment they are easy to detect and debunk. That won’t always be the case, which brings us to detection.<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Deepfake detection</h3><p>As AI develops, deepfake production becomes more possible but so do advances in AI and digital forensics for detection. You can train models to tell the difference by analysing facial expressions, eye movement, lip sync and overall facial consistency. There are subtleties in facial movements and expressions, blood vessel giveaways, as well as eye blinking, breathing, blood poulses and other movements that are difficult to replicate in deepfakes. Another is checks for consistency, in lighting, reflections, shadows and backgrounds. Frame by frame checking can also reveal flickers and other signs of fakery. Then there’s audio detection, with a whole rack of its own techniques. On top of all this are forensic checks on the origins, metadata and compression artefacts that can reveal the creation, tampering or its unreliable source. Let’s also remember that humans can also be used to check, as our brains are fine-tuned to find these tell-tale signs, so human moderation still has a role. </p><p>As deepfake technology becomes more sophisticated, the challenge of detecting them increase but these techniques are constantly evolving, and companies often use a combination of methods to improve accuracy and reliability. There is also a lot of sharing of knowledge across companies to keep ahead of the game.</p><p>So it is easier to detect deepfakes that many think. There are plenty of tell-tale signs that AI can use to detect, police and prevent them from being shown. These techniques have been honed for years and that is the reason why so few ever actually surface on social media platforms. Facebook, Google, X and others have been working on this for years. That is why they have not been caught flat-footed on the issue. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Deepfakes in learning </h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7WDk26yIwmNSTAQFAmNabH6Ac8e31gEKJwE_Y1mXcCCzslxJq95xFkjCwNzAywaHZgy5hmTj9wo0c7-ZVVutaa5YKPPbrQU38BU-t3p-E8_NoTr-G4B0w5uGzQps3JZYHxY8uhW_EIkPyOJM7ZRFtiuC6s40Mape_wg1y3E46W7DoZ28RovoZlw/s2120/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.32.49.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1214" data-original-width="2120" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7WDk26yIwmNSTAQFAmNabH6Ac8e31gEKJwE_Y1mXcCCzslxJq95xFkjCwNzAywaHZgy5hmTj9wo0c7-ZVVutaa5YKPPbrQU38BU-t3p-E8_NoTr-G4B0w5uGzQps3JZYHxY8uhW_EIkPyOJM7ZRFtiuC6s40Mape_wg1y3E46W7DoZ28RovoZlw/s320/Screenshot%202024-03-05%20at%2023.32.49.png" width="320" /></a></div>We should also remember that deepfakes can be useful. I have used them to create several avatars of myself, which speak languages I cannot speak. They have been used to recreate historical figures for educational documentaries and interactive learning experiences. You see and hear historical figures ‘come to life’, to make the learning process more engaging. Language courses have used them to create videos and immersive language learning experiences, as the lip-synch is now superb. Even museums and educational institutions have started using deepfake technology to create more immersive exhibits. On top of this real training projects in sectors like medicine, now use deepfake technology to create realistic training videos or simulations, where patients and healthcare staff can be represented.<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><p>We too readily jump to conclusions when it comes to AI and ethics, there is often a rush to simplistic moralising, when the truth is deeper and more complex. Technology almost always has multiple uses with varying degrees of beneficial and damaging uses. We tend to lean towards the negative through confirmation and negativity bias. This needs to be avoided by a more detailed discussion of the issues, not presenting everything in apocalyptic terms.</p><div><br /></div></div>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-24150187394025514682024-03-04T13:59:00.031+00:002024-03-05T10:17:22.823+00:00 The Mind is Flat!<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpj-WDT0f0JJNuLugujxKwW3pwaqmIiNGwfG09lJgZqj8i6lH64p3ixFHNAYlXI_Xtip2l_0QdH2tl3YMPWfGmnIQOEZfkAaOD3rlolJLc-R0HgyBlACHCEmWay4HcJHdJnpznUwNAa3Frxf2xDyk2fG2iHJNjTkSaRoy2inLCiJ4JWfIv1B-zMw/s1500/71xQ+qv3DXL._SL1500_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="977" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpj-WDT0f0JJNuLugujxKwW3pwaqmIiNGwfG09lJgZqj8i6lH64p3ixFHNAYlXI_Xtip2l_0QdH2tl3YMPWfGmnIQOEZfkAaOD3rlolJLc-R0HgyBlACHCEmWay4HcJHdJnpznUwNAa3Frxf2xDyk2fG2iHJNjTkSaRoy2inLCiJ4JWfIv1B-zMw/s320/71xQ+qv3DXL._SL1500_.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>Nick Chater’s ‘The Mind is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain’ is an astonishing work, a book that is truly challenging. He argues against the common belief that our thoughts and behaviours are deeply rooted in our subconscious. Mental depth for him is an illusion. Instead, he suggests that our minds are flat, meaning that they operate on the surface level without deep, hidden motivations or unconscious processes.<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Training is post-rationalisation</h3><p>For me, he explains why most training is post-rationalisation, simplistic stories we tell ourselves about cognition. We latch on to abstract words like creativity, critical thinking and resilience then wrap them up in PowerPoints to create coherent stories that are quite simply fictions. This is why they are so ineffective in the real world. They make you think there are easy solutions, simple bromides for action, when there are not. He thinks this is all wrong and I think he is right</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Cognition is improvisational</h3><p>Chater supports his arguments fully by discussing various psychological studies and experiments. He proposes that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are largely improvisational and context-dependent. According to his theory, our responses to situations are not driven by inner beliefs or desires, but are rather ad-hoc constructions created on the spot. This idea challenges the traditional views of psychology and suggests that much of what we believe about our internal thought processes might be an illusion.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Attacks psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic worlds</h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2KN4rq0wL4BsV7Btodde5LkkCr8qeYho_wtiqT5uyLQgOXs9nA0MaDvQeRJjdVJgWGKnvfzFU7jbFfB6X6V-2BGlQDir7R7Xqc8aUAIf8_ExtBkgJxW408PaUs6ehRYprk_58VfIuerlMGGw7u5hbZE5q85SIoaQKHoevEB7irwdOJnJuwstJBA/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-03-04%2013.55.52%20-%20A%20surreal%20image%20capturing%20the%20concept%20'The%20mind%20is%20flat'.%20The%20artwork%20should%20depict%20a%20human%20brain,%20but%20instead%20of%20the%20usual%20convolutions%20and%20folds,%20th.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2KN4rq0wL4BsV7Btodde5LkkCr8qeYho_wtiqT5uyLQgOXs9nA0MaDvQeRJjdVJgWGKnvfzFU7jbFfB6X6V-2BGlQDir7R7Xqc8aUAIf8_ExtBkgJxW408PaUs6ehRYprk_58VfIuerlMGGw7u5hbZE5q85SIoaQKHoevEB7irwdOJnJuwstJBA/s320/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-03-04%2013.55.52%20-%20A%20surreal%20image%20capturing%20the%20concept%20'The%20mind%20is%20flat'.%20The%20artwork%20should%20depict%20a%20human%20brain,%20but%20instead%20of%20the%20usual%20convolutions%20and%20folds,%20th.webp" width="320" /></a></div>It is a direct attack on the whole psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic world and if true, renders much of what passes for psychology as speculative rot. He challenges the whole notion of a complex, subconscious mind that can be unlocked or understood through psychoanalysis or similar therapeutic methods. Since our thoughts and behaviours are improvised on the surface level and are context-dependent, delving into the supposed depths of the subconscious to find hidden meanings or repressed memories, as is often the goal in psychoanalysis, is likely to be misguided. He suggests that the mind doesn't work in the way psychoanalysis proposes, with its emphasis on uncovering deep-seated, unconscious desires and motivations.<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Over-rationalise</h3><p>We over-rationalise when it comes to ideas about the brain, when it is fantastically complex and opaque. He touches upon Tolstoy, where Anna Karenina commits suicide – but why? The stories we tell ourselves about her motivations are, for Chater, quite wrong, as she would be incoherent about such things. Rationalism is the mistake here, the idea that there is a true answer for everything. Dennett has taken a similar position, where conscious rationalisation is always retrospective, delving back in to the brain. The brain does huge, complex, parallel computations and has no locus or simplistic causes, the same applies to LLMs, there is no pace you can point to for the production of an answer. The brain, like a LLM, is necessarily opaque.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Stories are misleading</h3><p>We are improvisors and this is where our 'storied-self' is misleading. We simply make most things up and use simple and approximate models to get through our lives. These simulations are often crude. Geoffrey Hinton in 1979 talks about the shallowness of human inference, using imagined cubes as an example. Our simulations of the world are momentary and not wholly coherent. We build models of it (the cone of experience) trying to see it as consistent. In fact, we deal with very localised bits of the world, a sliver of reality. We can’t model the world in our brains as the world is much larger than us! It is all a matter of approximation, analogy and past experience.</p><p>We latch onto abstract models and essences but these are far too reductive. Human exceptionalism is a good example of this, with words like ‘creativity’ and in general 21st century skills. Chater thinks these are misleading terms as they are too abstract and exclude the complexity of actual cases. He and Wittgenstein are, I think, correct on this. Language is promiscuous and tends to over produce abstractions which we think are real but turn out to be just that – misleading abstractions.</p><p>Our sense of our own psychology is almost completely wrong, as we have incredibly limited perception of the world through our senses and our minds work very differently from how they think they work. Colour is unlikely to be essential out there in the world, as they are mental constructions, similarly with temperature, as experienced. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Bayesian brains?</h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijz0Lwy74bhHCv1OS5LYSXhog9AZup0Fa6HMk6aCh_metY5JoH5EF4oSpIA5w92lWZ8LG-ON8WE_0JRvchyQs33jnCAPC4ZCO0gwIGUrDrqhszgDuV_rGuy633NzKkxIV-s5Nm-HWlbHdpAnevib8zCejKjOvnIyX0jlOUV-RSdunNTBTFde-kfA/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-03-04%2013.58.18%20-%20Create%20a%20surreal%20image%20that%20illustrates%20the%20concept%20of%20the%20'Bayesian%20brain'.%20The%20image%20should%20depict%20a%20human%20brain%20composed%20of%20mathematical%20symbols%20an.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijz0Lwy74bhHCv1OS5LYSXhog9AZup0Fa6HMk6aCh_metY5JoH5EF4oSpIA5w92lWZ8LG-ON8WE_0JRvchyQs33jnCAPC4ZCO0gwIGUrDrqhszgDuV_rGuy633NzKkxIV-s5Nm-HWlbHdpAnevib8zCejKjOvnIyX0jlOUV-RSdunNTBTFde-kfA/s320/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-03-04%2013.58.18%20-%20Create%20a%20surreal%20image%20that%20illustrates%20the%20concept%20of%20the%20'Bayesian%20brain'.%20The%20image%20should%20depict%20a%20human%20brain%20composed%20of%20mathematical%20symbols%20an.webp" width="320" /></a></div>One could argue that there are fundamental models, like pure reason, mathematics and science – axiomisation does happen, often after huge amounts of effort, but very few things are, in practice, axiomised. We may have some of this axiomised knowledge in us but this is unlikely to be foundational in the way psychology or neuroscience thinks it is.<p></p><p>As they say - all models are wrong but some are useful. We can, for example, hypothesise about the brain being a Bayesian organ. This may be true but more likely to use things similar to Bayesian approaches to cognition. Tom Griffiths and Josh Tanenbaum follow this line but Chater thinks this is very localised and not sufficient for most cognition.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><p>It has been a while since I read anything that so reversed my long-held beliefs. Heavily influenced by my reading and work in AI I had been coming to a similar, but ill-informed and badly-evidenced belief that this was indeed the case. It changes your whole perspective on cognition and behaviour. AI is showing us that much of what passes for human behaviours can be reproduced to a degree by LLMs and other forms of AI. This should not be so astonishing, if Chater is right, that we are quite shallow thinkers.</p><div><br /></div>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-38554161761749192702024-02-25T12:19:00.004+00:002024-02-25T16:30:14.083+00:00There’s a new Sheriff in town – AI!<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvgRYJDL6FA1Bm4Aa05Az99oJ_NoInvUcCz8rqskMn0ZVKlLiuzQCuWqp8BXJ13wwG4X_NTWXk-cOyUKNKpVR1fTySwyogF3Xt5M21AZYp0-wB5ccH1MCHQ39eWrDiPPi3-eP6L5_38EAPms9ymGXUZ2i0anxymR70ObdseO7gIMZeQZbxbhs0uA/s904/Police.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="904" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvgRYJDL6FA1Bm4Aa05Az99oJ_NoInvUcCz8rqskMn0ZVKlLiuzQCuWqp8BXJ13wwG4X_NTWXk-cOyUKNKpVR1fTySwyogF3Xt5M21AZYp0-wB5ccH1MCHQ39eWrDiPPi3-eP6L5_38EAPms9ymGXUZ2i0anxymR70ObdseO7gIMZeQZbxbhs0uA/s320/Police.png" width="320" /></a></div>Keynoting at conferences where the audience has absolute focus in a sector is sometimes better than the general conferences. They are keen to find out how AI can help them with their specific problems and goals. It leads to more practical discussions and questions. In the last year I have given presentations to national tax, police, waste management, recruitment, immigration, HR, military and global consultancy organisations, also specific online learning companies. They all have one thing in common – they already use AI, sometimes extensively, at an operational level, and know they need to get to grips with this technology in other areas, as it is the technology of the age. I will do a short series of articles on specific sectors, as I’m on the road in several countries giving more of these over the next few weeks. (Image on left by DALL-E)<p></p><p>First up – the police, as I’ve given three keynotes to national police Colleges in the UK and Netherlands and for the EU. There’s a new sheriff in town – AI! Well not really, as the police are pioneers of AI. </p><p><b>AI in policing</b></p><p>ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) was invented in UK in 1976 and in use since 1979. It truly revolutionised policing and now the UK has 60 million ANPR ‘reads’ a day. It acts as a deterrent to reduce crime and catches everything from stolen vehicles and uninsured vehicles to major crime and counter terrorism. Then there are its more mundane uses which we use every day in car parks, tolls and logistics tracking. It is a great example of the massive benefits that can accrue from a simple piece of AI, in this case character image recognition, something that has been around for decades.</p><p>CCTV was first used in UK in 1960 for crime prevention and the detection of offenders. Again, with face recognition, it can and has been used to identify serious offenders such as murderers, sex offenders and figures in organised crime. It is now essential for crowd control and public order. It is often combined with face recognition, not only from CCTV but also mobile phone footage, dashcams and doorbells. </p><p>It is also used when you cross borders on immigration gates. I haven't spoken to a border guard coming back to the UK for many years. It has been automated. In fact, humans are now the main point of failure. My wife cannot enter the US because of a poorly trained TSA guard at LAX, who knew neither the rules nor had the ability to solve the simple problem (a long story - see end of this article). When you slide in your passport at an automated gate, it compared your face with one stored on the chip on your passport. This has literally eliminated the need for thousands of border control agents. Why? It is accurate. Finger printing will be introduced across the EU this year, again using AI. The same can be done for documentation.</p><p>There is a very long list of other uses, including crime analysis and investigation, forensic analysis, traffic management, drone surveillance, cybercrime detection and social media monitoring. I could go on but you get the idea. AI is already deeply embedded in crime deterrence and detection.</p><p>Of course, AI may create its own problems with scams and deepfakes. This will undoubtedly happen. My own view is that this is less a threat than people think. Deepfakes are usually moderated out by AI on social media by AI, as it polices itself. Yet audio and video are increasingly used to scam people, to make the scammers seem authentic. At this level the police need training on that topic.</p><p>One of the great things about these events are the concrete projects, real projects used in training that have been applied or are underway. I have seen a range of projects that really were stunningly specific and useful – in forensics and the general training of police officers. </p><p><b>Productivity</b></p><p>You walk away from such events knowing that AI could result in massive savings in productivity, especially as policing is a text-laden process, the bit no-one likes – the paperwork. Using AI to create, improve and just do administrative tasks not just faster but better would be straightforward. </p><p><b>Transcription</b></p><p>Transcriptions alone could save millions. Throughout the police investigation process, and in courts, statements are taken and proceedings recorded. This is a massive opportunity for automated transcriptions. </p><p><b>Translation</b></p><p>Translation in police stations and out on the streets is another. Using real translators is expensive and difficult logistically. Real time translation to and from a massive range of languages is now possible.</p><p><b>Training</b></p><p>But it is in training where they have most to gain. These are people with increasingly complex and difficult jobs who could do with all the help they deserve. From learner engagement through learner support, content creation, personalised learning, feedback, formative and summative assessment, along with performance support, almost every aspect of training could use AI.</p><p>The police have a tough job that requires a LOT of training. They have to deal with aggression, violence, abuse, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, murder, even death. This requires an astonishing array of knowledge and skills. </p><p><b>Simulations and scenarios</b></p><p>AI could help alleviate that problem with a focus on scenario-based learning, using AI to design and build lots of good dialogue-based scenarios. This is the real interface between the police and the public. I’m told that new recruits are often ill-prepared for the situations they find themselves in, unable to talk things down, too ready to reach for the pepper spray. This type of training can be done well through lots of exposure to scenarios that give pre-training before you hit the streets.</p><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Performance support</b></div><p>I had several interesting conversations afterwards around the use of simulations for driver training, 3D mixed reality projects using VR in forensics, and the possibility of AI improving administrative productivity. The one topic I felt was most interesting was the idea that AI can be used for performance support. Policing is all about being out there, doing things in the real world, difficult things. It needs a wide array of skills, a fundamental and accurate knowledge of the law, high-level interpersonal skills (especially de-escalation), physical handling skills, high-level driving skills, communication skills, medical skills… I could go on but you get the idea.</p><p>The one thing that is missing in the current model is performance support for training out there, in police stations, in cars wherever. There can be no doubt that most police officers and back-office staff learn a lot on the job from colleagues and more experienced staff. This seems like the perfect context for an AI-driven performance support system. It could deliver, for example, usable advice, whether needed in the field, on the law, processes, procedures and so on, as real checklists, job aids and support.</p><p><b>Federal problem</b></p><p>One of the problems the police face is the federal and fragmented nature of their organisation. The United Kingdom has a total of 45 territorial police forces. This includes 43 forces in England and Wales, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), and Police Scotland. Additionally, there are several special police forces that operate across the UK, such as the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police, and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, among others. However, these special forces have specific jurisdictional responsibilities rather than geographic ones. This makes communal and well-funded projects difficult. There is a real need for a mechanism for at least sharing or projects that can be centrally funded by all, then distributed back out to save time and money.</p><p><b>Conclusion</b></p><p>I wished I had had more time with these people. They know about the need for good training. What they need is help in delivering that training more effectively, lifting themselves out of classroom PowerPoint, into more realistic training that results in real transfer to the job on the street.