The following article was first published in the free newsletter, Digital Education.

At the time of I wrote this article there was an AI Summit going on in the UK. It was concerned with ensuring safe use of AI. I think it's a good thing to be discussing, but of course whether any solutions will be found and then implemented is another matter. You can read several speeches that were made on the official website: AI Safety Summit.

We need to know how an AI decision-making tool arrives at it's conclusions, which might be hard given that even the designers of these tools don't always know.

Also, given how easy it is to create fake videos and so on, we need to double down on teaching students that it's healthy to be sceptical, and how to be so.

On that note, you might like to have a look at Tony Parkin's video on YouTube. Tony has been experimenting with AI translation technology.

Just so you know, I occasionally experiment with using AI, and when I do I always say that this was created by AI, or this is what AI came up with. I am still of the opinion that my writing is better and more incisive than AI's, but if you disagree with me feel free to not let me know!

Anyway, here are a few links to whet your whistle, whatever that means:

News about the AI Summit

Westminster Forum Conference on AI; it looks interesting, perhaps especially for those in higher education.

Industry Insider – The big conversation: AI. Made by humans; this is an online webinar from the UK's Society of Authors. The session will cover:

• What does AI mean for the publishing industry and the authors, editors, illustrators and translators who work in it?

• What are the considerations, ethical, legal and practical?

• How are we dealing with them and how should we?

• How can authors benefit from the new technologies and are they at risk of being replaced?

• How is the industry working together to counter the risks and maximise the opportunities?

Dr Philippa Hardman has written an interesting article called AI: the New Electricity? She suggests that AI will actually have a structural impact, much as electricity did. I agree. She discusses how AI will have an offloading effect, by which she means doing the boring tasks that people currently have to do, and an extending, whereby AI does new things that are not currently possible (or easy). 

This analysis reminds me of the edtech model from the old BECTA, JISC and others which distinguished between schools using technology to replace people in certain areas, but basically doing the same things as always, and schools using it to do completely new things:

Stage 1: Emerging

Stage 2: Developing

Stage 3: Embedding

Stage 4: Enhancing

Stage 5: Transforming
There’s an AI Summit coming up in June ‘24.
I've been doing a lot of experimenting with AI over on the Eclecticism website. For example, in September 2022 I asked ChatGPT to write a review of a non-existent book, with a bio of yours truly. It didn't do too badly on the latter, though with some inconsistencies. I found it disconcerting that it just made up the review though! Here's the link, which was behind a paywall but which I've de-paywalled just for you.

My most recent experiment is Experimenting with styles: comic strips.

If I were still teaching  in a school I would love the fact that AI exists. Think of the areas you could cover, such as:

• Copyright: when you use AI to create text or graphics, it's drawing on what it has "learnt" from being fed loads of information (my own websites have been scraped for the purpose as it happens); so who owns the copyright?

• Following on from the above, what are the ethics of using creators' work without their permission (or even knowledge unless they make an effort to find out), much less remuneration?

• How can AI be used to create schemes of work, and assessment exercises? (I've experimented with both. While AI has its limitations in both spheres, it's not bad, especially if you use it as a starting point.)

• Given that it will be dead easy to get ChatGPT (say) to write code, how can computing lessons be "beefed up" to take account of that?

I do cover some of that in my blogging course (details below). I think AI is very exciting, potentially, and that it would be a pity if the people who want to ban its use in schools get their way.

New Online Blogging Course

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Here is a sample of the feedback I’ve received about this course:

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Writing for blogs: a taster

The next issue of Digital Education will contain resources relating to National STEM Day.