The next generation of large language models beyond GPT-4 may present unique and unprecedented risks to society — but is temporarily halting their development the right way to go? — (Cross posted from Substack — read the full article here) A couple of weeks ago, a number of leading artificial intelligence experts — and many others — created something of a stir when they published an open letter calling on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6…

Well, I finally cracked and moved my less formal writing on technology, society, and the future, over to substack. To be honest, I’ve missed writing a focused blog. I started blogging way back in 2007 when I was at the sharp end of research and action around the responsible development…

Exploring Innovative Approaches to Evaluating and Supporting Faculty in Research Universities using ChatGPT — What does “tenure” mean at a research university? How does this create institutional and social value? How should tenure track faculty be evaluated — especially as understanding of what constitutes “scholarship” continues to evolve? …

Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been grappling with how ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) are impacting teaching and education — especially at the undergraduate level. Since ChatGPT’s public launch last November, there’s been a flurry of articles predicting educational chaos as students use it to complete assignments…

Why be yourself when, with the help of ChatGPT, you could be channeling great writers of the past? — Yesterday I posted a very long article on working with ChatGPT to write my annual academic self-evaluation — a task that I dread each year! The results were pretty impressive — by working with ChatGPT, I managed to get a compelling evaluation together without the usual existential angst this process…

I find writing about myself and my achievements for my annual academic review a miserable process. So I thought I’d see of ChatGPT could help. — I hate writing my annual academic self-evaluation. Scratch that, I dread it. …

A timely lineup of films that remind us that intelligent machines don’t aways have to be bad for the future of being human — Think robot movies, and it’s easy to conjure up images of dystopian futures, dominated by intelligent machines that have decided that the one thing they really can’t stand, is people. Yet there are a surprising number of films where robots pull on our heart strings, and that hint at a…

The just-released conversational chatbot has an impressive ability to convey complex concepts in understandable language — There’s been a flurry of interest in Open AI’s ChatGPT bot since was opened up to the public last week — and for good reason. The bot is remarkably good at providing informed responses and engaging in conversations that feel authentic. Since ChatGPT’s release there’s been a lot of interest…

All these images were generated by Midjourney using a single prompt. And while it’s debatable whether they are art, they are still jaw-dropping. — I’ve spent the past few weeks playing around with the AI art bot Midjourney, and I must confess that I’ve been blown away by what it can produce. I’ve also come to realize that, more than anything, these machine learning image creation platforms have an amazing ability to unleash human…