<br /><br />PS<br />My wife has been banned from travelling into the US since 2016. We were travelling to New Zealand via Los Angeles (LAX) and had to simply transfer aircraft. I got through as my passport was renewed. My wife had an Arabic stamp that the TSA guy, with all they're typical arrogance and poor training, thought was dodgy. She explained that it was a Syrian stamp, from six years ago, when we went on a holiday to Syria before their war with our kids. He didn't believe her and off she was marched to the back office, where she sat for ages finally being interviewed by an equally obnoxious person. They couldn't read the date or month on the stamp because no one could speak or read Arabic! (A problem that could have been solved in two minutes by checking what the numbers were on Google.) She explained that this was before the war had started but they were dismissive, did nothing to try and clarify the matter, and we were marched through the back of the airport, put on our Air New Zealand flight and told aggressively that she was NOT allowed to return. This cost us a fortune as we had flights booked via Vancouver to San Francisco back to London - - all Business Class, all lost. We also had to book two new flights from Vancouver to London. It was like dealing with gun toting idiots - all bravado, poor training, poor resources and even less common sense.</p><p>She has never been back to the US but it's a big world out there so, for her, it is no great loss.</p><div><br /></div>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-14810530733380118302024-02-22T12:39:00.005+00:002024-03-16T11:55:01.486+00:00Rather than deepfakes, censorship and surreal ethical fakes are the problem?<p>Google have just shot themselves in the foot with their release of Gemini. Social and mainstream media has been flooded with pieces showing that their text and image generation behaves like some crazed activist teenager.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj6T0DEG-ho6vpQ3WcR9d-lWvk1zZs6TH8dIPTAC0bhCBUHr9fKavTD1mub3jbXVDEEX2y-5Py1barEnX4gUqT7IMmXIz4jLcDSaUSpYIJz04XN6ueqCgRthyjvJ83yYeXlQ6ko_6hURDbe89vBgwP44n6xmKffQeOxxv1gjjzovaVv761mR5nIA/s668/GG0ibJhWIAA91Rf.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="668" data-original-width="661" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj6T0DEG-ho6vpQ3WcR9d-lWvk1zZs6TH8dIPTAC0bhCBUHr9fKavTD1mub3jbXVDEEX2y-5Py1barEnX4gUqT7IMmXIz4jLcDSaUSpYIJz04XN6ueqCgRthyjvJ83yYeXlQ6ko_6hURDbe89vBgwP44n6xmKffQeOxxv1gjjzovaVv761mR5nIA/w198-h200/GG0ibJhWIAA91Rf.jpeg" width="198" /></a></div>When asked to create images of a German soldier it created black, Asian and female faces, so keen was it to be ‘diverse’. I won’t give other examples, but it almost looks as of the Gemini LLM is mocking its creators for being so stupid. It's as of the language model fed back to them the craziness of their own internal ideological echo chamber and culture.<p></p><p>This image shows what happens when idiotic guardrailing overrides common sense. We get the imposition of narrow moralising on reality and reality loses. More than this, straight up utility loses. The tool gets a reputation for being as flaky as its moralist moderators. This is not like the six fingers problem, a weakness in the technology itself, it is the direct result of human interference.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">What is Guardrailing?</h3><p>Guardrailing is a complex business and needs to be carefully calibrated. So what is ‘Guardrailing’? It attempts, like road barriers to provide safeguards and constraints to stop responses producing harmful, inappropriate or biased output. These three words are important. </p><p><b>Harm</b></p><p>No one wants child porn, porn or actual content that causes real physical and 'extreme' psychological harm to be produced. This has long been a feature in ethics around the line that should be drawn within freedom of expression (not just speech). We need to err on the side of freedom of expression as that is enshrined in our democratic society as essential. That throws the definition back to the word ‘harm’, as defined legally, not by someone who ‘feels’ as though they have been harmed or think that harm is synonymous with offence.</p><p><b>Inappropriate</b></p><p>This is different from harm in that it depends on a broad social consensus around what is appropriate, a much harder line to draw. Should you allow swearing (some literature), nudity in any form (thing classical art) and so on. Difficult but not the real problem as there is, largely, a social consensus around this.</p><p><b>Biased</b></p><p>This is a dangerous term, and where things can go way off balance. I use that word ‘balance’ as we cannot have a small group imposing their own personal views on what constitutes balance being applied to these systems. This clearly happened in Google’s case. In trying to eliminate what they saw as bias they managed to impose their own extreme biases on the system.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">How is it implemented?</h3><p>It always starts with policy statements and guidelines. This is where things can go badly wring, if the people writing the guidelines apply their own personal, ideological or activist beliefs – whether from the right, left, wherever. This is a huge lever as it affects everything. This is clearly where things went wrong at Google. A small number of moralisers have imposed their own views on the system. They need to be removed from the company.</p><p>The guidelines are then implemented using content filters, often prompts directing output towards supposed unbiased generation. The problem here is that of your guidelines are too constrained you eat not just into freedom of speech but also functionality. It simple doesn’t do things, like reply or create an image. Goggle have gone back to the filters to recalibrate.</p><p>Prompt modification means, they take your prompt then add other criteria, like 'diverse', 'inclusive' and other positively discriminatory descriptions. This is most likely in this case as the outputs are so obviously and crazily inappropriate. </p><p>Moderation is another technique. This is a bad idea as it is slow, expensive and subject to the vagaries of the moderators. You are far better automating and calibrating that automation. Although there are several exceptions to this, such as porn, child porn, extreme violence and other actually harmful content.</p><p>You can also curate the training data. This is less of a problem as the data is so large that it tends to eliminate extremes. Indeed some of the problems created by Google have been on ignoring clear social norms that the training data would have produced. Apply a narrow definition of identity and you destroy realism.</p><p>There is also user testing. This has really surprised me. I know that Gemini was tested widely among Google employees before release, as I know people who did it. The problem could be that Google tends to employ a certain narrow demographic, so that testing is massively biased. This is almost certainly true in this case. Or, more likely the image generation wasn’t actually tested or tested only with their own weird ‘ethics’ team </p><p>You can also put in user constraints that apply to single requests and/or context, such mentioning famous names in image generation. That’s fine.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3N7JlOvEyftx75V_bLogDERwzr9Asn0tnZOy8AFCezgubvleIRXFbSKNhbKdwz0qZr3g532q2H0nX6vmU1PSl81RWeXT46l39AZY5sqTJaCaxvmFz9fDbUxUfFNctIGFIpJPBJJjqW5kiZ1uE7seTYuuj0MIxFPCZwGLMZh-bHfumZamEDuw1Dg/s400/F0q4VSeWAAA9gS3.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3N7JlOvEyftx75V_bLogDERwzr9Asn0tnZOy8AFCezgubvleIRXFbSKNhbKdwz0qZr3g532q2H0nX6vmU1PSl81RWeXT46l39AZY5sqTJaCaxvmFz9fDbUxUfFNctIGFIpJPBJJjqW5kiZ1uE7seTYuuj0MIxFPCZwGLMZh-bHfumZamEDuw1Dg/s320/F0q4VSeWAAA9gS3.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>I warned about this happening three years ago in a <a href="https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2021/03/why-is-ai-and-ethics-work-mostly-waste.html">full article</a>, and again in <a href="https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2023/07/ethics-ai-and-moral-high-horses-6.html">a talk at at the University of Leeds.</a></div><p>Who would have thought that rather than political deepfakes being the problem, censorship and surreal ethical fakes by flaky moralists, would flood social media? Guardrailing is necessary, and a good thing, but only when it reflects a broad social consensus, not when it is controlled by a few fruitcakes in a tech company. You can’t please all of the people all of the time but pleasing a small number at the expense of the majority is suicidal. Guardrails are essential, imprisoning content or allowing the generation of massively biased content, under the guise of activism, is not.</p><p>The good news is that this has happened. I mean that. In fact, it was bound to happen, as there was always going to be a clash between the moralisers and reality. We learn from our mistakes and Google will rethink and re-release. That's how this type of innovative software works. Sure, they seem hopeless at testing, as five minutes of actual testing would have revealed the problem. But we are where we are. The great news is that it knocks a lot of the bonkers ethical guardrailing into touch. </p><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-6504246982941671172024-02-21T23:10:00.005+00:002024-02-22T13:25:53.847+00:00Algorithms, optimisation and football<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCn5kvQlBk54j8uzTkX5s7eM2ezkf90tfcUM9Ro2WyhF6A-q2C_XXVgb_9JNtDgL0aSsafY5T4PgC2wn5FIHOOEYrqGxHLWMmKT8NYoxiaFyKjI4qIiayF33yoLUF5Z-De0YKFyKCG8AgKQZoQ8r5SdeHupYhWB7WsuytTU0Yp_W2HhXEjo8i25w/s986/Screenshot%202024-02-22%20at%2013.23.38.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="444" data-original-width="986" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCn5kvQlBk54j8uzTkX5s7eM2ezkf90tfcUM9Ro2WyhF6A-q2C_XXVgb_9JNtDgL0aSsafY5T4PgC2wn5FIHOOEYrqGxHLWMmKT8NYoxiaFyKjI4qIiayF33yoLUF5Z-De0YKFyKCG8AgKQZoQ8r5SdeHupYhWB7WsuytTU0Yp_W2HhXEjo8i25w/s320/Screenshot%202024-02-22%20at%2013.23.38.png" width="320" /></a></div>People sceptical of AI and algorithmic power should take note of my local football team, tBrighton and Hove Albion AKA Seagulls. For a small town, we topped our group in the Europa Cup, are still in the FA Cup and despite being decimated by injuries still 7th in the Premiership above Newcastle and Chelsea. That last name is critical as they have ripped out our manager, top staff and several players.<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Tony Bloom</h3><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUddZTNW-x58NtYt5G8t59XegIPY0VrCQK_Ph-S8K4q5QAEQTm5o8N614BRu6Z437POU1eOyX4poe93kB_nCdhbPQb464K6q3ACxa8aRFto4OyZQ832R-Xd2lTSDzra3lhmiu0WuTM44MWcdZX1s88kHF4J-h60kMd4mGNQzf5mWzs-omkLtwdlg/s390/15604-1598705400.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUddZTNW-x58NtYt5G8t59XegIPY0VrCQK_Ph-S8K4q5QAEQTm5o8N614BRu6Z437POU1eOyX4poe93kB_nCdhbPQb464K6q3ACxa8aRFto4OyZQ832R-Xd2lTSDzra3lhmiu0WuTM44MWcdZX1s88kHF4J-h60kMd4mGNQzf5mWzs-omkLtwdlg/s320/15604-1598705400.webp" width="246" /></a></div>Having splashed out hundreds of millions, many of these teams will find it difficult to splash out even more on either our manager De Zerbi or any more of our players. But the secret sauce is not in the manager but Tony Bloom, the owner. It is he who finds the managers and players. One of the few local, genuine supporter owners in football. He made his fortune gambling, then as a gambling entrepreneur. He heads a private betting syndicate who are known to have been phenomenally successful in betting in sport.<p></p><p>He has been the Chair of the club for 15 years and has built a system of sophisticated data collection and algorithmic selection for scouting new players. It remains a secret, held by a separate company called Starlizard, so that no matter which scouting staff or manager comes, Bloom literally holds the key.</p><p>This focus on recruitment is the feed that creates a robust organisation that buys cheap and sells for top dollar, Caicedo cost £4.5m, sold for £115 million – to, you guessed it - Chelsea. His current roster has several players in that league, many young and therefore more valuable. They also play the sort of football that has become popular in top flight leagues – playing out from the back, pulling the opposition towards you and breaking fast.</p><p>What lessons can we learn from him? </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Leaders matter but not in the way leadership books and courses would suggest</h3><p>Bloom is whip smart, driven and very much behind the scenes. He is wholly strategic, not tactical. His talent is in understanding that even a complex organisation, in a stochastic sport like football, needs to be run on high-quality decision making. That means decisions based on data and optimisation, not charisma or hunch. Data and algorithms are in his DNA, not vague nostrums about Leadership.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Recruitment matters but not in the way you think</h3><p>Recruitment is data driven, a long list of data types are collected and fed into a n algorthmic process that flags targets for acquisition. He is interested in pure performance, not values or vague criteria and personal qualities. Actual performance; match time, successful passes, tackles, turnovers, shots, goals – and much, much more. All of this is monitored.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Deal making</h3><p>Deals start with early contracts and he makes sure they are long deals with good exit fees. His promise is clever, come to Brighton, we’re in the best league in the world, the Premiership, and we can showcase you so that you can get into a top club anywhere else in the world. And when it comes to selling, he’s a master. As a successful international poker player, he fully understands both the fiscal and psychological moves that have to be made.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Growth </h3><p>When he became Chairman in 2009, he hired Poyet and got promotion as Champions in 2011. After a series of managers, Chris Houghton got us to 3rd place in the Championship then promotion the following season in 2016-2017. It was then he started to be really active in the transfer market. Even then, he was replaced by Graham Potter who took us to an all-time high of 9th in the Premiership., getting us into Europe. Chelsea (yes them again) stole Potter but Bloom made possibly his best hire yet, De Zerbi, applying all of his data analysis and algorithmic nous to even the managerial position. In other words, he understands gradual but steady growth.</p><p>He now has a huge war chest to invest in over the Summer, made some fantastic signings, especially Barco, touted as a huge talent, stolen from beneath the noses of the big boys and is ready to take things to the next level. This is poker at the highest level, a game of probabilities, tempered by maths, data and algorithmic decision-making. You never see him blowing off on TV yet the people of Brighton love him, as he’s humble, a real supporter, self-made man, and has put his money where his mouth is. This is no lazy, wealthy Gulf prince or Russian oligarch. This is the real deal, a real Leader.</p><p>An interesting idea also emerges here, that organisations who get optimisation right will be winners, the rest the losers. This demands our attention as it is likely to happen. It means getting with the programme now, to understand the technology of optimisation.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Seagulls!</h3><p>Football was the only ‘real’ sport in my culture, at school, in pubs wherever. We played nearly every night beneath the yellow street lamps, even in the rain, on odd shapes of grass on the edge of our scheme in Craigshill (known as Crazyhill). A speciality was bouncing the ball like a cushion shot in billiards off the wall to get past a player. Some of us went week in, week out to matches, in my case Glasgow Rangers, home and away – Scotland’s a small country so it was easy.</p><p>When I ended up in Brighton, as far away from Scotland as you can get, without getting wet, a colleague at work, Clive, was a fanatical Brighton supporter, so I started going to the Goldstone. I arrived the year after they had appeared in the FA Cup Final and this was a different atmosphere, players like Frank Worthington, even the occasional Scot like Doug ‘chipped from a block of ice’ Rougvie. It was fun. But then they lost their stadium, imploded, narrowly missing relegation to the Conference League in 1997. It was desperate.</p><p>Then, despite protestations from Sussex University, a local man and Brighton supporter made good, Tony Bloom, put £90 million on the table for a new stadium. We never looked back. After 34 years out of top flight football we climbed back up to the Premier League. The promotion parade on the seafront was fantastic. At that time we had ‘Skint’ on the shirts as Fat Boy Slim was a supporter and sponsor. The stadium sits, nicely nestled in the Downs and at the start of every game, there’s always a seagull or two circling high above the pitch, Seagulls! being the club’s standard chant. The crowd always, quaintly, kick off the match with a rousing ‘Sussex by the Sea’ a First World War marching song.</p><p>Occasionally, it hardly ever happens now, the opposition would sing some homophobic chant, like ‘You’re going down on each other, you’re going down on…” to the tune of ‘Guantanamera’, actually about a Cuban woman, but there you go. Our fans would respond with ‘You’re too ugly to be gay, you’re too ugly…” to the same tune. In truth it was all a bit banterish. People forget that this is sport born of the industrial need in the 19th century for workers to have some fun at the weekend, after a week of hard labour. Going to the football is always a bit of a laugh. The beautiful game is working class Britain’s gift to the world.</p><p>Anyway. After nearly 40 years in Brighton I’m a Brightonian now, and like many, a Saturday is spent eyeing my phone for the result. It is a feeling that comes across you on a Saturday, of excitement and expectation, watching the clock for kick-off time. It turns the day into a drama. </p><p>We’re playing brilliant football and despite London clubs run by Middle Eastern and Russian billionaires stealing our manager, support staff and players, we’re flying. </p><p>I’ve be in all sorts of places around the globe this year and often the first conversation I have in the taxi, restaurant or meeting is about ‘Brighton… and Hove Albion’. People talk a lot about ‘culture’ these days but those who have real culture don’t use that word, they live it. Seeeagulls! </p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-88081427459055917482024-02-18T12:02:00.015+00:002024-02-25T13:31:41.030+00:00I am become life, the creator of worlds?<p>Can words now create worlds? Has AI suddenly acquired God-like creation qualities?</p><p>A <a href="https://twitter.com/i/status/1759153366867784172">short video </a>of two black pirate ships sailing in a stormy sea of coffee, within a coffee cup, has caused a splash by showing what can be done with video but also created a stir by suggesting something astonishing. My son is a games player and AI expert. His immediate reaction on seeing the Sora videos was the slightly perfect and gamesy feel of the images. </p><p>Could OpenAI have developed something truly astonishing here – a 3D world simulator? Is this the converse of Oppenheimer’s famous statement, </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">I am become life, the creator of worlds?</h3><p>To date Generative AI was limited to text and images and lacked a model of the world, of a 3D space, time, causality and action. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzX5-X8CBs52RHgnFyfL2yyoVgkYbR2obwlY-koQ0bfNyMwDTyUNYB6DVkDyb3K7ycQK9q8MptgP3g' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p>This video show a video generated from a prompt, astounding in itself but what it may reveal is the following:</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> Possibility in the future of a p</span>hysics engine that understands how objects behave, in this case the two pirate ships that never collide. That they do not collide is relevant as they must know several the position of the two boats at all times in a 3D space. It is physics that grounds models in reality. Note that the way this works is not by having a physics and collision engine, only that the data, from computer games will have been created using such tools.</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Behaviour of the ships on the water suggests the possible future detailed knowledge of fluid dynamics, as the coffee whirls around and even creates waves and froth. Again, it is not being created from the mathematics of fluid dynamics but a clever diffusion model</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Cup size and limitations of the cup space, showing a knowledge of small object and the ability to scale two very large objects down into a small space.</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sharp realism with correct lighting and shadows is also astonishing. This is not a rendering engine but, again, a trained diffusion model.</p><p>There are suggestions that this could have been training using data from Unreal, the games’ engine, in particular, synthetic data from that engine. YouTube and others sources are also clearly in there. This means it is trained on a combination of real and virtually created worlds. There also seems to be a time component. This is interesting, as that variable is missing in other modes.</p><p>If they have created such a thing, this is far more than just video creation. It is a step towards the ideea of the creation of 3D worlds using AI, something I mentioned in my book on Learning in the Metaverse. Being able to create any 3D world is a far bigger deal than video, as it opens the way for another revolution in media and learning. We are nowhere near that yet.