There’s a dual interpretation of the title in this post. First, I’ve been using my own writing as a tool to understand what AI can and can’t do. It provides a useful medium for doing this as I have a lot of it, and it’s something I’m deeply familiar with so I can gauge the quality of the output. I tried feeding a couple of writers tools, including Sudowrite and Novel.AI as well as Claude and Gemini with both my academic text (Metaphors of Ed Tech) and fiction writing (my in progress...| The Ed Techie
Some of you will have seen how at least one author has been caught accidentally leaving AI prompts within the finished text of their book, and also how a suggested summer reading list in the Chicago Sun-Times contained AI hallucinations for books that don’t exist. There was, rightly, an outcry against this laziness, and a sense of being cheated (also, does no-one do any editing anymore?). But beyond these obvious, egregious examples, I find the question of artistic integrity (and related, a...| The Ed Techie
Clip art used to require specialist access and skills. It was literally clipped stock art, that could be used in creating physical paste-ups which would be photographed to create ads (I remember a friend of mine who worked in graphic design in the 80s having widely admired scalpel skills for cutting out images). Then in the late 80s it became almost entirely digital with desktop publishing, but this was still largely the domain of professionals. It was with the advent of the Microsoft product...| The Ed Techie
I’ve seen a few stories recently about how people (often men) are sort of disappearing into AI blackholes. Whether it’s being convinced you are a spiritual leader, hunted by the CIA, unhealthy sexual fantasies, or generally reinforcing self-beliefs it’s hard to see how this is going to stop. As humans we’re programmed to anthropomorphise, we see Jesus’s face in toast for goodness sake, so even when you know it’s not real, it’s pretty hard to resist the emotional response that ...| The Ed Techie
I took part in a Reclaim Hosting session as part of the blogging community yesterday. Maren ran the session on How to Get Your Blogging Mojo Back and Lee Skallerup Bessette gave a fascinating talk on her blogging history. One topic she raised was a thorny one that many of us have wrestled with in the blogging area. And that is, whether to have specialised blogs or an all-encompassing one. Lee talked about how she had established different blogs for swimming, knitting as well as ed tech. Jim G...| The Ed Techie
For my upcoming keynote at the Education after the algorithm: Co-designing critical and creative futures symposium in Dublin, I am exploring metaphors relating to ecosystems and AI. I’ll blog the whole talk after the event, but one of those metaphors I am using is the introduction of the European rabbit to Australia.| The Ed Techie
