Sometimes I wish I could lay on a beach and read trashy romance novels and just be a lady of leisure. That didn’t happen this summer. Oh, I got a little bit of relaxation but a lot of time was spent reading and learning about AI. I mean, generative AI as we know it has been out since Nov. 2022, and there is still much to learn. Here are a few things I can share with you, and maybe it can cut down your time if you’re searching for information related to AI:
- COMING SOON: I did build four short modules on AI and related ethical issues (bias, misinformation, labor, and the environment) that will be available for fpg (pending)–GCC faculty and staff will get first dibs. We’re hoping to have two in the fall semester and two in the spring. They will all be fully asynchronous over two weeks and worth 4 hours of FPG. I built these for you! 😂
- AI for Educators by Matt Miller along Christina Clark and 31 colleagues from GCC for a summer book club. When asked why they wanted to read the book, most said they wanted to learn more about AI to be able to help their students or to just learn more. So if you fall into that sphere, you are not alone! This is a really easy book and goes right into using AI in the classroom. So if you’re looking for a starting point on using AI with students, this could be it.
- Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini. I really liked this book. Part memoir, part critique, Buolamwini traces her own projects and discoveries, including “the coded gaze”–what she calls the bias in coding algorithms. Her insights came after testing a software that could not recognize her black face, but recognized her as soon as she put on a white mask. This book is more dense than AI for Educators and will generate a lot of thinking.
- Ethan Mollick’s book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Mollick is the Co-Director for the Generative AI Lab at Wharton. This is a pretty good overview book for how AI works in general and then how it could be used as a person, creative, coworker, tutor, coach, and our future. These topics each get their own chapter. It’s a shorter read and thought-provoking! Mollick wants us to dive in and get used to using AI every day.
- Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard. I think this book is for anyone who thinks AI can take over the world. Broussard demystifies its ability and critiques what she calls “technochauvinism,” or the assumption that computers are superior to people or that technological solutions are superior to any other kind of solution. The book is from 2019, so her chapter on self-driving cars is already quite outdated, but I found the underlying ideas she’s trying to convey still relevant. People are in control of the technology, not the other way around. As a teaser, one of the first activities she has the readers do is to write a simple computer program. She attempts to take away the thought that there’s magic behind the curtain. I’m 50% through and liking this book.
- Finally, my experimenting with AI has been with Claude’s “Projects” where you can create a project, add “project knowledge,” and then prompt AI to assist with whatever, and it will use the project knowledge to provide better responses. It’s pretty cool! Come visit with me if you want to know more about how that went. (It does require the paid version of Claude.)
So be on the lookout for the short AI modules/asynchronous workshops, and feel free to share what you’ve been reading or learning about AI in the comments!
*Dr. Mary Lourdes Silva, from Ithaca’s Dept. of Writing, wrote a chapter in Utah State University’s Teaching and Generative AI: Pedagogical Possibilities and Productive Tensions, an OER text that is part of USU’s The Empower Teaching Open-Access Book Series. Her chapter is titled “My Summer with ChatGPT.”
**”Beth Lady of Leisure” image provided by Meghan