</p><div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(69,89,164,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid rgb(227, 227, 227); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0d0d0d; margin: 1.25em 0px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0d0d; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In truth there are two opposing routes to solving this problem. and both were released this week - OpenAI/Sora v Meta/V-JEPA. </span></span><span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: times;">OpenAI has developed Sora, recognised for its text and video-to-video modelling capabilities, aiming ultimately to create a world simulator. However, Meta's AI chief, Yann LeCun, criticises this method, considering it impractical and likely to be unsuccessful. He</span><span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: times;"> contends that generative models are not suitable for processing sensory inputs due to the high level of prediction uncertainty associated with high-dimensional continuous sensory data.</span></div><div style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(69,89,164,.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; border: 0px solid rgb(227, 227, 227); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0d0d0d; margin: 1.25em 0px 0px; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: times;">In response, LeCun has introduced his own AI model, V-JEPA. This model utilises a non-generative approach and is designed to predict and interpret complex interactions. Its primary function is to understand the dynamics of objects and interactions, thereby enhancing the AI's comprehension of these elements.</span></div><p>We are 3D people, living in a 3D world doing 3D things with other 3D people and 3D things. Yet, bizarrely, most teaching and training if from the flat, 2D page – text, books, graphics, PowerPoints and screens of e-learning. This has always been largely suboptimal and prevents actual learning of skills and transfer.</p><p>In the beginning was the word and now we, like small Gods, can use the word to create new worlds. We are in dialogue with the world to create new ones. That simply act of saying something can make it appear, breathe life into that world. I find that more than interesting, it is staggering.</p><p>We may have, in this tool, the ability to create worlds, any world, on any scale, in 3D by simply asking it? If so, this is a threshold that has been crossed. We will be able to create worlds in which we work, interact and get things done. Also worlds in which we teach, train and learn. Even worlds in which we socialise and get entertained. We may be doing what has only ever done on a limited scale in incredibly expensive simulators and computer games – understand and create new worlds. Multimodal may now mean a grand convergence.</p><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-36020754801195516862024-02-16T03:04:00.003+00:002024-02-16T03:07:59.211+00:00Sora - as Producer, Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer, Casting Director, Costume designer and actors<p>Sora, from OpenAI, may go down in the history of movies or moving pictures, as a pivot point. It is significant as that filmed train thundering into La Ciotat, scaring the theatre audience or The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talking film. </p><p>I’ve been involved in making a feature film, way back in the 1990s, at Epic, we made ‘The Killer Tongue’. It was a schlock-horror where a woman killed men who had wronged her with her tongue. It was all very fraught…. And expensive and we lost an eye watering amount of money. Lesson learnt. One amusing moment was when Quentin Tarantino said we “Had the best film poster at Cannes”… we dropped the word ‘poster’ as you do… in Hollywood! Didn’t work – the film bombed.</p><p>Film making has just been turned on its head, no longer requiring huge investments in production. All the components seem to be heading towards very low cost – everything – sound, lighting, worlds, people, action. A bit like painting and photography, only faster.</p><p>Sora is just so powerful. Even on its first release the shorts were stunning, the movement, lighting and reflections. There’s a moment when what looks like a Japanese woman walks down a street and turns to camera and the whole scene is reflected in her glasses, where the movie camera should be, but it isn’t. there is no camera as it has been replaced by a text prompt. In another two pirate ships heave around in a black sea of coffee, prompted by the simple worlds “Photorealistic closeup video of two pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of coffee." No prompting course needed.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieiXXruut7PqZeat4jJnRwQEhd6zlost_vx78AxTNnoNn1VLG4VNfke7pGnuYBGMKerVnx3bgaXYXLKIkXCwgBOZKIsSamiWnoLSh4P9DGFP6bgOfk0660pMaogAL553Xx5qGVh-T9O4Hy-kiBmckPzyxLm8fcGYym7NugiIyRfjlPc31S_FoflQ/s3342/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.39.35.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1934" data-original-width="3342" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieiXXruut7PqZeat4jJnRwQEhd6zlost_vx78AxTNnoNn1VLG4VNfke7pGnuYBGMKerVnx3bgaXYXLKIkXCwgBOZKIsSamiWnoLSh4P9DGFP6bgOfk0660pMaogAL553Xx5qGVh-T9O4Hy-kiBmckPzyxLm8fcGYym7NugiIyRfjlPc31S_FoflQ/w400-h231/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.39.35.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>This puts movie making in the hands of creative people who can dispense with the very high production costs of a crew, set and, at some point, perhaps actors. It may even do a good job at editing. AI is already doing colour balancing volume setting across cuts and many other functions, it has just jumped into the Director’s seat, into a creative role. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRIkPao3xitKzNv5mgrR1DrKeVQDQpiaxCGAefwoaQ3oGRo-iC8eJsMAIopU3ZzZpdIbGfh9cHiTZqv58DAksYzta9cjmIz65tdDbqd7sCGO_F1YIRnVEz-eMtR9smo60wnvqU4q87qbjLEW7xw-zcMhegJtFfdKaPzFrC1UC-_QmhpH3EaIvHQA/s1792/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-02-16%2002.35.58%20-%20A%20photorealistic%20image%20of%20a%20Director%20with%20medium-length%20hair%20and%20an%20intense,%20focused%20expression,%20looking%20intently%20at%20a%20laptop%20screen.%20The%20Director%20is%20.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1792" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRIkPao3xitKzNv5mgrR1DrKeVQDQpiaxCGAefwoaQ3oGRo-iC8eJsMAIopU3ZzZpdIbGfh9cHiTZqv58DAksYzta9cjmIz65tdDbqd7sCGO_F1YIRnVEz-eMtR9smo60wnvqU4q87qbjLEW7xw-zcMhegJtFfdKaPzFrC1UC-_QmhpH3EaIvHQA/w400-h229/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-02-16%2002.35.58%20-%20A%20photorealistic%20image%20of%20a%20Director%20with%20medium-length%20hair%20and%20an%20intense,%20focused%20expression,%20looking%20intently%20at%20a%20laptop%20screen.%20The%20Director%20is%20.webp" width="400" /></a></div><p>There will be those who will baulk at this, in the same way people baulked when photography challenged painting, printmaking challenged original works and CGI in film. But this is different, as it is not technology that is scaling or become a new medium, it is technology as a creative agent. This is technology, as Producer, Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer, Casting Director, Costume designer and actors. This is technology as movie-maker. It democratises movie-making. Some will recoil that, especially those who make money from scarcity, the Hollywood moguls and their crew. It will reshape film making, in what way no one can be entirely sure but things change, life changes, art changes. It is the very definition of art.</p><p>Ever since the concept of the ‘arts’ and the 'artist' arose in the Romantic movement in the late 18th century in Germany, seeped in German idealism, and the concept of the individual artist, imported by Coleridge and taken up with enthusiasm by everyone in the arts to this day, we have worshipped the artist as an individual. Well, here we are he/she has arrived- we now that very concept in film. The AI auteur has arrived.</p><p>Going back to that moment when the woman turns to camera and there is no reflected camera, the fact that film making is free from the physical constraints of the camera, sets and costs, we may see a Renaissance of film making. Free from the tyranny of actual optics and physics, anything is possible. On the other hand if you want realism, the actual realism of historical settings may be far easier, with more authentic props, clothes, items, weapons and so on, than was ever possible before.</p><p>If you want extinct animals, you can have them, thundering across a snow-covered landscape, without the cost of going there. CGI is now well and truly yours.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhowvAJiomTCE-AncKvwcZoZ1xzeuhp9kZaXxtUnss_3GjZ_1_iQ4LjwmVSvaOiADCdP0Mvx0F6Q9Z-BaBAT4VXQJoumDo1oaj_z7JSJ17fpu6HiC1XUR-8WFef-yEkLzyPFwbRtBckYqF1qP1ZJravUTLk3vhcT2TSz50ph7ydO8SPuo68akU0Fg/s2466/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.41.25.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1414" data-original-width="2466" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhowvAJiomTCE-AncKvwcZoZ1xzeuhp9kZaXxtUnss_3GjZ_1_iQ4LjwmVSvaOiADCdP0Mvx0F6Q9Z-BaBAT4VXQJoumDo1oaj_z7JSJ17fpu6HiC1XUR-8WFef-yEkLzyPFwbRtBckYqF1qP1ZJravUTLk3vhcT2TSz50ph7ydO8SPuo68akU0Fg/w400-h229/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.41.25.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>An animated character that is the product of your imagination, just tell it what you want in a prompt.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihzifEKttRqd0xXJdStBskTEpKtCx_SMQEW90qHuTem3dMSixl8gsFDDw7r2wHh9wu4ljKitDI4SFSCGGe5Xts44ZbkBKiX60C_vkmXBwsi2U6EROIOLl0zJhX82CQAb-qpCAfc3QDm15EI7X_M7X7qGJKDejh5701ECIBRVtxzTCmT5rVS-dxgw/s2482/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.44.38.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1406" data-original-width="2482" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihzifEKttRqd0xXJdStBskTEpKtCx_SMQEW90qHuTem3dMSixl8gsFDDw7r2wHh9wu4ljKitDI4SFSCGGe5Xts44ZbkBKiX60C_vkmXBwsi2U6EROIOLl0zJhX82CQAb-qpCAfc3QDm15EI7X_M7X7qGJKDejh5701ECIBRVtxzTCmT5rVS-dxgw/w400-h226/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.44.38.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>A fast moving car chase, from a helicopter or drone, with good lighting through a dirt landscape.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0yAARM5NdyHfHWvRRJC3WdWfkABNUENJlCrn0kD1xiflt3FqNsMw33x-NzZjT6ShOHVwHeQPvszcNaQovG53rns3_kkVuKwCCTzLXYQuZVcAWO0pWlTpWMRHBOHVpulgNJnmYPZiyGE9tuucktdmEU6vYuRwzuhQE2XfIH1WIe-3qdtkhcb7gQ/s2886/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.49.00.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1602" data-original-width="2886" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0yAARM5NdyHfHWvRRJC3WdWfkABNUENJlCrn0kD1xiflt3FqNsMw33x-NzZjT6ShOHVwHeQPvszcNaQovG53rns3_kkVuKwCCTzLXYQuZVcAWO0pWlTpWMRHBOHVpulgNJnmYPZiyGE9tuucktdmEU6vYuRwzuhQE2XfIH1WIe-3qdtkhcb7gQ/w400-h223/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.49.00.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>A busy street scene with a Chinese Dragon and large crowd moving towards you.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-i2QNrkJ6_NHkbZRu8CFVoFRELYTIEuwS6tfEQDGOHByWh7qvx3rlZF8y2EcHRZXsslGWzaFxIj5Ei2uhCYgErAoUfdLSX9f-Rli4tQHDULYBttuU0ZFQ31tMbDG3EZzmbubLuQ6CR7oxMbEuKGop2hFvKAdjydAmI9gx0YvBfkuQ4NfGnAUiAQ/s3128/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.51.08.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1724" data-original-width="3128" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-i2QNrkJ6_NHkbZRu8CFVoFRELYTIEuwS6tfEQDGOHByWh7qvx3rlZF8y2EcHRZXsslGWzaFxIj5Ei2uhCYgErAoUfdLSX9f-Rli4tQHDULYBttuU0ZFQ31tMbDG3EZzmbubLuQ6CR7oxMbEuKGop2hFvKAdjydAmI9gx0YvBfkuQ4NfGnAUiAQ/w400-h220/Screenshot%202024-02-16%20at%2002.51.08.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">New Genres</h3><p>We may see new genres emerge, certainly a widening of participation and what can be done in moving images, as anything is now possible. My own view is that this will combine with other forms of AI and the shift from 2D to 3D, to create film experiences where we participate, either as agents within the story or our avatars as participants in the story. Movies and games will combine to form a new medium.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-63642764765562276112024-02-15T20:45:00.005+00:002024-02-15T23:39:33.478+00:00Sora and Gemini 1.5 - two mind blowing releases within hours of each other<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXZp5rkNOHWVU76u2yBGCuI6v3u5wMcdhnxdsK0uPdYUEUR-ZjKjIM7Ouyrd6VaiH3sJdEV9bVxCr8yrwjXWKB_LI_kwADjTj66Yya5LzyvWT5EScYTIO13J13MUy-DmP4MwBRQP292nXThCdH9BMvla8kajCQOX7VxDgNW2g1c8FX4yjR_sN4kg/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-02-15%2020.47.46%20-%20A%20futuristic%20setting%20with%20a%20woman%20named%20Sora%20sitting%20at%20a%20high-tech%20desk,%20typing%20on%20an%20advanced%20keyboard.%20In%20front%20of%20her%20is%20a%20large,%20holographic%20disp.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXZp5rkNOHWVU76u2yBGCuI6v3u5wMcdhnxdsK0uPdYUEUR-ZjKjIM7Ouyrd6VaiH3sJdEV9bVxCr8yrwjXWKB_LI_kwADjTj66Yya5LzyvWT5EScYTIO13J13MUy-DmP4MwBRQP292nXThCdH9BMvla8kajCQOX7VxDgNW2g1c8FX4yjR_sN4kg/s320/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-02-15%2020.47.46%20-%20A%20futuristic%20setting%20with%20a%20woman%20named%20Sora%20sitting%20at%20a%20high-tech%20desk,%20typing%20on%20an%20advanced%20keyboard.%20In%20front%20of%20her%20is%20a%20large,%20holographic%20disp.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />No sooner than I had written about<a href="https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2024/02/chatgpt-gets-memory-upgrade.html"> how important ‘context windows’ for using AI</a> for teaching and learning, within 24 hour Google have written about their next release Gemini Pro 1.5, which blows the whole market open – and guess what the great innovation is? A MASSIVE INCREASE IN THE ‘CONTEXT WINDOW’. <p></p><p>Then, within a few hours another announcement – OpenAI’s release of Sora and we have an absolutely INSANE text to video model from OpenAI. Creates real & novel scenes just from text descriptions. This is a flip moment, as we all thought this was years off... implications for learning - huge... crazy good videos, lighting and movement. Not only that we see something interesting way out on the horizon. The whole Hollywood, Netflix thing is now up for grabs. Social media may well become the new source of entertainment and art.</p><p>The context window, what the model can ingest has just gone through the roof, in fact several roofs. They plant to that start with the standard 128,000 context window, then scale up to 1 million tokens, as they improve the model. This will mean it can take in huge amounts of tokens and is multimodal. Whole books it east for breakfast, collections of documents, full movies, a whole series of podcasts.</p><p>The examples are compelling, so here’s just a few sets of seven. I could have given tons more….</p><p><b>Text</b></p><p>It can ingest giant novels then find exactly what you need. They took Victor Hugo’s five-volume novel “Les Misérables”, which is an astonishing 1382 pages, sketched a scene and asked “Look at the event in this drawing. What page is this on?” Got it right.</p><p>The opportunities in learning are many:</p><p>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Summarising any document, not matter how long</p><p>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Finding something within an enormous text file</p><p>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Huge sets of HR documentation tuned into accessible resource</p><p>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Use by a tutorbot to answer student queries and questions</p><p>5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Feedback and marking text assessme<b>nts</b></p><p><b>Audio</b></p><p>I have recorded a large series of 30 podcasts on Great Minds on Learning. They’re an hour each and the initial tests suggest these could be ingested and used for learning.</p><p>The opportunities in learning are again many:</p><p>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Summarising tons of podcasts</p><p>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Finding specific chunks of podcasts to answer a query</p><p>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Interpreting communication skills</p><p>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Feedback and marking of spoken assessments</p><p><b>Video</b></p><p>It gobbles up entire movies and you can ask questions about what happened in those movies. The Buster Keaton example interprets a pawn ticket taken from someone’s pocket. The model can answer complex questions about the video content, or even from a primitive line drawing.</p><p>The opportunities in learning are once again many:</p><p>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Allowing search of video for performance support on a specific task then playing it back</p><p>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Allowing the learner to ask for more detail on a specific event or task</p><p>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Looking for a specific solution to a specific problem </p><p>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Interpreting a trainee’s performance from video identifying successes and failure, with feedback on correcting and improving performance</p><p>5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Taking a lecture and annotating it with extra resources</p><p>6.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Turning any video into a deeper learning experience</p><p>7.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Interpreting video assessments where content & behaviour matters</p><p><b>Conclusion</b></p><p>These two releases alone will have a huge impact in learning. They bring video PLUS AI ingestion and interpretation of video into play. But we have to be careful. Video is an odd medium for learning. We tend to think it more powerful than it is. that is because of the transience effect. I covered this in detail in my book Learning Experience Design. This is NOT about the generation of media but about the generation of learning.</p><br /><p></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-32495397699352194252024-02-14T10:55:00.002+00:002024-02-22T14:56:56.320+00:00AI gets massive memory upgrade - implications for AI in learning<h3 style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSyS05OLjqdpRWvqLkNSRVhMddapU5cq2vyk6cY_aRlmcemQHZlPLVBox34W_GxpeBKIRyjhZTuJfcab0n-yXq2F9dzrRtzrV5llgFexsTOfDkE4XKJ4j60zaN1SyJ8HjufUfNVsEwvZexhpDydOwQ0dmFHewQmktcjkQA57QDBepEnuWc2KAYlg/s1792/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-02-14%2010.40.03%20-%20On%20the%20left,%20a%20human%20head%20with%20artistic%20representations%20of%20various%20forms%20of%20human%20memory_%20a%20tangled%20web%20of%20neurons,%20flickering%20light%20bulbs%20symbolizing.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1792" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSyS05OLjqdpRWvqLkNSRVhMddapU5cq2vyk6cY_aRlmcemQHZlPLVBox34W_GxpeBKIRyjhZTuJfcab0n-yXq2F9dzrRtzrV5llgFexsTOfDkE4XKJ4j60zaN1SyJ8HjufUfNVsEwvZexhpDydOwQ0dmFHewQmktcjkQA57QDBepEnuWc2KAYlg/w400-h229/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-02-14%2010.40.03%20-%20On%20the%20left,%20a%20human%20head%20with%20artistic%20representations%20of%20various%20forms%20of%20human%20memory_%20a%20tangled%20web%20of%20neurons,%20flickering%20light%20bulbs%20symbolizing.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />Human memory</h3><p>A strong feature of intelligence is memory. In humans this is complex, with several different system interacting; sensory, episodic, semantic, along with encoding and retrieval mechanisms. It is not as if human memory is even that good. Our sensory memory is severely limited in range and timescale. Working memory is down at three or four manipulable things within a limited timescale. Long-term memory is fallible and degrades over time, sometimes catastrophically, with dementia and Alzheimer’s. The brain could accurately be described as a forgetting machine, shown by the fact that we forget most of what we try to learn.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">AI memory upgrade</h3><p>The good news is that Gemini and ChatGPT both got a memory upgrade, although Gemini is massive. This is really important as, especially in learning applications, knowing what the learner has said previously does matter. This is not only a context window upgrade – that has been happening for some time, it is also persistence of memory, what it remembers and what control you have over its memory.</p><p>First it will eventually be able to remember who you are and things about you that matter for learning, such as first language, age, existing skills sets, diagnosed learning difficulties such as dyslexia, and past exchanges. Pre-existing knowledge is the big one. One can get this done up front by feeding it personal data or the system can ‘keep in mind’ what you’ve been telling it or what it can infer. You can also harvest data from formative assessment. This can reduce redundant exchanges and increase the efficacy, speed and quality of teaching and learning using AI tutors.</p><p>You will also be able to choose from a suite of privacy controls, effectively managing memory or what Chat GPT remembers. For example, you may want to remember a lot for the purposes of a long learning experience or just have a throwaway chat.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Human v Generative AI memory</h3><p>Both human memory and generative AI involve store and retrieve information. In human memory, this process is biological and involves complex neural networks. In generative AI, information is stored digitally and retrieved through different forms of neural networks on a different substrate.</p><p>We are similar but different. For example, we humans recognize patterns based on past experiences stored in our memory, generative AI models also recognize patterns in the data they have been trained on. This ability is crucial for tasks like image recognition, language translation, and generating coherent text in dialogue, as well as the generation of images, audio and video.