weekend ai reads for 2023-02-17

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS

• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web Ted Chiang, The New Yorker

• Long (4,000 words) and valuable thinking on AI Platforms, Markets, & Open Source Elad Gil

🎓 EDUCATION + AI

• A Seven-College Experiment Using Algorithms to Track Students: Impacts and Implications for Equity and Fairness [PDF] National Bureau of Economic Reserach

  • “Almost a new paper: We show algorithmic placement substantially ⬆ placement into college courses w/o ⬇ pass rates; ⬇ need for remediation➡️saving students $; test scores discriminate➡️disparate impact, algorithms less so; selective labels hurts prediction in English, not math.”, a tweet from Peter Bergman, summarizing his paper.

• EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Did ChatGPT Write This Report? Educause

  • Educause quickpoll results on generative AI (I'm already tired of this "har har" title)

• Turnitin's AI writing detection available now Turnitin

  • Turnitin are spending more time thinking -- or at least writing -- about generative AI in the classroom than most other edtech companies. View this through the lens of “pure sales collateral”.

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

• “Will machine unlearning become a thing, and will the right to be forgotten become the right to unlearn a model?” Twitter (sorry)

• Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools arXiv

• 🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

• Humata

  • A personal ChatGPT for your documents. Upload a PDF, and ask it questions.

  • My results exceeded my admittedly low expectations. Your mileage may vary. (requires registration)

• I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, Substack

• Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’ New York Times

  • via Rahim: "A fascinating chat with Bing's ai"

• API Table

  • I'm sure the n for people who are excited about this is 1 (me), but hear me out: a collaborative database/spreadsheet that is extensible, has row-level security, comes with a Rest API interface, has a built-in BI dashboard AND is open source? You (and probably a bunch of under-resourced organizations and institutions) should also be excited.

  • FYI: Airtable, the commercial version of APITable, costs $20/person/month.