Poisoning AI. Plus My new podcast, 'Wide Angle'
'Radio 201' makes way for a fresh new podcast on critical issues we all face.
After 45 episodes of my class podcast, Radio 201, that focused on education and tech, I I’m changing the lens, so to speak.
Begun in December 2020, a semester after we gingerly pulled down our masks as the pandemic wound down, Radio 201 took on the challenges of technology, media bias, totalitarianism, writing, science, AI (before hype kicked up dust) and social media. The first episode, as you would expect, was on teaching during a pandemic (“Bricks and Modems.”) My guests were colleagues and even some students at Benjamin Franklin High School. It was pitched at ‘The intersection of Education and Technology.’
So now, I venture into a new territory. The show is called Wide Angle. It will launch in November. The photography, metaphor is appropriate. I’ll be looking wider, and focusing on issues such as ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ — those terms you probably hear about. I will be exploring misinformation and disinformation, Big Data, and algorithmic bias.
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A school without phones. No big deal!
For seven hours a day for 180 days of the year, students’ phones are off in our school. Do the math: That’s 1,260 hours per school year during which all social media noise is shut off. I think of it as a time when the ‘Attention Extraction Model’ is on lockdown. take cellphone use seriously, despite the fact that on paper, they have a no-cellphones in class policy. The results are so clear, as we watch how they engage with each other in the hallways, at lunch, and in class.
So I was amused when I saw this New York Times article about a school in Orlando, Florida. Titled, “This Florida School District Banned Cellphones. Here’s What Happened,” it documents how talkative and social kids have become. Duh! Do we confiscate phones? Sure. Are there many violators? Not really. Students have come to appreciate what this has done to their social life.
The other day my daughter, who’s doing student teaching, said she had to stop a student in her school making a TikTok in class. There’s plenty (plenty!) of research as to who those sneaky apps are messing with students’ brains, their their conversations and friendships. How could we get our kids to push back against the onslaught of Silicon Valley? I wrote a longer piece about this on Medium, if you care to dip in. (No subscription is required.)
Phone addiction is no exaggeration. Do you (a) sleep with your phone? (b) Take it to the bathroom? (c) Pull it out more than once at a restaurant? And not just to scan a QR code of the menu? I try hard to not grab my phone while I’m in a checkout line, or while talking to someone ‘just to show them’ something I think is interesting. Try this for a week and tell me if it doesn’t make a difference.
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Adobe Express, Canva, Capcut and… Speech-To-Text
This week I began testing Adobe Express, to show students how to create and publish infographics. Adobe Express is a lot like Canva. Both are free. When we switched to video editing I learned something new. The app, Capcut has a nifty editor that resembles Canva. So now we have three to choose from for much of graphics and video.
I am testing out a ‘Voice Notebook’ app on my phone that transcribes speech-to-text flawlessly. I could see it’s going to come in handy when I’m quickly writing up an outline for my students in my Media and Publishing class, since I often quickly adapt my lesson plan, to address a current event. Speaking of a Voice Note, please scroll down for a poignant story about how it’s being used today.
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POISONING AI.
I got a kick out of reading how, given that AI tools like ChatGPT are basically language models scraping content off the web without content creator’s permission, those very database could be ‘poisoned.’ Meaning tainted with bad metadata. The revenge of the nerds! Here’s how it’s being described. A content creator could protect his or her work bi embedding certain pixels into digital images that mislead the algorithm, and give it bad data, so to speak. The concept was put forward by a team in the department of computer science, at University of Chicago. Writing about the poison attack, they say that “When applied on a single narrow prompt, their impact on the model can be stealthy and difficult to detect.”
The paper they published could be found here.
Which makes me wonder. If the data an AI model grabs of the web includes THIS PAPER, will it find a way to sneak around it?
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Marc Andreessen’s Hype: Take it or leave it
Not many people remember Marc Andreesen. He co-founded Netscape that back in the day was the most popular web browser. He was the oracle of the Internet in the early nineties, when the Web was just getting tying its shoelaces and starting to jog.
Today, however he’s the leading trumpeter of the AI-will-save-the-world camp. He peppers his theories with language designed to make us all fall in love with the AI arms race. Here’s one of those wacky statements:
“Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful.”
He calls it “the machine version of infinite love.”
Ga! He’s such a disappointment. He should probably make a close reading of Isaac Asimov. So if you want some entertainment, why don’t you read his piece on why AI will save us?
MORNING ASSEMBLY AT OUR SCHOOL
One of the things I love about our school is our morning assembly we call ‘Opening Ceremony.’ It reminded me of my own school days when we had a morning assembly in the quadrangle. This ritual sends signals to everyone — students and staff - that we are one connected community, instead of abstract faces. We are more then the sum of our parts confined to classrooms. Students not only get to hear a ‘speaker’ selected each week, but they also get to celebrate the small wins in extra curricular events, watch their peers perform —dance, music —and engage with the speaker before the pledge. There is also a short video from Student Government, a sort of news dispatch.
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END NOTE: Voice Notes
I heard a news item yesterday how a nineteen-year old college student in Gaza has been leaving voice notes from southern Gaza. This horrifying, unimaginable act of documenting a war zone is what was once called ‘civic journalism.’ An audio diary that no other form of journalism can replace. If you care to listen to it, find it here.