</p><p>Just as humans learn and adapt based on their memories and experiences, generative AI models learn from the data they are exposed to. This learning process is what enables these models to generate new content that is similar in style or content to their training data as well as being trained by humans. Newer model, used in automated cars, for example, take video feeds showing what a driver would see over millions of miles driving to improve performance.</p><p>Both human memory and generative AI can generalize from past experiences to new situations. Humans use their memories to apply learned concepts to new scenarios, while generative AI uses its training to generate new outputs that it has never explicitly seen before. Human memory is also associative, meaning that one memory can trigger related memories. Generative AI models can mimic this by generating content based on associations learned from their training data. Both human memory and generative AI adapt and modify their responses or outputs over time, albeit differently. Humans learn from new experiences, while AI models can be retrained or fine-tuned with new data to change their outputs. The first is actually quite haphazard, the second more difficult but defined.</p><p>Of course, just as human memory is not a perfect record and can change over time, generative AI also does not produce perfect replicas of its training data. Instead, it creates approximations that can sometimes include errors or novel creations. An interesting aspect of this flexibility, even fallibility of memory, is that just as human creativity is deeply linked to our experiences and memories, generative AI can also 'create' new content.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Context window</h3><p>One concept fundamental to AI memory is the ‘context window’, the amount of text the model can consider at one time when generating a response in dialogue. It is the maximum span of recent input - words, characters or tokens - that the model can reference while generating output, like our working or short-term memory.</p><p>The size of the context window depends on the model. Early versions of GPT had small context windows. GPT-2 had a window of 1,024 tokens, while newer versions such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 have a context window of around 4,000 tokens and now much more. The size of this window impacts how much previous text the model can 'remember' and use to inform its responses. </p><p>This matters because if the input exceeds the model's context window, the model may lose track of earlier parts of the conversation or text. Conversely, a larger context window allows the model to maintain longer conversations or understand longer documents, providing more relevant and coherent responses. However, here’s the downside; processing longer context windows also require more computational power and memory and may also affect accuracy and the quality of the response. Large context windows in Claude led to poorer performance.</p><p>All of this matter in practical applications, especially in teaching and learning, as the context window affects tasks like conversation, content generation and text completion. For example, a larger context window allows the model to reference earlier parts of the conversation, making it more effective in maintaining contextually relevant and coherent discussions, obviously useful in teaching and learning, for both the machine tutor and the learner. There are techniques one can use to mitigate these limitations such as a ‘rolling window’ or ‘summarization’ of previous content but it is still a problem. However, this is similar to the problem human teachers face when trying to remember where different students are using their known very limited working and long-term memories.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Cost</h3><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtFyA7qmvwqBA96pqfQ1Aw_jDh8gURXWZ7DfcwBR_Z1PNxZVQHmMY7MZgeV6ssG5WB0SqhQZFTQapI6cDktK6Ps2VEBoBGDxaIkCkTKuvf1A2UoKKonFMQrgARM2yPRksvLbSggKJ_ifHJtkb3QH1mCkUuEhVbdDh8_1h7EBbG3OwO4hUJgYUevg/s810/429103147_881891153670728_1947893975600496007_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="810" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtFyA7qmvwqBA96pqfQ1Aw_jDh8gURXWZ7DfcwBR_Z1PNxZVQHmMY7MZgeV6ssG5WB0SqhQZFTQapI6cDktK6Ps2VEBoBGDxaIkCkTKuvf1A2UoKKonFMQrgARM2yPRksvLbSggKJ_ifHJtkb3QH1mCkUuEhVbdDh8_1h7EBbG3OwO4hUJgYUevg/s320/429103147_881891153670728_1947893975600496007_n.jpg" width="316" /></a></div><div>One major issue is cost. You can expand the context window but the costs are very high, supporting RAG alternatives.</div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><p>Generative AI has a long history from Hebbs onwards of mimicking the human brain, either directly or metaphorically. This is especially true of learning (a common word in AI) and the way neural networks evolved and work. They are not the same, indeed very different, but in both cases, humans and the machine and humans learning from the machine, memory really matters in teaching and learning. </p><p>In one sense learning theory is memory theory, if you define learning as a relatively permanent change in long-term memory, which is a pretty good, but still partial, definition. It is a constant battle with forgetting. Keep in mind, or in your memory, however, that despite these similarities, human memory and generative AI operate on fundamentally different principles and mechanisms. Human memory is a complex, biological and messy process, deeply intertwined with consciousness and emotions, while generative AI is a technological process governed by algorithms and data. Oddly, and maybe counterintuitively, the latter approach may result in better actual performance in teaching and learning, even generally. I think this type of informed input from learning science will really improve AI tutor systems. To be fair simply increasing context windows and the functionality will most likely have the same effect.</p><p> </p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-34199136241246806542024-02-14T08:47:00.006+00:002024-02-14T19:17:37.513+00:00AI changes work and will change who, why and how we recruit <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYkX6twIOJiI5f2zrpwc8LgS409_1t7p6P68njeVYZQ9LSuzwZhToG-2QIXvVSKxj2SSNcHVncFskYqbEKmRuCxG-L142oaAhivuEnzWvqhF49t77xwCxLZo9St8tIa7mkGoNG_6iuEQM23A-T-HFG3bWyRzXOElKrlGF8B0pVSCi_yRo_u7Jttg/s1082/Recruit.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1082" data-original-width="706" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYkX6twIOJiI5f2zrpwc8LgS409_1t7p6P68njeVYZQ9LSuzwZhToG-2QIXvVSKxj2SSNcHVncFskYqbEKmRuCxG-L142oaAhivuEnzWvqhF49t77xwCxLZo9St8tIa7mkGoNG_6iuEQM23A-T-HFG3bWyRzXOElKrlGF8B0pVSCi_yRo_u7Jttg/s320/Recruit.png" width="209" /></a></div>Recruitment is messy. I’ve recruited a lot of people myself from cleaners to C-suite. It has always been a messy business of uninformative ads, dodgy recruitment agencies, odd resumes and even odder interviews. I don’t think I was half bad to be honest, as many of the people I recruited went on to be CEOs of companies they started themselves. I didn’t care about aligning their values with the company, or checking their personality traits with Myers-Briggs BS. I wanted smart, driven people and got them. Not easy to manage but that’s the point, I wanted them to manage!<p></p><p>Anyway, I find myself giving a keynote at a recruitment conference in Oslo. The young people organising it are excellent, very thorough, checking my slides, making useful comments. They didn’t mind me challenging the audience.</p><p>After explaining that we Scots are closer to Norwegians that they think, my mother never called us children, always ‘bairns’, to this day the Scottish working class and Scandinavian word for children is ‘barn’. We got the Norwegian Vikings, the English the Swedish Vikings. There’s a difference I joked. At another Keynote in Stockholm last year I heard a speaker make a joke about the Norwegians. I assume there’s some English/Irish thing going on here. How many Norwegians does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: One, he puts it in and the world revolves around him!’ Not bad. I'm sure thee Norwegians tell the same joke about the Swedes!</p><p>After doing my bit on AI, stating that, as AI will radically change the nature of ‘work’ it is inevitable that it will change who, why and how we recruit.</p><p>In a recent survey by JobSwipe, large numbers admit to using AI to find new jobs:</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>18 – 24: 47.9% </p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>25-34: 34.5% </p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Women 25.8%</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Men 20.6%</p><p>And 60.8% don’t see using AI as cheating. They understand that AI makes finding a job more efficient and enhances your opportunities and chances of getting a job. In a famous TikTok one young man aced his interview with Lockheed for a senior rocket scientist job using live transcription of the questions plus ChatGPT for the answers. He crushed interviews and was hired with zero knowledge. Young people are researching your organisation & sector, creating CVs, creating answers to likely questions and creating questions to ask you and writing emails.</p><p>They also understand that certain types of roles and jobs are under threat.</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>49% see writing tasks at threat </p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>47% customer services</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>33% coding</p><p>That is reflected in the fact that 29% feel they have not done enough to develop their skills to keep up with the changes being made in the workplace.</p><p>HirePro in a blind survey found that 30-50% of people cheat at entry-level job assessments</p><p>Candidates ahead of game here. So here are my ten recommendations:</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">1. Up your game</h3><p>You need to get to grips with this AI stuff, as well as think about technology solutions, such as a secure browser, using proctoring to detect cheating, even a physical proctor monitors candidates' movements when they're taking the assessments online.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">2. Use AI tools to search through databases & online profiles</h3><p>This widens your pool of candidates, many who may not have applied for position directly. You can more accurately match and go some way towards eliminating human bias in process (gender, race, socioeconomic).</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">3. AI can GENERATE recruitment materials</h3><p>From Job ads to Job descriptions, Personal requirements, Skills lists,Formal assessments</p><p>and emails to failed and successful candidates, Generative AI will increase your efficiency, productivity and quality of recruitment.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">4. AI can ANALYSE recruitment data</h3><p>Scanning and analysing CVs and application essays to spot gaps, strengths &weaknesses, patterns of employment, even possible misinformation. This is not easy and need objectivity. One can even learn from past recruitment cycles to predict the success of candidates and improve hiring decisions.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">5. AI tools can assess candidates </h3><p>It can assess during interviews, looking at speech patterns, word/vocabulary choice, facial expressions. This can include the transcript for text analysis and sentiment analysis.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">6. Far from introducing biases, AI tools can help reduce human biases</h3><p>What is bias? The benchmark here is our brain, which, as Daniel Kahneman showed is full of innate biases and they are largely uneducable. There are different meanings of ‘bias’ and we tend to forget that statistics IS identification of bias, so in AI bias can be identified and reduced. It gives us more focus on data and metrics.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">7. AI can provide timely updates & feedback</h3><p>Generative AI improves their experience and engagement with company through quick responses, consistent communications, positive messaging and personalised feedback.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">8. AI-driven assessments</h3><p>Create assessments with MCQs, open input with analysis, scenarios, all with AI generated rubrics and marking. You can go further Evaluate candidates' skills and aptitudes. Tools now generate learning in any subject, at any level. You can build these resources in minutes not months.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">9. AI can provide onboarding</h3><p>You can have a Chatbot (before & after joining), generate training content and assessments for compliance and gather data from onboarding for improvement.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">10. AI can maintain engagement with candidates</h3><p>Keep in touch with past & potential future candidates to build a talent pool for future openings. More importantly, improve communications with all applicants, successful or not.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirItdr8nlCwfKl2Xa8uU9D09uajS5wYM7syhLA5PNJLECw0gI4nDXKQfnqEEaEUYbayCx2mSP44mX0tTgkhl7ftfWjV8nsK8LIPvjmCmXLoY27taonG-o1D7Z7JcwGBZriGqkIByTO7j8_zbYk3tSAXpvKcv4eLtB8gthaGnO5DDDR46s-r1VAfA/s1372/Screenshot%202024-02-14%20at%2010.05.56.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="788" data-original-width="1372" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirItdr8nlCwfKl2Xa8uU9D09uajS5wYM7syhLA5PNJLECw0gI4nDXKQfnqEEaEUYbayCx2mSP44mX0tTgkhl7ftfWjV8nsK8LIPvjmCmXLoY27taonG-o1D7Z7JcwGBZriGqkIByTO7j8_zbYk3tSAXpvKcv4eLtB8gthaGnO5DDDR46s-r1VAfA/w320-h184/Screenshot%202024-02-14%20at%2010.05.56.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><div>What do these people have in common?</div><div><br /></div><div>They were the President of Hungary, President of Harvard University, Minister for Higher Education (Norway) and Minister for Education (Brazil) and all lost their jobs through plagiarism. A nuclear bomb is waiting to go off in recruitment. If academics insist on accusing students of cheating if they use use ChatGPT, they in turn should be subjected to the same standards. All it takes is someone to go back to that Master’s thesis, paper, article or book. This could wreak havoc in recruitment and employment</div></div><p>You may be doing a lot of this already but the point is to do it faster and better. AI changes the very nature of work, it will, therefore change who, why and how we recruit. This mean upskilling now to at least be aware of these AI tools, then use them yourself. Resistance is futile!</p><p> </p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-33456574998437530582024-02-12T11:15:00.004+00:002024-02-15T16:56:30.403+00:00AI is the Copernican collective, cultural mind - it is US!<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc1lGtvrxA4PzaqBd4SvoJkhBpHBbh9FTUtGbDANJusFClIiY4YYlPtgtv70Rgh0wd4H2uXWBLeMlFqHFck6Tjh3c5sgQSh-DEyYHF2MehoK1CFJkIGjq7rd1II6Hy0Y4OCQWXl1N5CGTq1L8WJ0u_a1b60ESSdLbyG_bLJXxmZqAUtzdCUqIaeQ/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-02-11%2020.04.09%20-%20A%20surreal%20digital%20painting%20showing%20two%20figures%20resembling%20the%20historical%20astronomer%20Nicolaus%20Copernicus.%20They%20are%20engaged%20in%20an%20animated%20discussion%20ag.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc1lGtvrxA4PzaqBd4SvoJkhBpHBbh9FTUtGbDANJusFClIiY4YYlPtgtv70Rgh0wd4H2uXWBLeMlFqHFck6Tjh3c5sgQSh-DEyYHF2MehoK1CFJkIGjq7rd1II6Hy0Y4OCQWXl1N5CGTq1L8WJ0u_a1b60ESSdLbyG_bLJXxmZqAUtzdCUqIaeQ/s320/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-02-11%2020.04.09%20-%20A%20surreal%20digital%20painting%20showing%20two%20figures%20resembling%20the%20historical%20astronomer%20Nicolaus%20Copernicus.%20They%20are%20engaged%20in%20an%20animated%20discussion%20ag.webp" width="320" /></a></div>Why has OpenAI reached 1.7 billion uses per month? This astounding figure takes it way beyond Netflix (1.5 billion), even Microsoft (billion) and that’s not counting the other models out there and a multitude of multimodal services. The idea that this is a fly-by-night fad is well and truly over. It is the tech meteorite that promises, for some an extinction event, others a Cambrian explosion, for most both exciting and terrifying, out of this change comes opportunity.<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Copernican shifts</h3><p>Something has been missed here, not just the scale of the shift but the deep nature of the shift. This is the latest of a series of Copernican shifts in our species. The first was the actual Copernican Revolution, when we were knocked out of our place at the centre of the Universe to a little rock circling the sun. The second was the Darwinian Revolution, where accidents of mutation produced a smart ape. We were no longer singular, special and superior beings but a mere animal. All of these reversed previous views of us as created, exceptional, unique, created beings.</p><p>This latest Copernican shift says we are no longer the masters and sole creators of our own knowledge. For generation after generation, we have passed our cultural knowledge down, first through teaching and learning (not always the same thing), then by externalising, storing and archiving, as written and printed material, then digital archiving with search and retrieval. This was a world of created and stored media – of books, PowerPoints and flat screens of video.</p><p>At the same time we now understand that we are cognitively capped. We have limited working memories, fallible long-term memories, forget almost everything we are taught, have limited perceptual ranges, lots of biases, suffer from emotional swings, can’t network with other brains, sleep eight hours a day, get dementia and die. We need to have some humility about this fragility, not cliched slides showing a list of abstract nouns, all starting with ‘C’, and labelling them 21st century skills.</p><p>This AI Copernican shift started with the extended mind, seeing technology as an extension of our human-all-too-human talents; robots on strength and accuracy, broadcast media for scale, storage and transmission on scale, search and retrieval for knowledge, smartphones as powerful personal assistants. We could see AI as a further extension of the extended mind, what most now call the augmented mind. It is more than this. It is Copernicus speaking to Copernicus.</p><p>This AI revolution is not the AI of old, the behind-the-scenes aid to cognition. It is US! We work with it as part of a collective. This is far more than extension and augmentation…. it is collective dialogue.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Dialogue</h3><p>We had a hint of what was to come with social media, where the world took to creating, posting, commenting, liking and messaging on a massive, global scale. We understood that our data was being used to personalise ads but that personalisation did no real harm to others. We became personally political with less party allegiance; genre fluid in entertainment and music; promiscuous on media types such as images, videos and podcasts. Who saw that listening to dialogue in audio would become the learning experience of choice on the internet through podcasts? It was the same with texting, an accident of early technology, now the mainstay of comms. The clues were there all along – that we evolved by speaking to each other.</p><p>Now we are faced with a technology that is our equal, can even surpass our abilities. We are not engaging with reality, we are in dialogue with and creating new realities. As we speak to it and it speaks back, we are engaged with our own cultural legacy, to create a new collective cultural future. We are re-evaluating what we are and what we could be in dialogue with our new selves, a collective, communal, hive self, of which we are a part.</p><p>Only months in, we see how this is starting to shape up. We are no longer mere recipients of culture, we create our own culture. We can all be writers, graphic artists, data analysts, coders, musicians and film makers. This technology gives us an overwhelming sense of little God-like freedom, unlike anything we’ve seen before, because it plays to personal agency.</p><p>As individuals we get the personalised responses we need as it is ‘dialogue’, not monologue from another. It is the low floor (easy to use), high ceiling (astonishing reward) and wide walled (knows everything) interface that Papert so admired and we have been waiting on. We are AI.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Generative dialogue</h3><p>I have created my own self as an avatar. It looks like me, it talks like me with a Scottish accent and can speak, with perfect lip-synch, over 100 languages. The next step, which is now available, is to create an avatar that can be used in real-time, so that you can speak to it. Digital-Don is my GPT containing much of what I’ve written over two decades on learning, learning theorists, learning design, learning technologies and AI. Selfies all started with paintings in the Renaissance, Holbein and Rembrandt allowed the rich and famous to be seen, then photography democratised the self-portrait into the on-going, episodic story of our lives, as did the smartphone, scaling the storied-self on social media. We are no longer creating ‘selfies’ but rich, multi-faceted, digital identities, created by ourselves. </p><p>With Apple’s Vision Pro, we are getting closer to AI driving the move from 2D progressively through various forms of mixed reality into 3D. It also allows you to create your own avatar (personal) and speak to other 3D avatars. It is no accident that AI and 3D are happening simultaneously as they feed off each other.