Peace (In A Box),
Kevin
ChatGPT Sorta Knows Me But Bard Doesn’t Seem To
Forget Googling oneself. I wondered what would happen if I ChatGPT-ed myself. What would it know about me? Sure, it’s narcissistic but I was curious about this new emerging technology.
When I Googled myself (with additional information about “teacher” and “Western Massachusetts” etc) before doing this ChatGPT experiment, I saw links to articles I have written for various publications and assorted media, some of which were me and some of where not me (some other Kevin in the world with shared name). There was no narrative about who I might be, just links that might lead me back to me, somewhere else, online.
When I ChatGPT-ed myself (OK, I need a better term here, particular when Bard and other AIs get in the mix), it actually knew quite a bit about me, and it was quite laudatory in its narrative description (it was some cheerleading to end a long week although I felt embarrassed to read some of it). But it also wrong about a few things, including the so-called books I wrote (I didn’t write those books).
Since I am not sure exactly where it has gathered its information, I assume most of it is from either articles I have written, my blog here, and other open educational spaces where I have long been active. I’ve left a lot of words in a lot of place over the years. The false reference to those books it says I authored likely came from book reviews I had done on them.
I also asked it about my Dogtrax moniker, and it knew it was me.
And I asked it about my blog, and it knew my blog and that I wrote it.
When I did similar queries into Google’s Bard Chat AI, it was not much worth of much at all.
First, Bard didn’t know who I was (OK, so maybe that’s a good thing that I am not in its database? I’m not even sure anymore).
Second, it referenced a teacher/writer with the question about “Who is Dogtrax?”, although not my specific name (now I am thinking maybe searching by name is one of the guardrails of Bard?) but it lumped a reference to me in with someone who wrote a book of poetry (Wait — maybe that’s me, too?) as well as “a dog who runs a popular Instagram account” (which is definitely not me, but now call me curious).
Bard seemed to know my blog but said it was Kevin Jarrett (another educational writer) who wrote it. I don’t think Kevin Jarrett had a blog of the same name, and I searched to no avail, but the rest of the references seemed to be about my blog (maybe, it was sort of a generic response). It ended with this as a recommendation: “If you’re looking for a blog that will make you think, laugh, and learn, I highly recommend checking it out.”
What do we make of all of this? (I seem to be asking myself this question a lot these days)
One lesson is that if you have been writing out in the open, your words and ideas are likely in the belly of the machine. I searched for my wife’s name and nothing came up, although she, too, is a writer and educator, just not as openly published as I have been. I’ve done that knowingly, which is important to understand as a writer.
It should be a given, too, that you don’t want to search ChatGPT for information about something and think it is all true. But it can give you a snapshot — one data point — that might inform you about something.
Maybe even yourself, if you are curious enough to try.
Peace (and Search),
Kevin
Video Poem: Murmurations
Lines Of Inquiry Guiding Me Into EMOOC2 and Artificial Intelligence
I still need to watch the video archive from the first gathering of ETMOOC2 and a shared exploration of Artificial Intelligence and I am getting myself acclimated to the Discord space where discussions are unfolding along different lines as the open community starts its explorations.
In terms of focus, I am hoping to try to develop some useful resources and lines of inquiry around the concepts of:
- Helping families of my students navigate this new world of AI in terms of learning, and helping them to better understand what ChatGPT and its many cousins are all about;
- Developing some elements of professional development for other educators that I might be able to offer in my school district or through my National Writing Project network (through my home site of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project);
- Grappling with the ethics of young students knowing and using AI tools, even though they are clearly not old enough nor mature enough to comprehend the emotional elements that come from working with technology that appears “sentient” even though it is not;
- Exploring more intersections of multimedia AI tools, and how they might merge together for artistic expression in a way that is meaningful and navigates the line between the ethical dilemmas of AI (such as ownership of the original material that the AI systems have scraped for its database);
- Building out a Diigo Outliner of resources that I hope to better curate around main themes of AI and writing and learning. Right now, it’s sort of a mess of links with no real structure or context. (This could fold into the professional development project).
We’ll see how it goes but I hope having some guiding focal points will be helpful for me, particularly as the school year goes into high gear with the end of the year on the horizon in June.
Peace (and Thinking),
Kevin
Audio Poem: I Had Starlings On My Mind
Starlings flickr photo by troutcolor shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
At Verselove, the prompt this morning was free writing, and I had starlings on my mind.
Peace (Flock To It),
Kevin
Video Poem: Weaving Words (with Robert Browning)
Poem: Weaving A Poem Into The Lines Of Another
The prompt at VerseLove this morning was to find a poet who shares your birthday month and use lines from one of their poems for inspiration. I found Robert Browning and used the first line of his poem, Epilogue. I wove another poem into the fabric of his lines.
At the midnight
(waiting, as always,
for the moon clock
to chime, the falling
star seconds beckon
the eye)in the silence
(you hold hands,
and tongues,
in these hours,
when the long day’s
no longer young,
but aged in galaxy
light)of the sleep-time
(grass dew pillows
beneath your heads,
she said earlier how
she needs roots and
seeds, not feathers,
to hold her mind,
upright, tonight)When you set your fancies free
(waxing, not waning,
the silver shine always and
forever reminds you
of her, in the now and for
the always, this night when
you watched the quiet
unfold)
Peace (In the Skylight),
Kevin
Poem: Spin Fidget
Poem: Gall Ink
From Audio To Image To Audio Back Again: Static In The Poem
I’ve had some strange obsession over the years of finding creative connections between audio files (in particular, music) and image files, and how to make one become the other, and vice versa. I tried some interesting experiments with a PC program called AudioPaint, and even tinkered with using Audacity for audio-image convergence, but none of those experiments generated anything to get too excited about. Mostly the result was noise — either visual or aural.
My DS106 friend John J over on Mastodon shared a conversion site the other day for the Daily Create — Wave2Png — and I gave it a try with a music file that I had written for this experiment. A short piece of instrumental loops that begins with a static sound blast. The site ate my wav file and kicked out an image file of … something like a panel of orange, sort of the same variation that John had created in his own experiment. John said he thought the idea was to take that generated file, and use photo editors to remix it, to turn it into something else.
That sounded like something worth trying, and I went through a few iterations with the orange panel before landing on a version that became even more static as a visual, with a black and white wave vibe, prompting a poem that I layered lightly on top of the file. Then, since the font I used brings forth the background, I tried to add another color layer (yellow) to the back and I really liked the effect. The poem is nearly static itself in the way I created it, in look and design, and the poem — which went through a few iterations — is called Static In The Poem.
As a final step, I brought the image file with the written poem into a video mixer and added back into the original song that had started the whole process. I do like the final video result but I am not sure all of the meta-work (audio-image conversion, filtering effects, adding words, re-layering the audio) does much for the casual reader/watcher but at least now you know how I got there.
Oh, I also did try a revers-o move — putting the final image/poem file back into Wave2Png to see if it would generate a new soundtrack for me, but all I got was an audio file of silence. The machine as critic!
Peace (Filtered, for effect),
Kevin