Are You Tired of Hearing About AI Yet?

I ask "Are You Tired of Hearing About AI Yet?" but the question is rhetorical because whether you answer Yes or No, AI is still going to be big news for the foreseeable future.

finger pointingThis month some tech big shots were summoned to the principal's office - well, the White House -  and told they must protect the public from the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and OpenAI's Sam Altmann were told they had a "moral" duty to safeguard society and that the administration may decide to regulate the sector further.

AI products like ChatGPT and Bard have gone mainstream and interacting with "generative AI", which was once the domain of computer scientists, is now something kids are doing. It is writing student assignments by summarizing information from multiple sources, debugging computer code, writing presentations, and even taking a shot at poetry. Some of it reads believably human-generated. Some does not. But it does it in seconds.

Altman of OpenAI commented that in terms of regulation, executives were "surprisingly on the same page on what needs to happen."

I'm sure it came up in the conversations that earlier that week, the "godfather" of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, quit his job at Google - saying he now regretted his work. Then again, he is 75, so "quit" might also be called "retired."

Google Will 'Help Me Write'

Google recently introduced a new feature to their Workplace suite that they call "Help Me Write." This generative AI will first appear in Gmail and Google Docs. At the moment, it's available to a select audience of invited testers.

Like other generative AI, you will be able to enter a prompt and have a first draft created. for you.,An example Google shared is not having it write a paper for your English class, though it will probably be able to do that. They show the example of having it create a job description for a regional sales representative/

It's another AI tool that might frighten teachers because it seems to help students unfairly but I think this may be a misperception. As with other AI tools, such as the much-discussed chat GPT, I think the best thing educators can do is to introduce this to students and guide them in the ways that it can be best used and best used legitimately.

The evolution of digital literacy in classrooms will never end. Yes, these kinds of AI- assisted-writing tools present boyj opportunities and challenges for educators. But ignoring them or trying to ban them from student use is certainly not the solution. This tool and others like it are an opportunity to improve student writing skills and critical thinking. 

Google Announcements
https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-developers-google-cloud-workspace/
https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai

demo
       Google Demo

China Regulating Generative AI Use

Chinese regulators have released draft rules designed to manage how companies develop generative artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT.
The CAC's (Cyberspace Administration of China) draft measures lay out ground rules that generative AI services have to follow, including the type of content these products are allowed to generate.

One rule is that content generated by AI needs to reflect the core values of socialism and should not subvert state power. The rules are the first of their kind in the country. China is not the only country concerned with the development of generative AI. Italy banned ChatGPT in March citing privacy concerns.

Chinese technology giants Baidu and Alibaba have launched their own ChatGPT-type applications. Alibaba unveiled Tongyi Qianwen and Baidu launched its Ernie Bot.

Though some people fear AI, others will fear restrictions and rules governing tech development. I am cautious on both of those issues but some of the CAC rules seem reasonable. For example, requiring that the data being used to train these AI models will not discriminate against people based on things like ethnicity, race, and gender,

These measures are scheduled to come into effect later this year. China already has regulations around data protection and algorithm development.