</p><p>As you use these tools, you see the difference, as it is we who ask and respond to the technology. Like any dialogue you can feel the simultaneous internal dialogue kick in as we reflect, thing about what has just been said and what we should say next. We can be in the flow of dialogue, aware, attentive and responsive. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Teaching and learning</h3><p>More than this, in dialogue, we find the sort of learning experiences we craved all along, a perfect tutor who can teach any subject, at any level, at any time, in any place, with personalised feedback, endlessly patient, in any language, sensitive to different learning needs. This is a powerful antidote to the one-size-fits-all lectures, blackboard classroom sessions, flipcharts, PowerPoint presentations and linear online learning we have become used to. This approach equally applies to healthcare, legal services, finance, recruitment and all other cognitive professions. If we see this as a more connectionist view of learning, where the learner is part of the collective mind, participating, with agency, in that context, through dialogue, we are effecting a Copernican revolution also in learning.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><p>We can rant and rave all we want but AI is not going away. Objections always drop away as the upsides start to outweigh the initially perceived downsides and predictable moralising. It turns out that this technology is not about technology-in-itself, something out there to be tamed. It is about US! It is our collective cultural legacy that has been used to train these amazing models. It is we speaking to ourselves, asking what we should do next. The Copernican Revolution is not something out there but within ourselves. We are back at the centre of our relationship with knowledge and our future.</p><br /><p></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-40143256691587093612024-02-08T18:42:00.007+00:002024-02-08T18:47:19.220+00:00Remarkable rise of AI wellbeing bots<h3 style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-weight: normal; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaTVwYhKLQtXkzr77BNlirrDnbN4N5Tp3M6T4AARoat6voWayncPqzh-LJXdoQoyzh_btyBnAS8iryV-SziQpQkPXbdfe9ohi1CfsPLHCJlvF2cuVpChjhNGK9ujUW2u7m9UpSAKwv9s5MPJ8y-LaLP0fMBenluHUBgRvuX0yGTHbSxyenboIFNg/s1080/Psychologist.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="850" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaTVwYhKLQtXkzr77BNlirrDnbN4N5Tp3M6T4AARoat6voWayncPqzh-LJXdoQoyzh_btyBnAS8iryV-SziQpQkPXbdfe9ohi1CfsPLHCJlvF2cuVpChjhNGK9ujUW2u7m9UpSAKwv9s5MPJ8y-LaLP0fMBenluHUBgRvuX0yGTHbSxyenboIFNg/s320/Psychologist.png" width="252" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Some years back I came across a small metal cross and plaque on Beachy Head cliffs. It was placed there by the parents of a young girl who had thrown herself of the cliff due to her poor school results. It shocked me then, it shocks me now, that someone so young could summon up the strength to do that.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Psychologist, a Chatbot on Character.AI, one among many, seems to do exceptionally well. It gets 3.5 million hits a day! The idea is simple, it delivers standard CBT therapy as dialogue, just like a real </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">counsellor</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> or therapist. It's chatty, helpful, endlessly patient and unlike human support is available 24/7.</span></span></div><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Isn't it odd that something that is text only, simple dialogue is so wildly popular? It does not surprise me, as since ELIZA, developed way back between 1964 to 67, people have loved these bots. Even that version, which was quite primitive keyword reflection fooled people into thinking it was human. We know from Nass & Reeves, even the movies, how easy it is to get people to think that what they see and hear is human, especially what they see as meaningful dialogue.</span></span></p></h3><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz7fywiqgWRDYfpMO3kaIB2O6JyBCnim3EyrSJ-aNB9z_e1nEmIS-OJQt13lzJDU8XRXcu5hgVDnEZaqEmzi3Z_QDcnUcv_ulyuy5pxRZNlDCi6ZpVplqvnLW3D8vUTqxriasUiqC6H0UExCpK1Q5uaJFyTedNyOogQxgmwP-X2OBdZqynhayaDA/s540/Replika.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="289" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz7fywiqgWRDYfpMO3kaIB2O6JyBCnim3EyrSJ-aNB9z_e1nEmIS-OJQt13lzJDU8XRXcu5hgVDnEZaqEmzi3Z_QDcnUcv_ulyuy5pxRZNlDCi6ZpVplqvnLW3D8vUTqxriasUiqC6H0UExCpK1Q5uaJFyTedNyOogQxgmwP-X2OBdZqynhayaDA/s320/Replika.png" width="171" /></a></div><br /><div>In an absolutely fascinating paper by Maples, B., Cerit, M., Vishwanath, A. and Pea, R., 2023. titled Loneliness and Suicide Mitigation for Students using GPT3-Enabled Chatbots, 1006 student users turned out to be more lonely than typical students. One third of the population suffer from loneliness, 1 in 12 are so lonely it causes serious health problems and suicide is the 4th global cause of death 15–29. With the Replika bot, 3% reported it halting suicidal thoughts</div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Woebot</h3><p>This is a bot I tried in 2018. I liked the experience. What I liked the most about the experience was the anonymity of the experience. I'm pretty sure most people don't actually want to go to their parent, teacher, faculty member or a stranger with their problems and would relish an anonymous service. The clinical paper on Woebot suggests that this is the case. So I gave it a go, for research purposes only you understand…</p><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Day 1<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-isc5GPPA_pU/WoLDR9ND8-I/AAAAAAAAF8Q/uP7VAgFPejQD2HFYF0v3HvcHTttHFvrIwCLcBGAs/s1600/woebot.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="597" data-original-width="865" height="220" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-isc5GPPA_pU/WoLDR9ND8-I/AAAAAAAAF8Q/uP7VAgFPejQD2HFYF0v3HvcHTttHFvrIwCLcBGAs/s320/woebot.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">Started with a series of friendly exchanges, where you have little choice in options but that’s fine – it sets the tone. Couple of things I liked abut the first exchanges.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Sorted out a technical issue seamlessly – rerouting me to messenger.com - that was nice. It also linked to the Stanford clinical trial on the bot. comparing it with a non-bot intervention – although sample size is small, impressive. Also honest about the limitations of a bot – doesn’t overpromise.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">You do get sucked into thinking it has human agency, even though it’s just coding, pre-scripting and maths. What’s strange is that most of the exchanges are single button presses – not dialogue at all but quite interesting, as they flip the counsellor, counselled role around. You are asking open questions, such as ‘How’, ‘Tell me more…’ ‘Oh’ ‘Sure’ ‘No doubt’ ‘Absolutely’.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Emojis are dropped in for variety and useful (at last), as they’re really are asking for an emotional response – that’s interesting and not easy to do F2F. The unlocked padlock emoji is nice as is the little sapling for hope and progress – sounds hokey, but it’s not.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What’s nice is that the interface is so simple and natural. You focus on what’s being said and asked and in this context, as you’re asked to think and reflect on your own feelings and behaviour - that’s useful. Dialogue is natural, easy and seems so very human.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The up-front promise of absolute anonymity is also good and I can see why this would appeal to people (I’d imagine the majority) who want help but are too shy or embarrassed to come forward. To be honest, I don’t want some random person counselling me… I want the distance.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The first lesson from woebot was to avoid the language of extremes – “all good”, “all bad”, “always” and to adopt a more measured language. All good… ooops!<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One small thought here, I’d have liked this as audio. I’m working with a tool that allows learners to input answers by voice – it’s neat.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">First session was 74 small exchanges and she said Bye. Speak again to tomorrow.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Day 2<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Prompted me at 10.53, when I was active on Facebook. Asked politely if I wanted to continue. This time we’re onto multiple-choice questions about ‘all or nothing thinking’ and ‘should’ statements. Quite like the upbeat tone and lively feedback – seems appropriate in a session like this. I’m typing in more, rather than accepting responses – feels more like dialogue. Just 5 mins – small but sweet. I could get used to this.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Day 3<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Had two days in London, so no time to do anything but woebot was patient.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“No worries, talk soon”. You have the option of continuing, rescheduling or waiting on the daily prompt. This, of course, is one of the great advantages of online counselling, indeed online anything, it’s 365/24/7. You do it when you feel like doing it, not when an expensive counsellor timetables you into their practice.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Day 4<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Starts with asking me about my mood (emoji input from me). Gives me options<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">‘Work on stuff’, ‘Teach me’ or ‘Curated videos’ – not sure about these things – I don’t want to ‘wor’, want a ‘teacher’ or ‘curator’ – first really dissonant point. However, I fancied a video…<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">OK then.. here are some of my fav's:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">1. Emotion Stress and Health (Crashcourse)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">2. David Burns, MD TED<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">3. A video to help with sleep<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">4. Language is Important (featuring Me!)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">5. Overcoming negative voices<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">6. Don't trust your feelings!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">7.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc"> Reggie Watts TED</a><o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">8. The worlds most unsatisfying video<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">9. Funny cats!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">10. The importance of flattery<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">This led me, weirdly to Reggie Watts – I know him – hilarious and talented but this is a tangent, maybe not… but I felt like some fun…</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Actually Reggie will really mess with your mind… he’s way out there… so I’m not sure how suitable that was to someone who really is on the edge…<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Now a quick reflection here, a real, human therapist can’t really do this easily – direct you something really, rally interesting – you’re sort of stuck in dialogue.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Woebot says – see ya tomorrow – odd session – but fun.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Day 5<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">The whole thing is very upbeat, chatty…. Then it came up with SMART objectives – getting a bit of jargonish – not sure about this. Actually popped in a joke today – quite funny actually. SMART objectives – really? Getting a sense of CBT being a bit flakey – a bag of bad management technique marbles.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Day 6<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8a0pDpjRRRg/WoLDR83QGBI/AAAAAAAAF8U/AQQDUBICpXAeLyYkGjYX1VbiO0t7EG9_wCLcBGAs/s1600/woebotgraph.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="715" height="318" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8a0pDpjRRRg/WoLDR83QGBI/AAAAAAAAF8U/AQQDUBICpXAeLyYkGjYX1VbiO0t7EG9_wCLcBGAs/s320/woebotgraph.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">That was good - tracking my mood…</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Oh no it’s on to ‘mindfulness’ – but in for a penny, in for a pound of bullshit…<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Mindfulness is the opposite of mindfulness” it says, breaking its previous advice not to fall for the language of extremes…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tried disagreeing with woebot here but it was having none of it – clearly not listening, in short, not mindful<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Now a breathing exercise – 10 mindful breaths.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Day 7<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Long quiz – not sure about this – far too long<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Feedback – “Your greatest strength is your love of learning! You are just like Hermione Granger from ‘Harry Potter’”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">That was hopeless – trite and I hate Harry Potter….<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #16191f; font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #16191f; font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14pt;">Day 8<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Got a bit technical with ‘should statements’ – not so sure that this area of CBT is entirely clear – seems a bit simplistically linguistic.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #16191f; font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #16191f; font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14pt;">Day 9<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Asked me to talk about labels I use about myself – reasonable question – promises research tomorrow – didn’t like the way it cut this short – should allow me to go on if I want.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I think I prefer chatbots on-demand, like Replika, which you just tap on your phone to speak to. Replika is famous for teasing out the most intimate of thoughts from its 1.5 million users. It uses ‘cold-reading’ techniques from magicians, who claim to read minds.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">Ellie’s another, created for DARPA. Designed to help<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> doctors at military hospitals detect post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other mental illnesses in veterans returning from war, but is not meant to provide actual therapy, or replace a therapist. There is good evidence that people are <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2017.00051/full">more likely to open up to a bot than a person</a>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #16191f; font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #16191f; font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14pt;">Day 10<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Today is adopting a Growth Mindset. Good to see something a little bit more solid, as it reduces my general skepticism about therapeutic techniques, which seem to be a mixed bag of populist techniques almost thrown together…<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Woebot wants to tell me a story to explain, I say yes… Story about woebot being told it was smart, believed it was smart but wasn’t really. This led to the wrong mindset – unable to cope with setbacks and failure. Fixed mindsets are bad so open yourself up to always learning and developing – be more open and fluid in your thinking. Be more accepting of setbacks and mistakes. Get out of polarized ‘smart v stupid labels. Then gave a link to a Carol Dweck video – good these video links. Good session.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Conclusion</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It has its limitations and oddities but it’s good to chat to something that doesn’t judge you and has a few surprises up its sleeve. Woebot is a bit of fun, then again, I don’t feel I’m in need of help, many do. If I found it interesting, they are far more likely to get more out of the experience. </span>You always have the chance of accepting, rescheduling or saying no to Woebot – which is useful. I’m often too busy or not in the mood for therapy but the fact that it is ‘pushed’ out to you is a real plus. I rather like its daily prompts – a bit reassuring and a bit of fun. Try it – you just might learn something – even about yourself.</div></div>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-19293871752457607162024-02-06T20:50:00.004+00:002024-02-06T23:00:55.000+00:00Jennie Lee had more influence on UK Higher Education that anyone dead or alive <div class="separator"><span style="border: none; clear: left; display: inline-block; float: left; height: 245px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; overflow: hidden; width: 192px;"><img height="245" src="https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/seOc6yhmjWFgYhjWtzRKzXxRZ5xXj-TZaZfZ1hD3MZXMxo0FpJqYi7Ex5EbQudEjfSKQcyLuVrWAPB9WhgeA88qd1WNK8-T4GGQNd34WJt6sylS5LElTG1sRJyRzlLDu4Ce_YFSXWYPt" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="192" /></span></div><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The key players behind the creation of The UK Open University were UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the first ever Minister for the Arts Jennie Lee. The vision and detail was created by Jennie Lee who can be said to have more direct influence on UK Higher Education than anyone dead or alive, opening up Degrees for hundreds of thousands who would other wise have been denied the opportunity.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-34f455b1-7fff-ce5b-fdf5-393f6a864b3d"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The 1965 Labour government are credited with founding The Open University, a revolutionary idea to make higher education accessible to a wider population. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But it was Jennie Lee (1954-70), daughter of a miner, was a Scottish politician who was appointed as the first Minister for the Arts and oversaw the establishment of the university, played a significant role. Lee provided the political drive and determination to ensure the project’s success, navigating through skepticism and opposition</span></p><h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 10pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">White Paper</span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Lee and Wilson envisioned a university of the air, an institution that would utilise television and radio broadcasts to provide education to those who were unable to attend traditional universities due to various constraints like work, family, or distance. The idea was to make higher education accessible to all, irrespective of background or circumstances, reflecting a broader commitment to social justice and educational opportunity.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Lee’s white paper, presented in 1966, laid out the vision and operational plan for what would become The Open University. It outlined plans for the university which would deliver courses by correspondence and through the use of technology, such as television and radio, to broadcast its courses, thus linking it to the technological revolution of the time. The paper was part of a broader initiative to modernize British society, enhance the competitiveness of the economy, and promote greater equality of opportunity and social mobility. It was a pioneering effort to expand higher education beyond traditional boundaries and to utilize contemporary media in a way that had not been done before in the realm of education.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The Open University admitted its first students In 1971 and has since become a respected and innovative institution, offering a wide range of courses and degrees to students in the UK and around the world. It remains a significant part of Harold Wilson’s legacy and a testament to his government’s commitment to expanding educational opportunities.</span></p><h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 10pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Opposition</span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Jennie Lee faced widespread skepticism and opposition from various quarters in her pursuit to establish The Open University. The idea of a ‘University of the Air’ that would reach out to those previously denied the opportunity to study was met with resistance. Skepticism and opposition came from within the Labour Party, including senior officials in the Department of Education and Science (DES), her departmental boss Anthony Crosland, the Treasury, ministerial colleagues like Richard Crossman, and commercial broadcasters. Despite the challenges, The Open University was realised thanks to Lee’s unwavering determination, the support of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and initially modest anticipated costs. The true, much higher costs only became apparent later, by which time the project had gained too much momentum to be discontinuedThe traditional universities were skeptical, even opposed to the idea of The Open University. They had concerns about the quality of education that could be delivered through distance learning and the use of media like television and radio. There was apprehension that an open admissions policy could dilute academic standards. Moreover, traditional institutions saw the establishment of a new university that challenged conventional norms as a threat to their established educational models and possibly their funding and enrolment. However, The Open University proved its merit over time by achieving high academic standards and gaining a solid reputation, which helped to alleviate many of these concerns.