What Is Generative AI, Anyway? In my last post, I went on at some length about what Generative AI is and its limitations. Rather than rehash it all here, I’ll refer you back to that section, but here’s what I think is the most salient point: It’s a prediction machine. And its predictions are often…
Hello Detox readers, and greetings from deep within my plague house. As most parents of young children will confirm, everything is a virus and the children are always unwell; my little germ factory came home early from school on Tuesday and hasn’t been back since. My thoughts are with anyone who is also living in…
A question I have been thinking a lot about this week is whether there is any equitable use of artificial intelligence, given all we talked about in last week’s post about algorithmic bias. Is there any way to imagine ourselves into a future where artificial intelligences really can do the work of decision making more…
It’s bitterly cold this week in Kamloops. I went out for a walk today before sitting down to write this, and it is taking me forever to warm up again, even though I’m now sitting in the sunshine in my cheery home office. The walls are a soft blue and the space is decorated with…
So. What if we just say no? In today’s post, I want to talk to you a little more directly about what resistance looks like in the context of our digital detox. Indeed, I want to talk to you about what radical resistance looks like in the context of our digital detox. The common factor…
I’m borrowing the title from a marvellous poem — linked again in context down below — by Kaitlyn Boulding. It’s wonderful to share with students at difficult moments in the semester. To peel back the lid of the sardine can, what we’ve been engaging in this month, so far as we have been talking primarily…
A subtitle of sorts: Contract Cheating and Equity, Data, and Algorithms. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about contract cheating and a lot about what contract cheating tells us about the problems endemic to our relationship to technology. I’ve chosen this as a focus not only because it is a massive growth-area of…
Today’s topic is a particularly heavy one, because I’m going to ask you to wrestle with the idea of what social exclusion looks like in the context of technology, and how many modes of exclusion are baked in to the technology we use, especially through the mechanism of algorithms. You probably have some idea of…
In the first instalment of the Digital Detox, we discuss equity, and how the inequities inherent in both technology and education are our responsibility to dismantle.