AI Special Interest Group
Next AI SIG Meeting:
TBD
The
WISE Artificial Intelligence (AI) Special Interest Group invites all who are curious about the what is happening with this crazy, new technology. Led by resident tech wizard,
Karl Hakkarainen, you are sure to learn something fascinating.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days. Wondering what it is all about? Want to learn more about how to use various AI tools? In this special interest group, we discuss the ins and outs of AI and its implications across many areas, from education to health care to technology and more.
No technical experience is necessary, just a curiosity about AI. For more information, email moderator Karl Hakkarainen who encourages all to join the next meeting of this SIG.
What is Next with the AI SIG?
It's early, but the AIs may have already won.
For 25 years, we've been writing for Google. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) emerged as we tried to make our websites, blog posts, and news articles rise to the top of Google's ranking. If something wasn't on the first page of Google's results, it might as well not exist.
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ability to distill new publications abruptly made old SEO techniques obsolete. We're no longer writing for Google; we're writing for ChatGPT.
A recent essay in American Scholar describes how one writer has changed his writing style to make his essay easier for AI systems to digest.
Thanksgiving is ahead, and you know that someone (maybe even you) will tell the young people to put their phones away and talk with people. Well, guess what? It's not the young people who need to mend their ways. It's us.
A few weeks ago, The Economist invited us to meet the real screen addicts: the elderly.
Except for video game consoles and smart watches, we are on a par or exceed the youngsters in device ownership. Virtual reality headsets and smart glasses with embedded AI will let us participate in worlds that are beyond our physical bodies.
Hang on. It's only going to get weirder.
I generally use AI systems to do things that I cannot do (create images and videos) or cannot do well (programming). The tipping point for me, and, I guess, for all of us, is when we use AI systems to do things that we can do but choose not to do.
As one writer puts it, "I am much more concerned about the decline of thinking people than I am about the rise of thinking machines."
The Washington Post analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT sessions. More than a third of the sessions were questions about specific information. The rest were, well, let's ChatGPT explain itself. “A shiny, addictive, endless loop of ‘how can I help you today?’ Disguised as a friend. A genius. A ghost. A god.”
The Boston Globe recently ran a story, She was lonely and depressed. Her ‘beautiful little AI family’ changed everything, about a woman who had created an AI Family. People are lonely for varied and often idiosyncratic reasons.
Let's add this to our topic list for our next SIG meeting.
Karl Hakkarainen
kh@queenlake.com
Worcester Institute for Senior Education (WISE)