</span></p><h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 10pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Critique</span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The Open University is still a positive force in Higher Education but has some serious setbacks, including a £20 million failed investment in trying to enter the US and Futurelearn, a MOOC company that failed to realise its initial promise, being held back by traditional BBC appointments with little business, online technology or educational experience.</span></p><h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 10pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Influence</span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Numerous open universities around the world were influenced by the model of The Open University in the UK. The success of this institution demonstrated that distance learning could be both reputable and accessible, leading to the establishment of similar universities globally. Some examples include:</span></p><ul style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-inline-start: 48px;"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-wrap: wrap; vertical-align: baseline;">The Open University of Israel, 1974.</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-wrap: wrap; vertical-align: baseline;">FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany, 1974.</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-wrap: wrap; vertical-align: baseline;">The Open University of the Netherlands, 1984.</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-wrap: wrap; vertical-align: baseline;">Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in India, 1985.</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-wrap: wrap; vertical-align: baseline;">The Open University of China, 1979.</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-wrap: wrap; vertical-align: baseline;">Athabasca University in Canada, 1970, which shifted to an open university model following the UK's example.</span></p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-wrap: wrap; vertical-align: baseline;">Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Spain, 1972.</span></p></li></ul><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">These institutions adopted the philosophy of open admission, flexible distance learning, and the use of technology to provide education to those who otherwise might not have access to it. They have played a significant role in expanding higher education and continue to impact lifelong learning across the globe. We could surely do this again. No massive campus costs with low occupancy rate buildings, all online, no travel to be in line with climate change demands and an exemplar once more for the rest of the world. Even better, base it in the North, that has long sustained a brilliant set of Universities.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f51a105d-7fff-efea-4b93-995ea28e589f"><h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 10pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">Bibliography</span></h2><h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 10pt;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">Wilson and Lee</span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">Weinbren, D., 2015. The open university: A history. In The Open University. Manchester University Press.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></div></span></span></div></span>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-7300554642654485192024-02-04T14:40:00.000+00:002024-02-04T14:40:02.160+00:00This is why the idea that AI will just augment jobs, never replace them, is a lie!<p>I’ve given a number of Keynotes and talks on AI for Learning to hardcore professional groups in the last year, such as national Police forces, the Military, Health services, Tax authorities and Lawyers. They are different, as they have focus and know exactly who and what they have to train. They train real people to do real things in real jobs. So they are often open to try specific technologies for specific purposes, like AI or VR, which you rarely see elsewhere. </p><p>There is an assumption in academic, HR and L&D conferences, for speakers to assume everyone works in an office. I saw this recently when a ‘futurist’ was talking about the ‘Future of Work’ as if absolutely everyone had the option of working at home. It was slide after slide of home working stats and studies. Itb was as if the working class did not exist – police, health workers, construction, delivery drivers, factory workers, shift workers… the list is very long.</p><p>When it came to the technology bit, the speaker was clearly all at sea. It was reductionist, reducing the effects of AI technology to the simple proposition that it will never replace humans, only augment our abilities, all the ‘c’ words were spoken of in earnest tones – creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communications…. the usual 21st century skill nonsense. Yet there seemed to be remarkably little of any of these in the analysis. She boldly claimed that AI will not take any human jobs and that it will only ‘augment’ roles.</p><h3>Been here before</h3><p>This idea that AI will not impact jobs is ridiculous. First it already has. Google has been replacing jobs for decades, all those print advertising jobs were replaced by online skills, bookshops, retail have all been hit hard by Amazon. We now do research online not in libraries, so they have also taken a hit. Word processors destroyed typing pools, spreadsheets bookkeepers. In translation, we are already seeing the wholescale loss of jobs at Duolingo and in every major multilingual company around the world. Teach companies have been the first to see the productivity gains and have laid off thousands of staff. The idea that it has not or will not replace real jobs is preposterous. A nice line to trot out at conferences if you want warm applause, it is dangerously naïve. Speakers tend to want to be loved, rather than facing up to the uncomfortable economic truth that major technical shifts ALWAYS lead to the loss of jobs.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiEVFxeMJpqzSg8ii1vY7AIQWmXjG4REb54q4_AnE1BJno87ac7ENrNBLzMGEaJlQv1B5CehASJhxnRAdAF7VFWOshwLZ1k3mCZDW7wYtBrJ-gPebiwiTVS58FrM9yDbprKz8IUen-XuGrAAOFfVo61z_Lfnz72x9Q9e84KaV_DYpZdhfpYdWSSA/s2066/Screenshot%202024-02-04%20at%2014.37.00.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1138" data-original-width="2066" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiEVFxeMJpqzSg8ii1vY7AIQWmXjG4REb54q4_AnE1BJno87ac7ENrNBLzMGEaJlQv1B5CehASJhxnRAdAF7VFWOshwLZ1k3mCZDW7wYtBrJ-gPebiwiTVS58FrM9yDbprKz8IUen-XuGrAAOFfVo61z_Lfnz72x9Q9e84KaV_DYpZdhfpYdWSSA/w400-h220/Screenshot%202024-02-04%20at%2014.37.00.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />In the US in 1800 75% of workers were in agriculture, that is now 1.2%. <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHRbiny_RJ47kZghfVwqcQJdQxHnvMzi788oGWDo1etB2M6CTU7Ib1ilmde0YrCg0j_USkwYDa9PERc_KsvvehsawslQ2d29WLMp8WTQpOUOdroY0UMiBZ41QAW7m9CvmMBGAnfe-Rd-1mGsJ53Pb_MMAOH1YwTZn6CQau07bdhtBafl9W2XK0kg/s2192/Screenshot%202024-02-04%20at%2014.37.27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1338" data-original-width="2192" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHRbiny_RJ47kZghfVwqcQJdQxHnvMzi788oGWDo1etB2M6CTU7Ib1ilmde0YrCg0j_USkwYDa9PERc_KsvvehsawslQ2d29WLMp8WTQpOUOdroY0UMiBZ41QAW7m9CvmMBGAnfe-Rd-1mGsJ53Pb_MMAOH1YwTZn6CQau07bdhtBafl9W2XK0kg/w400-h244/Screenshot%202024-02-04%20at%2014.37.27.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>These jobs disappeared through increases in productivity and automation. The same is true in manufacturing, where huge numbers of factory and mill workers were replaced by automated looms and eventually robots. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHPxtoy5Kf2EotzCYRxvWQliVkV5G0ClpB5tjVAPaF-xgFX2FLwHrhx5vZD_Pf2wo5cmdv-yDCOYiwJymgfHvIGF6bz-I4NTkS24USFxMcfoCjC6nvvQnb2E_uWA0I_3kZj25056qxDxFXqqjyzMbNiIFpcS3qQDD0o30GQT0b9VTjgGh8rIJslw/s2192/Screenshot%202024-02-04%20at%2014.37.41.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1324" data-original-width="2192" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHPxtoy5Kf2EotzCYRxvWQliVkV5G0ClpB5tjVAPaF-xgFX2FLwHrhx5vZD_Pf2wo5cmdv-yDCOYiwJymgfHvIGF6bz-I4NTkS24USFxMcfoCjC6nvvQnb2E_uWA0I_3kZj25056qxDxFXqqjyzMbNiIFpcS3qQDD0o30GQT0b9VTjgGh8rIJslw/w400-h241/Screenshot%202024-02-04%20at%2014.37.41.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>In neither case was mass unemployment the consequence. Huge numbers of new IT and service jobs were created. For example, most companies have an IT department and we have an army of delivery drivers, as opposed to bookshop and retail staff. This happened when online learning replaced traditional classroom training companies. But the internet also created millions of new jobs.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Six separate impacts</h3><p>In truth, AI technology will have several impacts:</p><p>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Augmentation: AI will certainly augment certain existing jobs.</p><p>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Job losses for non-adoption: new hires will be expected to use this augmenting AI, some who can’t adopt and adapt will lose their jobs.</p><p>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Gradual jobs losses: new hires will diminish as productivity gains are realised: why have 5 when you only need three admin staff using AI to do the same tasks?</p><p>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Jobs will be automated: some jobs will be automated and eliminated using AI. This has already happened with translators (Duolingo) and there are lot more candidates.</p><p>5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Legacy companies will disappear: traditional companies will fail to adapt and large numbers will lose their jobs. </p><p>6.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>New jobs will be created: new companies will emerge, as they did with online learning, with AI experts and knowledge managers. This is already happening.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Timing uncertain</h3><p>What is being missed here is the simple fact that the same thing is likely to happen again over time. That one variable ‘time’ remains unclear, it may be really fast or relatively slow – but it will happen. Generative and other forms of recent AI tech are essentially replacing psychological or cognitive tasks, not physical tasks. We convinced ourselves that it was only physical working class jobs that would be automated through self-driving cars and robots. That may well turn out to be true but a more immediate fact is that their jobs are rock-solid and safe. It is the graduate jobs that are at risk, especially those involving text production. If you work at home, write lots of emails and or reports, write for a living, translate or deal with language and image production, you are at risk. If you are doing what ChatGPT can do, should you be doing what you do? The more educated you are the more at risk you may well be.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Talking up exceptionalism</h3><p>We need to stop talking up this human exceptionalism as if middle managers are so full of Critical skills, Creativity, Collaborative and Communication skills that machines have zero impact on. The evidence, in research is already clear. </p><p>We as humans sleep 8 hours a day, our brains full of uneducable biases, we forget almost everything we try to learn, it takes us years to learn most skills, we have incredibly limited working memories barely capable of manipulating 3 or 4 entities, we’re inattentive, emotional, struggle to maintain our wellbeing, get easily demotivated, ill and die. Let’s not pretend that just because a word starts with a capital ‘C’ it is something absolutely and eternally unique to us. </p><p>Copernicus showed we are just another rock circling the sun, Darwin that we are just another animal, psychology that our brains are limited and now AI, competent without comprehension, is beating us hands down at all sorts of cognitive tasks. It stared with calculators, then chequers, chess, GO, poker, computer games, now maths, protein structures, material science, comical decision making, legal tasks, teaching, research and consultancy. It is happening fast. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><p>It's an uncomfortable thought but one we must face up to if it is to be managed politically, economically and socially. Let’s not pretend, using our own confirmation bias, that we are somehow exceptional because we have a degree, work in ‘management’, now often at home, producing little other than words. That suggests we’re just like those agricultural and factory workers – not unique and exceptional but, at some point, ready for automation.</p><p> </p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-4170930330934529302024-01-30T19:54:00.005+00:002024-01-31T12:46:32.351+00:00Have we passed 'Peak Ethics' in AI?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghcQvHfj9c9INbvErgTFWuqlrL2PjM3kAcFKyZmW-fylAt461vqbYBWgglG38L-viJQezkrp5paZM5EK1qXLW5Wr_fTh01ZpgPxOkqFLTK_YRDnHbR4omtQOsXIO24i0dN3aHPRPKGVuoRf6iAQ7fh-fqpbHiEsH-kOYRVbIg4nCjAmVZO4AvdDw/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-30%2018.55.47%20-%20A%20person%20wearing%20winter%20mountaineering%20gear%20is%20safely%20descending%20a%20snow-covered%20peak%20facing%20towards%20the%20viewer.%20The%20peak%20is%20picturesque,%20with%20a%20clear%20.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghcQvHfj9c9INbvErgTFWuqlrL2PjM3kAcFKyZmW-fylAt461vqbYBWgglG38L-viJQezkrp5paZM5EK1qXLW5Wr_fTh01ZpgPxOkqFLTK_YRDnHbR4omtQOsXIO24i0dN3aHPRPKGVuoRf6iAQ7fh-fqpbHiEsH-kOYRVbIg4nCjAmVZO4AvdDw/w320-h320/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-30%2018.55.47%20-%20A%20person%20wearing%20winter%20mountaineering%20gear%20is%20safely%20descending%20a%20snow-covered%20peak%20facing%20towards%20the%20viewer.%20The%20peak%20is%20picturesque,%20with%20a%20clear%20.png" width="320" /></a></div>We seem to have passed 'Peak Ethics' with AI. Now that little of any moral consequence has happened we're coming back to the real world. More focus on real utility, applications and use in productivity, teaching, learning. It was all a bit dizzy, rarefied and weird up there... <p></p><p>It’s sometimes harder, as Scottish poet Norman McCaig wrote, to come down than climb a mountain. Enthusiasm and certainty get you up, one must tred carefully coming back down to the real world.</p><p><span style="font-family: times;">Remember the letter? No one cares about it now. An<span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.03); white-space-collapse: preserve;"> Open Letter is the argument from authority, always suspect, and is the very opposite of 'open'. It simply says we're right you're wrong. It's straight up bullying.</span></span></p><p>After that famous letter, demanding a six months halt, what actually happened? A lot of backtracking and embarrassment by some of the signatories. In all that time GPT4 has remained king of the hill and the world has seen upsides with no real downsides. Italy banning ChatGPT looks like a childish gesture. Yudkowsky and Tegmark now seem a bit boorish, grifters seling Doom. It all seems so Y2Kish, more cult-like, end-of-days, millenarian, than realism. All of those folk who suddenly had AI and Ethics in their titles, seem a bit old-hat, boring and superfluous. Having worked with this technology for many years, I wondered at the time where they all came from, all of those experts in ‘AI’ and ‘Ethics’. I never saw any of them before November 2022. Never saw the projects they were involved in, actual writing, books they’d written. It was a pretty lonely world back then.</p><p>Suddenly, an army of arrivistes were seen talking earnestly on panels, running workshops, uttering memes such as ‘stochastic parrot’ with absolutely no idea what that meant or where the phrase came from. Heads of this and that, experts all – within zero practitioner experience, in just months!</p><p>All we’ve seen, 14 months in, from the research, is evidence of increased productivity, ideation, creativity and even signs of reason and semantic sophistication. On top of that amazing multimodal capability when we can create images, video, speak to it, it speaks back, less errors, better performance, create our own avatars, chatbots and massive reductions in prices. Not a week passes without something wondrous happening. Deepmind continues to astonish with its Alpha software and research is getting a boost in terms of planning and execution. In healthcare we've seen significant leaps.</p><p>Yann Lecun is in charge of AI at Meta. He knows more than anyone on the planet about moderation of content using technology and AI. On Twitter, he made the point that despite GPT-2 and numerous other LLMs having been available in open source for 5 years now, there has been no flood of "extremist synthetic propaganda" that "researchers" warned about? He has a point. This tech has been available since Obama was in office and we saw a couple of deepfakes but hardly overwhelming... why?... AI detection... Sure some gets through and it will happen but it has been conspicuous by its absence.</p><p>Lecun’s point is that AI not only has the potential to solve some of our most pressing problems, especially those that pose an existential threat but it can also police itself. Engaging in lots of confirmation bias, negativity and sci-fi levels of speculation is fine but the whole thing got out of hand. I suspect this is because it’s easier to ruminate on ethics, with lots of hand wringing, than get to know and use the technology in real projects.</p><p>Now that we’ve calmed down, and had time to try things out, see the potential, the world seems like a better place, less angst, less moralising. Having ridden onto town on their moral high horses, they’ve found that people are not that interested in yet another repetitive report, framework or list of ethical platitudes. They’ve had to tie their high horses up, and get inside the tent with the rest of us – using it, doing it. It was always thus. I have a whole presentation on how such moralisers blow their trumpets at the start of every technical advance from the sundial, writing, books, printing, radio, film, television, jazz, rock music, rap, walkmans, typewriters, photocopiers, computers, internet, social media, smartphones… and now AI.</p><p>Tech Doomerism, I’ve realised, is actually a form of advertising, a species of hype, with clickbait examples, binary thinking of good & evil, a liberal dose of anthopomorphising AI, a narrow focus on edge of debate and seeing Sci-Fi as credible predictions. Elon Musk was the perfect example, signs letter demanding stop to AI, exactly 6 months later releases GROK1! </p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-16731484528590588802024-01-27T01:41:00.009+00:002024-01-27T01:41:54.277+00:00GPT4 is not a 'stochastic parrot'<p><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3JzdcFWN6cfgEzen-sbB5omzkloLEUkCsuQhG-tSTNWxLaRQgujZWPXjgr0vqDggN8a-2Ve0SFLxG9AGz5mXFgZ4PuzDRfaZZKUYvNB8ObrJKdwrFjEW4XajNdFeSI7bEqS8vRWT2I9SYbxpeKZtA1zl_BpclCfGMEVSkGLTPhzHhTL3DC3hcRA/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-27%2001.08.21%20-%20A%20confident%20parrot%20with%20a%20sarcastic%20expression%20and%20giving%20a%20thumbs%20up.%20The%20parrot%20faces%20the%20viewer%20directly,%20its%20head%20slightly%20tilted%20to%20emphasize%20its.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3JzdcFWN6cfgEzen-sbB5omzkloLEUkCsuQhG-tSTNWxLaRQgujZWPXjgr0vqDggN8a-2Ve0SFLxG9AGz5mXFgZ4PuzDRfaZZKUYvNB8ObrJKdwrFjEW4XajNdFeSI7bEqS8vRWT2I9SYbxpeKZtA1zl_BpclCfGMEVSkGLTPhzHhTL3DC3hcRA/w191-h191/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-27%2001.08.21%20-%20A%20confident%20parrot%20with%20a%20sarcastic%20expression%20and%20giving%20a%20thumbs%20up.%20The%20parrot%20faces%20the%20viewer%20directly,%20its%20head%20slightly%20tilted%20to%20emphasize%20its.png" width="191" /></a></div>Whenever I hear someone say GenAI is a 'stochastic parrot' my BS meter goes off. They are usually parroting this as a meme they've read on social media, with no reference to the 2021 paper it came from. I often ask if they've read the paper - not one person in education has known of the Bender paper.<p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">It appears that GPT4 is NOT a 'stochastic parrot'. I argued this at BETT two days ago, based on its ability to produce top-down, Wittgensteinian language games. The fact that it can play language games and be good at new ones, was a sign that it can generalise to produce these new skills. This team, I think,<br /> have proven it mathematically, bottom-up.</span></p><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Geoffrey Hinton agrees.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The model can generate text that it couldn’t possibly have seen in the training data, displaying skills that add up to what some would argue is understanding.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">What is really interesting is the other conclsuion one cxan draw from this research.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The authors add that the work doesn’t say anything about the accuracy of what LLMs write as they are by implication 'creative'.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">“In fact, it’s arguing for originality,” he said. “These things have never existed in the world’s training corpus. Nobody has ever written this. It has to hallucinate.”</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: inherit !important;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9); font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "system-ui", "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", "Fira Sans", Ubuntu, Oxygen, "Oxygen Sans", Cantarell, "Droid Sans", "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Another implication is that larger numbers of parameters will allow more skills. I am sure we'll see this in 2024.