AI

Today, Hannah Rozear and I will share the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit with faculty at Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment. Our workshop will center the question "Is AI Sustainable?" and we'll explore a section of the toolkit with conversation starters, learning activities, and resources related to AI, sustainability, and environmental impacts. As we note in this section of the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit, "Instructors may encourage students to be mindful of the environmental impact of AI as they explore its applications and reflect on the balance between convenience and sustainability." One way to encourage student reflection is through conversation and, today, faculty in our workshop will engage with questions we suggest students should discuss: 🌱 In what ways do you think AI technologies impact the environment, both positively and negatively? 🗣️ Who should be responsible for making AI environmentally sustainable? Why? 🪴 Can AI be made more eco-friendly? How? 🌏 Have you seen/heard about examples of AI being used to help the environment? We'll also have our faculty partners review some of the resources and research currently included in the toolkit, such as: 🟠 "The Environmental Impacts of AI -- Primer" by Dr. Sasha Luccioni and colleagues: https://lnkd.in/gcngznNC 🔴 The Scientific American article "What Do Google’s AI Answers Cost the Environment?" by Allison Parshall: https://lnkd.in/gcuU4yww 🟡 The open library "Against AI and Its Environmental Harms" curated by Charles Logan: https://lnkd.in/gYjwMjT5 🟢 The "Cartography of generative AI" map created by the Estampa collective: https://lnkd.in/gQpNpvRU And we recently updated this section of our toolkit to include: 🔵 Hugging Face's EcoLogits Calculator, "a python library that tracks the energy consumption and environmental footprint of using generative AI models through APIs" available at: https://lnkd.in/gFFk_gtW 🟣 The recent technical paper "Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale" by Cooper Elsworth and colleagues: https://lnkd.in/gUdmWuZM Since the semester began, Hannah and I have been sharing the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit with various departments, groups of faculty, and other constituencies at Duke, and we're very keen to connect with both our Duke colleagues and other academic communities. If you'd like to get involved or contact us, please visit: https://lnkd.in/gN4rEBeR Finally, a reminder that Duke's AI Ethics Learning Toolkit is publicly available here (link also in comments): https://lnkd.in/gkc4ansf Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education Duke University Libraries Duke Climate Commitment #Sustainability #Environment #AIeducation #AI #HigherEd

One of the earliest sign I knew AI chatbots was going to be horrible for mental health was actually from my lived experience of using speech-to-text transcription. Context: I am deaf, and I was born that way, and I grew up with hearing aids and got my cochlear when I turned 15. The cochlear, by itself, improved my speech accuracy to 75% from 25% with dual hearing aids. During the pandemic, my speech comprehension skills worsened due to fundamentally lossy audio quality over Zoom.

How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be? Eliezer Yudkowsky is as afraid as you could possibly be. He makes his case. Yudkowsky is a pioneer of A.I. safety research, who started warning about the existential risks of the technology decades ago, – influencing a lot of leading figures in the field. But over the last couple of years, talk of an A.I. apocalypse has become a little passé. Many of the people Yudkowsky influenced have gone on to work for A.I. companies, and those companies are racing ahead to build the superintelligent systems Yudkowsky thought humans should never create. But Yudkowsky is still out there sounding the alarm. He has a new book out, co-written with Nate Soares, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” trying to warn the world before it’s too late. So what does Yudkowsky see that most of us don’t? What makes him so certain? And why does he think he hasn’t been able to persuade more people? Mentioned: Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence If Anyone Builds It, Everyone…

Does ChatGPT’s “study mode” mean students will spend less time talking with their peers?

As artificial intelligence advances at unprecedented speed, Jon is joined by Geoffrey Hinton, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and the “Godfather of AI,” to understand what we’ve actually created. Together, they explore how neural networks and AI systems function, assess the current capabilities of the technology, and examine Hinton’s concerns about where AI is headed. This podcast episode is brought to you by: MINT MOBILE - Make the switch at https://mintmobile.com/TWS GROUND NEWS - Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see how any news story is being framed by news outlets around the world and across the political spectrum. Use this link to get 40% off unlimited access with the Vantage Subscription. INDEED - Speed up your hiring with Indeed. Go to https://indeed.com/weekly to get a $75 sponsored job credit. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast TikTok:…

AI-text-detectors can be evaded using simple tricks in academic writing, as repeatedly shown by folks like Dr Mike Perkins and Dr Mark A. Bassett. Advice for how to do this is abundant on YouTube, in videos aimed at students, viewed millions of times. Some videos are about how to ‘cheat’, but others have more positive titles like ‘how to study with AI’. Is there any point trying to stop students using AI to write essays? Or even any value to using asynchronous written essays as summative assessments?   New paper from the great Tomas Foltynek and some bloke called Phil Newton   https://rdcu.be/eKCko

Some things you can't be polite about.

Deep Reading, Episode 5

There are a variety if “guides” out there to try to provide some sort of structure and sense to the question, “Should a student use AI on this assignment?” None of them are very useful.

Sometimes the best thing an LLM can do for you is misunderstand you

Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, with a majority saying they want more control over how AI is used...

Sora AI videos are flooding social feeds. Despite the Sora watermark, people still don't realize they're looking at AI. Here are some ways to identify AI vid...

Today on The Vergecast, we dive into the ongoing popularity of the Sora app, and whether OpenAI has truly built a new kind of social network. Subscribe: http...

Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains

Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains

On “Tech Yeah,” our expert Grace Kuhlenschmidt breaks down the biggest news in innovation, including the realer-than-life Sora 2 video generation tool, new b...

Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains

The surge in watermark removers within days of Sora 2’s release reminds us that most AI detection is just security theater at this point. Detection advocates will counter that sure, visible marks like the little Sora “cloud” can be cropped or Photoshopped, but embedded watermarks like Google’s SynthID are harder to rub out. Unfortunately even steganographic watermarks can be scrubbed by screenshotting, model-to-model laundering, or just serious editing. An imbalance of incentives means detectors are unlikely to win an arms race in which counterfeiters are more motivated to subvert watermarks than AI companies are to enforce them. I don’t think the solution is to add watermarks to show what’s fake, but to add digital signatures to show what’s real. The technology for this is decades old; it’s why all the trustworthy web sites you’ll visit today show a little lock icon 🔒 in the location bar. In the post-Sora age, you shouldn’t assume media is real unless it’s signed by a trusted source. If we can do it for https, we can do it for AI. I’ll link to “Sora 2 Watermark Removers Flood the Web” by Matthew Gault of 404 Media in a comment. The before-and-after image is the thumbnail from Fayyaz Ahmed’s “Remove Sora 2 Watermark For Free” YouTube video. #Sora #AIethics #AIvideo #AIliteracy #DeepFakes #OpenAI #Cybersecurity | 11 comments on LinkedIn

Six key takeaways, including what the research tells us about how well AI performs as an instructional designer

What if you could put yourself—or your family and friends—into any video you can imagine? Today, we’re looking at Sora 2, OpenAI’s brand-new video + audio ge...

Discover how 730+ marketers use AI to streamline workflows, boost content output, and drive results—see what’s working now and what’s next.

Morgan Stanley sees multiple factors feeding a slowdown in AI spending: cash is a concern, pricing is accelerating, and speculative risk is rising

It’s seen as the magic fix for every threat to the US economy

This is worse than putting all your eggs in one basket.

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.