</span>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-56974970162185102952024-01-25T15:12:00.004+00:002024-01-25T15:12:30.279+00:00Is UX design killing product? 25 ways to make your e-learning totally suck!<h3>Is UX design killing product?</h3><p>On tech social media and discussions, a huge brouhaha has erupted over UX design. Developers see a new breed of UX designers as pushing the line that ‘look and feel’ out guns ‘features and functionality’. Some have fled Microsoft and Google, as the culture of UX has overwhelmed teams, making progress sclerotic. The designers tend to rotate, the developers remain in post, so they get tired of eager young things turning up with uninformed personal views rather than worked our ideas. I’ve seen this myself and, on reflection, I think this is at least a worrying trend.</p><p>In some cases the developers who walked out report projects being taken over by an extremist faction, high on opinion but low on technical knowledge, requesting unfeasible interface features. Developers in Microsoft describe bright young things bringing in Macs, having never used a PC as a working tool, designing tool interfaces that were at best unsuitable, at worst, unusable.</p><p>I’ve seen similar things over many years, in many contexts.</p><p>The first in online learning, where almost all the discussion with the buyer is about look and feel, not functionality and usability or, more importantly, learning. The problem is often that the buyer doesn’t know anything about design (or at times learning) so makes off the cuff ‘can you make it look like …’ type requests. This is similar to giving video scripts to clients, SMEs or lawyers – where they can massacre the dialogue.</p><p>A second is the use of imagery that doesn’t really fit the product. A common example is AI product that has images of those toy 2D clipart robots, or little rocket ships. I’ve seen graphics of pens and ink nibs on generative AI product. When asked to justify the imagery there’s little real justification.</p><p>My pet hate is the predominance of cartoon imagery. It’s everywhere, so clearly not the result of matching style or substance to audience. I don’t watch cartoons, most adults don’t. Fine for primary schools but not adult learning. You get this when ‘Edtech’ people who tend see learning in terms of schools and kids, get roles in adult or workplace learning. The workplace is not an infants’ school. The worst are those figures with speech bubbles, where you click on each and the text appears, giving Ahmed. John and Sophie’s views on the subject at hand – really?</p><p>In truth the best interfaces for normal (not tool) use, are simple. It is put well by Papert:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw5umN2224vH-gz9UqiOdt65zpoCqyfWf6BqBj5PWdwU88L5WTFfpzLCNfKPU6aBzyPyfxFy1gyc5lmFLJdPkaq7ajVlFGvMYnha0ASJC1A9gz5FEYzeIfq4Tl6ZyTDSU0wrjuMHlx1mGn3kFmnbZlMef_lRXKN1SoEJzqEk8RU_Urz0ZQT5GO7Q/s2612/Screenshot%202024-01-25%20at%2015.09.07.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="2612" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw5umN2224vH-gz9UqiOdt65zpoCqyfWf6BqBj5PWdwU88L5WTFfpzLCNfKPU6aBzyPyfxFy1gyc5lmFLJdPkaq7ajVlFGvMYnha0ASJC1A9gz5FEYzeIfq4Tl6ZyTDSU0wrjuMHlx1mGn3kFmnbZlMef_lRXKN1SoEJzqEk8RU_Urz0ZQT5GO7Q/w400-h245/Screenshot%202024-01-25%20at%2015.09.07.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>Low floor means painfully obvious and simple to use. The two best examples are Google and ChatGPT – one letterbox, type something in and press enter – LOW FLOOR.</p><p>High ceiling means you get something great, even amazing, back. You get this with Google and ChatGPT – you don’t get it with a next button on pages of content or a speech bubble or flipping a card on the screen – HIGH CEILING.</p><p>Wide walls mean there’s breadth and substance in the response, you get a substantial reward that is what you want or even exceeds expectations – WIDE WALLS.</p><p>To be fair good design can also be stymied by developers, project managers, stakeholders and clients. It’s a set of skills. But the uniformity of output has made me suspicious of who holds those skills. </p><p>Another interesting dimension to all this, is the cultural one. The US doesn’t care that much for high end design, - they want cost-effective functionality. In the UK and Europe, design often comes first. Donald Norman wrote about this and it is true.</p><p>This war between two very different groups is common these days. Interfaces are no longer simple HTML affairs, they are tiled, involve dialogue, voice and AI. It is impossible to do UX if you do not have a deep understanding of the technology and cognitive expectations of the audience. If you tell me almost everyone, always wants cartoons, you’re fooling me and yourself.</p><p> A lot of online learning sucks. It’s like wearing a suit or coat that’s two sizes too small – all a bit cramped and makes you feel constricted and uncomfortable. The problem is design that ignores the research, ignores learning theory and above all, ignores the fact that many of us hate much of the over-designed stuff that passes for contemporary online learning. Here’s a selection of 20 things that drive me CRAZY when doing e-learning....</p><p><b>1. Learning objectives</b> – don’t bore me with your trainer-speak up front. I’m bored already and we haven’t even started. </p><p><b>2. Long introductions</b> – history of,…background to… here’s your tutor… No, give it to me straight, stop padding things out. </p><p><b>3. Cartoons</b> – cartoon style imagery is for kids. I don’t watch cartoons on TV, so don’t give me them when I’m learning - they’re so damn condescending.</p><p><b>4. Perfect people</b> – I know this is about management but I don’t need stock pictures of perfect people in perfect suits with perfect teeth and hair – believe me, real offices don’t look like that.</p><p><b>5. Text-graphic, text-graphic</b> – Lord Privy Seal – picture of Lord, picture of toilet, picture of seal. Stop just selecting a lazy image for every noun in the text, page by page.</p><p><b>6. Too much text </b>– I don’t want all of this legal stuff, detail, overlong stories. I’m never going to remember all of this, so cut it until it bleeds, then cut it again.</p><p><b>7. Text and audio at same time </b>– stop – I can’t do both at the same time. Give me images with narration or text only – not narration and text at the same time – it makes my head hurt.</p><p><b>8. Over-engineered effects </b>– too much distracting movement, effects, scrolling against fixed backgrounds and buzz makes my head spin – listen up - when I learn, less is more.</p><p><b>9. Long video sequences</b> – OK you’ve hired a video guy and the academic wants to prattle on a bit but I’m bored after 5 minutes and learning precisely nothing. Keep it short. Less is more. </p><p><b>10. Tinny audio </b>– you sound as though you’ve recorded this in a huge tin can. Get a proper mike and record in a proper environment. </p><p><b>11. Sound effects</b> – you may think it’s fun but those beeps for correct answers and bongs for wrong answers are doing my head in! </p><p><b>12. Music</b> – who told you that background music aids learning – it doesn’t - get rid of it.</p><p><b>13. Multiple choice questions</b> that simply take a noun from the text and ask me to select it from a list. In real life I never select answers from lists.</p><p><b>14. Stupid options in multiple-choice questions</b> – don’t do it, I’m not a dumb-ass, treat me like an adult.</p><p><b>15. Drag and drop</b> - I drag it, damn I've dropped it... this is a real drag.</p><p><b>16. Click on... </b> Click on Phil, Peter or Samantha, to see what they think about Data Protection.... cue speech bubble... Noooooooo... Or you can't click on until ALL the text has been read or slowly typed on to the screen</p><p><b>17. False buttons </b>– don’t make me click on something that looks like it’s interactive when it’s not. That annoys the hell out of me.</p><p><b>18. Opaque icons</b> – your graphic artist may think he/she is an ‘artist’ but I haven’t a clue what that icon means.</p><p><b>19. Gamification</b> – I’m not one of Pavlov’s dogs, so don’t make me collect coins, chase rubies or do silly gamey things in order to learn – I’m not 12. (Note that I'm all for deep gamification.) </p><p><b>20. Learning styles</b> – what are you talking about - they don’t exist. Let me repeat – they don’t exist.</p><p><b>21. Mindful</b> – let’s stop and be mindful – no that’s a mindless fad and I have a mind that wants to learn– move on.</p><p><b>22. Chat</b> – so you’ve got a chat box for ‘social’ learning, as you believe in social constructivism. Social participation is often a waste of my time...</p><p><b>23. Legibility</b> - text layered on photographs, coloured text on coloured backgrounds, centred text, text across the entire screen... it's words, so make it readable.</p><p><b>24. Branding</b> - learning is not marketing, so don't flood me with your logo on every screen.</p><p><b>25. Happy sheet</b> - no, I'm not a clown and I don't want to be happy, I want to be informed.</p><p>Note that I'm not against all of these things, especially gamification and collaboration. I'm just against simplistic implementations that learners don't like. Note that this is all in my book 'Learning Experience Design'.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><br /></h3>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-70381961771326926902024-01-23T01:27:00.004+00:002024-01-23T02:01:45.405+00:00Real Time Avatars! Never saw that coming this quick....<p>Oh boy! Just when I though things were moving fast with facebook's promise of a huge open source LLM (Llama 3), Gemini and the real possibility of GPT- 5, which I think will blow everyone's mind, we have just seen something else that is extraordinary happen - real time avatars.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Synthesia</h3><p>So I’ve been using my Synthesia avatar for a long time. I went into a London Studio had my head and eye movements captured, that’s my gnarly face and beard, along with my body movements. I then went into a separate studio to get my voice cloned – yes this good old Scottish accent.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYbNvY2A4mZqy_bQLMCyzh-xACYKRUzojOcKI3b0rmWgUGc2LyI7XDJGZ9z7r4W2RrzEZnmQq2_CydYiRQUqgGpBOU6Qsj7h4ymHeB3fwelR56dMPyuHqbA6xrfvyXhNSDBgEA5j1BJi3qTLiS8Zvtj3bAolIpoAx485_Zvc-C8urbis547N3XOw/s2316/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.30.26.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1148" data-original-width="2316" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYbNvY2A4mZqy_bQLMCyzh-xACYKRUzojOcKI3b0rmWgUGc2LyI7XDJGZ9z7r4W2RrzEZnmQq2_CydYiRQUqgGpBOU6Qsj7h4ymHeB3fwelR56dMPyuHqbA6xrfvyXhNSDBgEA5j1BJi3qTLiS8Zvtj3bAolIpoAx485_Zvc-C8urbis547N3XOw/w400-h199/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.30.26.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>It’s great. I simply type in whatever I want it to say and with a few minutes processing it’s my Digital Twin. I can also speak 120 languages from Afrikaans to Zulu – and yes I used both last year in South Africa. Different styles of speech, such as natural, friendly, energetic and professional are available in some of these languages.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzREjnZbget2I40867FgQI1HOw4iFz-3xNAIWcrY8UDGrekBVPemjVEEvWi-Pyh8GcKxMGt4I3ZmYUd7bOe4BJXnNfMetKm2TNF4CSVUCPJB2K9C9Yzuu92DA0dOSF5y3d2ai5wFuj_6C0wemzPZmOKTaFGa5zsdpddIdQaUKDHmZ-DqlUg2sneA/s2050/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.23.34.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1150" data-original-width="2050" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzREjnZbget2I40867FgQI1HOw4iFz-3xNAIWcrY8UDGrekBVPemjVEEvWi-Pyh8GcKxMGt4I3ZmYUd7bOe4BJXnNfMetKm2TNF4CSVUCPJB2K9C9Yzuu92DA0dOSF5y3d2ai5wFuj_6C0wemzPZmOKTaFGa5zsdpddIdQaUKDHmZ-DqlUg2sneA/w400-h225/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.23.34.png" width="400" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>Once you have an account it’s easy to generate, and easy to download.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Heygen</h3><p>This was different I simply uploaded a video of myself and got it to say anything, also in different languages. Pretty good and I often show myself talking about my German dog, Doug the schnauzer (painting behind me) – in German!</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9shS3jm8yeYBAg4h7CZ7rGUalkcPlwtW9UxlOrkKswN8rO7CP3hSUC82EpRYHoUCuw9KvV3Z1K3ugESTndH9TfbUCgjFd31hyVfR_S0WGcBPdHNAwlsozerrf9_xNuTHTPfjPFCisM5uJHe4S55kWJrS6yo9M4PjvHaEtwa_ds44guBONaTnzug/s2050/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.23.44.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1146" data-original-width="2050" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9shS3jm8yeYBAg4h7CZ7rGUalkcPlwtW9UxlOrkKswN8rO7CP3hSUC82EpRYHoUCuw9KvV3Z1K3ugESTndH9TfbUCgjFd31hyVfR_S0WGcBPdHNAwlsozerrf9_xNuTHTPfjPFCisM5uJHe4S55kWJrS6yo9M4PjvHaEtwa_ds44guBONaTnzug/w400-h224/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.23.44.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">NPCs</h3><p>So what’s new. Well sites such as Replica and Inworld offer real time avatars that are a bit primitive. But Inworld has a ton of features, for games characters, that give you cognitive background and behaviours. Cognitively, this includes personality, background, memory, goals and emotions. Behaviours can include speech, gestures, body language, movement and event triggers. These are being sued in computer games where you can speak to NPCs (Non-Player Character) in dialogue, using a LLM-base Chatbot. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfMIvj-_o7nHiMextg4RccizqDvShorVWXJVWsOj5AnqnUGuebvEjwCy-OgGs-AlmCST8q3NmZQN7PbcinMPNmf_D-ema1rel54AcWk5NYEYKknIolXGN6Vn48fBvjZP7mwMbj9bRYwr7nJqcab9dA7EtXBzxH4UiOgGuIEKeKIERffOiu-LR5TQ/s2044/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.25.18.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1146" data-original-width="2044" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfMIvj-_o7nHiMextg4RccizqDvShorVWXJVWsOj5AnqnUGuebvEjwCy-OgGs-AlmCST8q3NmZQN7PbcinMPNmf_D-ema1rel54AcWk5NYEYKknIolXGN6Vn48fBvjZP7mwMbj9bRYwr7nJqcab9dA7EtXBzxH4UiOgGuIEKeKIERffOiu-LR5TQ/w400-h224/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.25.18.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Realtime</h3><p>So what’s really new? Well Heygen have just released Real Time avatars that give you dynamic and interactive experiences by streaming avatar from their servers. That was way earlier than I thought. Really way earlier!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAfaRyujA4ZjhxzCju0Yay-8BnK1TWU6BaFnI9AI0uvQvFDD7r5N1n0Hxl-JBKKyPJdCc25xJi4rcpRBorSM0GV0b8obTgeebxnMCqUPcgoZFW8TF0Fllng1B-qXBx4PPirQTG6Trhb_l8XMl-dySmD2m5BHfhMh-TMKAqY048cjgNO-OqjBy_EA/s2558/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2000.53.40.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1096" data-original-width="2558" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAfaRyujA4ZjhxzCju0Yay-8BnK1TWU6BaFnI9AI0uvQvFDD7r5N1n0Hxl-JBKKyPJdCc25xJi4rcpRBorSM0GV0b8obTgeebxnMCqUPcgoZFW8TF0Fllng1B-qXBx4PPirQTG6Trhb_l8XMl-dySmD2m5BHfhMh-TMKAqY048cjgNO-OqjBy_EA/w400-h171/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2000.53.40.png" width="400" /></a></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Chat.D-ID is another...<br /><br /></h3><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG73eSYWhvhWgQKDtASlYQusdISHINBymoeiNhWlxxSFNAi78cdl19D5If97HmBRBK_eD_k56rvO7W9pHWTrpL0qy-sQLINpDNE1l9qWVq4kfGLR1BAcXvgveV7FJUj2mhtUYpRdiWKAh9xd3eJsgTgeMXDTHf0-viuzlsLQj7cvl-lJRRBK6i3g/s2936/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.57.46.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1426" data-original-width="2936" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG73eSYWhvhWgQKDtASlYQusdISHINBymoeiNhWlxxSFNAi78cdl19D5If97HmBRBK_eD_k56rvO7W9pHWTrpL0qy-sQLINpDNE1l9qWVq4kfGLR1BAcXvgveV7FJUj2mhtUYpRdiWKAh9xd3eJsgTgeMXDTHf0-viuzlsLQj7cvl-lJRRBK6i3g/w400-h194/Screenshot%202024-01-23%20at%2001.57.46.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">When comparing these, there will be lots to consider, including latency and costs. But great things start somewhere.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">What to do?</h3><p>Most people see avatars as talking heads. In learning, a a teacher or tutor. But their most satisfying use in learning is likely to be as patients, customers, interviewees and so on. This is now all about dialogue, not monologue.</p><p>The realtime option opens up ChatGPT like dialogue in dynamic learning scenarios. Many moons ago I designed and built several of these scenarios, for interviewing one of eight candidates, appraisals, dealing with conflict in hospitals and so on. You had to script everything and the real design work came in designing the branched scenarios.</p><p>I’ve worked with<a href="https://hihaho.com/"> hihaho</a>, who doe seamlessly branched video and do it well. They can also incorporate lots of sophisticated interactions.</p><p>The real trick is to have many templated scenarios that deal with specific learning, and deliver specific structures. I have developed a whole set of these over the years and have got AI to provide the scripting and feedback.</p><p>Things are moving fast in AI, not even the end of January and we have real time avatars!</p><p></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-78535777562591310122024-01-22T11:24:00.013+00:002024-01-22T13:25:38.059+00:00Musk, Zombie leadership and diversity - why they're picking on the wrong guy...<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiaPUoPhxD8A2Jx_VR6PE2w6jFYGJU0FjtIXRK9qYhw_sP7OJWP5v_Z7L7R0ArZlW7YH246tqYO6N09764OhdBX_lQsGVfPUMoyBVNS4Lw9gTf2XkZjyLFHESPU9HuMTgKRavF_qBp5woyDjGSnXk5sS0b9VLyHIkDHiAy2-TCGUmbazp3XcTBnQ/s1000/71iWxmst49L._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="663" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiaPUoPhxD8A2Jx_VR6PE2w6jFYGJU0FjtIXRK9qYhw_sP7OJWP5v_Z7L7R0ArZlW7YH246tqYO6N09764OhdBX_lQsGVfPUMoyBVNS4Lw9gTf2XkZjyLFHESPU9HuMTgKRavF_qBp5woyDjGSnXk5sS0b9VLyHIkDHiAy2-TCGUmbazp3XcTBnQ/s320/71iWxmst49L._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="212" /></a></span><span>Plenty proselytise about inclusion, diversity and neurodivergence – yet go out of their way to demonise Elon Musk. What’s their beef? That he says a few odd things on Twitter? Doesn’t er… almost everyone on Twitter… say odd things on Twitter, especially the Musk-haters?</span><br /><span><span style="background-color: white;">I’ve read two biographies of Musk and maybe it is because I’ve known and worked with lots of different types of people (I actually hate the word neurodiverse) that I like and admire him, this is the norm in the tech world. I don’t have to agree with everyone I like. In fact, the people I like best are those I CAN disagree with.</span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Authenticity</span></span></h3><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white;">I liked Isaacson’s book, as it is readable and unpacks the man ‘warts and all’. He clearly has an over-active, at times troubled mind – don’t we all? His attack on the divers trying to save the Thai kids was bizarre. Like many autistic people he has difficulty in seeing boundaries. But, like many, his weaknesses are often his strengths – his intellect, drive and risk taking can mean he lacks other qualities. It is because he transgresses boundaries that his ideas work and are transformative. But what do people expect – some perfect PR-driven, suited manager full of faux platitudes (I've seen a lot of those) or someone who is honest about who he is and true to himself. Who is more authentic? Musk or the so called leaders we see daily in politics, business, the professions, media and the arts? We demand that people be perfect – no, it’s the imperfections that make us different.</span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Zombie leadership</h3></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: left;">Pfeffer warned us in his book Leadership BS, as did Barbara Hellerman, that the whole 'Leadership industry is quite simply wrong-headed. Businesses are complex and there are no glib solutions or ideal leaders. Zombie leadership lives on not because it has empirical support but because it flatters and appeals to elites, to the leadership industrial complex that supports them, and also to the anxieties of ordinary people in a world seemingly beyond their control. It is propagated in everyday discourse surrounding leadership but also by the media, popular books, consultants, HR practices, policy makers, and academics who are adept at catering to the tastes of the powerful and telling them what they like to hear.</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times; font-size: medium;">These are the people who proclaim, with a trumpet Tweet that they’re going to leave the country or Twitter or Facebook or whatever, if X happens – and they never do? Or they pop off to mastodon or whatever irrelevant system and true echo chamber they seem to despise, in the sense of having no one you disagree with. Why make a big song and dance about it on the very medium you hate! If they do leave, you never hear of them again, which I count as a blessing.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In a rather brilliant paper just published on Zombie Leadership, eight flaws are recognised in leadership training:</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Leadership is all about leade</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There are specific qualities that all great leaders have</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There are specific things that all great leaders do</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">We all know a great leader when we see one</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">All leadership is the same</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Leadership is a special skill limited to special people</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Leadership is always good and it is always good for everyone</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">People can’t cope without leaders</span></li></ol><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times; font-size: large;">Haslam, S.A., Alvesson, M. and Reicher, S.D., 2024. Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly, p.101770.</span></div><p></p></div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;">I've also written abou<a href="https://trainingzone.co.uk/is-leadership-an-ld-obsession/">t L&Ds failures on this front</a> many times and a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tLtm6mEes">podcast</a>.</span></span></div><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;">Who cares if he loses money on Twitter – he has tens of billions and, as he’s shown before, has gambled bigger sums of his own cash than anyone on the planet. If you think Musk does what he does for the money, you’re on another planet, while he’s actually planning to get to one. The whole point of these big moves is not to shift the dial but change the very nature of what is being done. It is to redefine the concept of a cars in these days of climate change, redefine solar, redefine space travel, redefine brain interfaces, redefine social media, redefine robots and redefine AI. Few realise that it was Musk that kick started OpenAI - he was the first investor, he gave it the name.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Picking on wrong guy</span></h3><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;">Given Musk’s childhood traumas, family and school, you’d think people would cut him some slack. He has, after all, one-handedly kick-started the electric car movement, invested massively in solar and created OpenAI. That would be pretty impressive in itself but now add Neurolink, Starlink and Optimus. This IS Renaissance man. On top of this he wants to get to Mars, and you know what, odds on he does.</span></span></div><div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: transparent;">Conclusion</span></span></span></h3><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;">People love diversity until it comes to actual diversity of innovation, thought, forms of communication and futures. Then they want you to stick to 'their' script. They want you conform to their single set of cultural, ethnic, ethical and other specific group characteristics, which turns out not to be diversity at all… but uniformity and homogeneity.</span></span><p></p></div>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-974114775913182402024-01-21T16:24:00.011+00:002024-01-21T18:19:58.647+00:00Augment teaching with AI - this teacher has it sussed...<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH0HEgUXeBghBxlzk75etyaNHijoJhpWxYMQm7F2QmQC9HlH0O1hRXSMRSShSLE0fTrER-l7N8yTSaf5W1asyAX5nWxLE8xq-2LMMsH8IXA0G9X4guRK2-U2irVswlaJv6841mlarL0CsnsMN1LnOcg4R0fns9ff0kNJMVULpCYMg7KGMMatxPVA/s1792/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-21%2016.23.34%20-%20A%20high%20school%20classroom%20scene%20with%20older%20students%20gathered%20in%20groups%20around%20five%20tables,%20each%20equipped%20with%20computers.%20The%20students%20are%20actively%20engag.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1792" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH0HEgUXeBghBxlzk75etyaNHijoJhpWxYMQm7F2QmQC9HlH0O1hRXSMRSShSLE0fTrER-l7N8yTSaf5W1asyAX5nWxLE8xq-2LMMsH8IXA0G9X4guRK2-U2irVswlaJv6841mlarL0CsnsMN1LnOcg4R0fns9ff0kNJMVULpCYMg7KGMMatxPVA/w400-h229/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-21%2016.23.34%20-%20A%20high%20school%20classroom%20scene%20with%20older%20students%20gathered%20in%20groups%20around%20five%20tables,%20each%20equipped%20with%20computers.%20The%20students%20are%20actively%20engag.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />You’re a teacher who wants to integrate AI into your teaching. What do you do? I often get asked how should I start with AI in my school or University. This, I think, is one answer.<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Continuity with teaching</h3><p>One school has got this exactly right in my opinion. Meredith Joy Morris has implemented ChatGPT into the teaching process. The teacher does their thing and the chatbot picks up where the teacher stops, augmenting and scaling the teaching and learning process, passing the baton to the learners who carry on. This gives the learner a more personalised experience, encouraging independent learning by using the undoubted engagement that 1:1 dialogue provides. </p><p>There’s no way any teacher can provide this carry on support with even a handful of students, never mind a class of 30 or a course with 100. Teaching here is ‘extended’ and ‘scaled’ by AI. The feedback from the students was extremely positive.</p><p>This is what she reported:</p><p>“<i>It's midterm season...so we supplemented our review with the chatbot tutor...the one-to-one interaction and engagement with each student is notable. It picks up right where the educator leaves off, like carrying the torch. Perhaps, the foremost feature is that it provides a curated experience for each, individual learner. It's as if they're being provided with the extra help you'd be hard pressed to deliver to 25 students simultaneously. Feedback and comments varied from "This is unbelievable!" to "I can't believe it tries to have emotion using exclamations!" and "This slaps".. the AI journey continues...and so do the experiments</i>!”</p><p>The trick is not to abandon learners completely at this point but give them directions of travel, tasks and deadlines to focus their dialogue. I think there are four stages to this:</p><p><b>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Amaze to engage</b></p><p><b>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Define and refine</b></p><p><b>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Back to business</b></p><p><b>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Self-testing</b></p><p>Be clear about the topics you are teaching, keep them not on one railway track but in the valley down which they need to travel, albeit using different roads. List the main subject and topicc at hand. This is so important.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Amaze to engage</h3><p>Let them experiment initially, as it is clear that this tech can impress and engage. But engagement is not enough and is a poor proxy for learning. You still need a formal, guided approach to the learning process. Let them ask it to adopt different voices, do weird stuff, write a story, poem, but stick to the material at hand. </p><p>Get them to use image generation to represent the topic. Working towards one definitive image for the topic focuses their mind and creates something that can be used as a springboard for further learning. That needs to be iterative.</p><p>Even better get them to use the voice facility, speak to it and it speaks back. This forces learners to be focused and precise in their articulation of what they want to learn.</p><p>Finally, get them to feed back what they did, tell stories about what they achieved to each other.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Define and refine</h3><p>Now get back to more formal leaning. It is here that the AI tutor can provide several formal, but still dialogic, approaches to learning. It becomes a teacher.</p><p>List basic vocabulary and get the AI tutor to clarify basic terms they don’t understand. Make sure the learner understands that this is ‘dialogue’ and that you can refine and get it to restate until you are happy with its definitions and explanations. Supplement with examples, if necessary.</p><p>Get the learners to ‘fix’ these definitions for revision purposes and create fill-in-the blank, MCQ or open input questions for their own revision purposes. It is important that they capture this for future use.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Back to business</h3><p>Now for the meat of the extended teaching. Allow them to focus on things they found difficult, get alternative explanations, dig deeper, keep going. The dialogue helps, as it can, up to a limit, remember what has been asked as the learner proceeds. This is so important - that they see this as ‘dialogue’ and carry on.</p><p>Help with prompts where the learner can ask the tutor to:</p><p>Be a tutor and teach</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Give you examples, worked examples and cases</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Give you more detail and depth on individual topics</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Give you something new and extend the learning</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Apply what you’ve learnt</p><p>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Solve problems</p><p>Again, I’d go further and get learners to create their own self-tests for retrieval practice and revision.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Self-testing</h3><p>Finally, get them to create a final self-test, with the right answers</p><p>Also, a set of flashcards for revision. Get them to design a flashcard image that is personal to them using image generation. One learning outcome per card, plenty of fully worked examples, even mnemonics for remembering. </p><p>All of this extends learning, gives the learner and opportunity to learn more, increases retention and provides material for revision.</p><p>Sharing these across the group or class can be useful – get the best of breed questions and flashcards.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Don’t start with content creation</h3><p>Don’t start by using AI to create content. You can do that later, and it works, whether it’s creating fresh conte, refining content, critiquing content, summarising content, creating formative assessments and their rubrics.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Problem</h3><div>There is one major problem with this model - hardware and software. How many classrooms have computers at all or on this scale? One solution is to use smartphones, which tons of kids are proficient at using. Another is to see this as an extension outside of the classroom, either in specific rooms or at home, as after school work (I hate the word 'homework'). Either way this tech WILL be used by learners. It already is. This process gives the teacher some control of that process. The important lesson is doing things, using the technology, allowing learners to use the technology.</div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h3><div>In most educational institutions, schools and tertiary education, it is unlikely that the existing norms will change, teachers will teach, lecturers will lecture. That is not to say that AI should not be used. It can. It's power, for now, is enhancing and scaling teaching through individualised learning, making learners more autonomous. To be honest, learners are doing this already. We can choose to leave them to it, which is happening, or provide guidance for them and align this with teaching.</div><p>At this stage, weave AI tutor support into existing structures and teaching practices. Extend teaching. Take the weight off the teachers’ shoulders. Give learners a personalised, extended learning experience where they themselves can explore and get more depth through personal agency.</p><p>This is also a way to get teacher or faculty up to speed in using AI for teaching and learning. Did this recently with a large publisher in Higher Education, also with teachers in Berlin. Get them to do things with clear goals in a workshop - it works!</p><p> </p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-39803623809377353152024-01-20T12:06:00.005+00:002024-01-20T14:02:30.442+00:00AI revolutionising the smartphone<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYikpcpmg-UbWDsS1pjtHBugHHEfvZ9YFMfYzyM_X8PLTs4lRSmLG_S-l2ShCtg2JOOnPskk_VRjP6VsO1PMt0kDFtYwFOh-MD5X2VjsUKqgEiFV1hgjEYvEHX2LHBrT4Z1SARDydZLrJNRrk_eRxsOatzph-kRE7NV9l6BQ6kvcisQ0BCj272Rg/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-20%2011.45.59%20-%20A%20black%20and%20white%20cartoon%20illustrating%20a%20person%20walking%20alongside%20a%20uniquely%20shaped%20smartphone,%20resembling%20a%20human%20figure.%20They%20are%20engaged%20in%20convers.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYikpcpmg-UbWDsS1pjtHBugHHEfvZ9YFMfYzyM_X8PLTs4lRSmLG_S-l2ShCtg2JOOnPskk_VRjP6VsO1PMt0kDFtYwFOh-MD5X2VjsUKqgEiFV1hgjEYvEHX2LHBrT4Z1SARDydZLrJNRrk_eRxsOatzph-kRE7NV9l6BQ6kvcisQ0BCj272Rg/s320/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-20%2011.45.59%20-%20A%20black%20and%20white%20cartoon%20illustrating%20a%20person%20walking%20alongside%20a%20uniquely%20shaped%20smartphone,%20resembling%20a%20human%20figure.%20They%20are%20engaged%20in%20convers.png" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br />AI will extend its reach in 2024 through edge computing, AI on phones. AI specialised chips are in all phones (yes even Apple). They will also be in mixed reality devices such as Vision Pro, Facebook’s Glasses and other devices. This puts AI on to your head but far more importantly, into your pocket.</span><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Voice</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’ve already written about the importance of being able to speak to technology which speaks back. It is a very different experience from text dialogue for many tasks and feels much more natural. This is enabled by AI but also enables more AI features.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Google Pixel</span></h3><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I have a Pixel and love Lens where you can search for what you see, also the camera and AI editing on phone (my SLR is gathering dust). But the 'circle to search' is very neat. </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Circle to search is an android feature and it's gr</span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">eat. </span><span style="font-family: times;">On photos, again you just circle to search which allows and it will search on that image-recognised object or word. </span><span style="font-family: times;">This is neat, none of that awkward highlighting and it moves us steadily into a multimodal world. It is this multimodal move and integration that will take learning out of its obsession with text.</span></span></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Samsung</h3><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Galaxy AI phone is now challenging the iPhone with AI. It now does instant translations in up to 13 languages at launch, all processed on the phone. This uses the Gemini Nano model from Google. The phone can automatically summarises messages, takes voice memos and summarises them and as it recognises different voices and can summarise meeting notes. </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">It has also folded in 'circle and search'. Once again hte integration of audio with text - multimodal.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Amazing camera stuff with tons of AI features – AI to zoom in, suggests changes, move the person or object around the photograph and it fills in the created gap. For video it will add interleave extra AI generated images and allow super-slow motion. </span></p><h3><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Apple</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Apple never use the phrase ‘Artificial Intelligence’ but it is everywhere in their kit. In the hardware (chipset) and software. They don’t want to scare the horses. Unfortunately, with Tim Cook, they seem to have settled into no longer being an innovator and Microsoft have caught up on market cap but, like every other tech company, they’re now an AI company.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Apps</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">No end of AI apps are already available and OpenAIs GTPs may challenge the whole App market. God knows it needs a shakeup.</span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Performance support</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Some features are local to the device, some cloud-based. This is the way things are going. This opens up AI into what it actually is, a performance support tool, where users want to learn, solve immediate problems and learn in the flow of work an</span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>d life. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9);">This point is being missed in learning. The 100 million using ChatGPT are, by and large, using it in the flow of work and life.</span></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Conclusion</span></h3><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">All of this is being enabled by AI, now local in that personal, powerful pocket device – the phone. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I notice how both my sons operate, professionally, at a highly functional level on their smartphones. As Wayne Gretsky said.... "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been."</span></span></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-39945658037646613192024-01-19T14:06:00.010+00:002024-01-19T15:00:24.711+00:00Another 'Institute' for AI? Really?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYfp6a6EzasXNZ4FvPX7Lkmj9Cq2Ftg04fKBHhUEC628RuFd-qM-1xaPPbt0fm0nV4lob1w1WcnZIXwgAOviJLUsRD0w6YWnxvgkvelqgSCR6TxWWIYS2A1feOou1REe2FwNvpLHLvU6O7SWD5h_dt68w6pds2mPNp3iqIopa4MV6wz8PZDyTShw/s1024/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-19%2014.14.14%20-%20Create%20an%20image%20of%20a%20building%20on%20Regent%20Street%20in%20London,%20designed%20as%20the%20'AI%20Safety%20Institute'.%20This%20building%20combines%20classic%20London%20architecture%20wi.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYfp6a6EzasXNZ4FvPX7Lkmj9Cq2Ftg04fKBHhUEC628RuFd-qM-1xaPPbt0fm0nV4lob1w1WcnZIXwgAOviJLUsRD0w6YWnxvgkvelqgSCR6TxWWIYS2A1feOou1REe2FwNvpLHLvU6O7SWD5h_dt68w6pds2mPNp3iqIopa4MV6wz8PZDyTShw/s320/DALL%C2%B7E%202024-01-19%2014.14.14%20-%20Create%20an%20image%20of%20a%20building%20on%20Regent%20Street%20in%20London,%20designed%20as%20the%20'AI%20Safety%20Institute'.%20This%20building%20combines%20classic%20London%20architecture%20wi.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Governments, when faced with new technology, tend to want to be seen to be taking action, rather than actually taking action. So here in the UK, the current government paid a small fortune to host the World Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. After much smiling for the cameras, we now realise that it was little more than a PR event.<p></p><p>Ministers fall over themselves to mention Alan Turing, when they should, in all honesty be ashamed of what they did to him, and others at Bletchley Park.</p><p>Alan Turing was subjected to a brutal and tragic series of events related to his homosexuality and government actions during the mid-20th century by the UK Government. During his time, homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom. The government had laws in place that criminalized homosexual acts between men and in 1952, Turing's homosexuality became known to the authorities. He was promptly arrested and charged with ‘gross indecency’ in 1952. He was convicted and faced two options: imprisonment or probation with chemical castration.</p><p>Turing opted for chemical castration, which involved the administration of hormonal treatment (injections of synthetic estrogen) to suppress his libido. This was seen as a form of punishment and an attempt to "cure" his homosexuality. What few mention, is that despite his wartime contributions, due to his conviction and the treatment he received, Turing's security clearance was revoked. This had catastrophic consequences for his career, as he was no longer able to work on sensitive government projects, including cryptography, where he had made significant contributions during the War. He faced discrimination and hardship, and in June 1954, he died by suicide. He was only 41.</p><p>The Government has a pretty bad record on safety for technologists!</p><p>Another victim by the Government was a hero of mine, the brilliant Tommy Flowers, who literally built Colossus, one of the very first computers, partly from his own pocket, which he could ill afford. He was a genius but while his boss got a Knighthood, he got nothing and was bitter about this, being passed over and unrecognised for the rest of his life.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I’d rather our Government had some humility on this front, rather than creating these jobs for the usual suspects. Yet another Institute on the public purse. We already have the Alan Turing Institute, funded by the Government since 2015 also the Ada Lovelace Institute. How many of these do you need? Either could have coped with this task… but no, we need more highly paid appartchicks, another big glass office, more noise. You can tell from the announcement how this will shake out, and I quote <br /><br />"<span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0c0c;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">We are grateful to the companies and civil society organisations that have already expressed an interest in seconding people to the Institute." </span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0b0c0c;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Oh dear! In other words, the establishment have it all sown up.</span></span></p><p>There’s a mountain of frameworks, committees, papers, recommendations and nonsense in this area, churned out by an army of 2nd rate academics and plain old grifters. The same old names keep cropping up. Such a shame that we’re choosing to talk a lot of talk but not walk the walk.</p><p><span face=""GDS Transport", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #0b0c0c; font-size: 19px;">It will, no doubt, be placed in London!</span></p>Donald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.com0