A number of seniors at Texas A&M University–Commerce who already walked the stage at graduation this year have been temporarily denied their diplomas after a professor ineptly used AI software to assess their final assignments, the partner of a student in his class — known as DearKick on Reddit — claims to Rolling Stone.

Dr. Jared Mumm, a campus rodeo instructor who also teaches agricultural classes, sent an email on Monday to a group of students informing them that he had submitted grades for their last three essay assignments of the semester. Everyone would be receiving an “X” in the course, Mumm explained, because he had used “Chat GTP” (the OpenAI chatbot is actually called “ChatGPT”) to test whether they’d used the software to write the papers — and the bot claimed to have authored every single one.

“I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content,” he wrote, saying he had tested each paper twice. He offered the class a makeup assignment to avoid the failing grade — which could otherwise, in theory, threaten their graduation status.

Texas A&M commerce professor fails entire class of seniors blocking them from graduating- claiming they all use “Chat GTP”
by u/DearKick in ChatGPT

There’s just one problem: ChatGPT doesn’t work that way. The bot isn’t made to detect material composed by AI — or even material produced by itself — and is known to sometimes emit damaging misinformation. With very little prodding, ChatGPT will even claim to have written passages from famous novels such as Crime and Punishment.

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Voir aussi: AG 2023 de l’ASHSM

 

 

But, unless you’re running tracking protection in the browser you’re using right now, companies you’ve never heard of (and some you have) are watching you read this, and eager to use or sell personal data about you, so you can be delivered the human behavior hack called “interest based advertising.”

Shoshana Zuboff, of Harvard Business School, has a term for this:surveillance capitalism, defined as “a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior.”

Almost across the board, advertising-supported publishers have handed their business over to adtech, the surveillance-based (they call it “interactive”) wing of advertising. Adtech doesn’t see your browser as a sacred personal space, but instead as a shopping cart with ad space that you push around from site to site.

So here is a helpful fact: we don’t go anywhere when we use our browsers. Our browser homes are in our computers, laptops and mobile devices. When we “visit” a web page or site with our browsers, we actually just request its contents (using the hypertext protocol called http or https).

In no case do we consciously ask to be spied on, or abused by content we didn’t ask for or expect. That’s why we have every right to field-strip out anything we don’t want when it arrives at our browsers’ doors.

La CJUE vient de publier un arrêt sur le cas d’un citoyen autrichien qui n’avait pas consenti au traitement de ses données à caractère personnel, mais pour qui Österreichische Post avait quand même déterminé «une affinité élevée avec un certain parti politique autrichien».

Le citoyen affirme de son côté « avoir ressenti une grave contrariété, une perte de confiance, ainsi qu’un sentiment d’humiliation, en raison de l’établissement d’une affinité particulière avec le parti en question. C’est au titre de la réparation du préjudice moral qu’il estime avoir subi qu’il réclame devant les juridictions autrichiennes un montant de 1 000 euros ».

La Cour suprême autrichienne avait exprimé des doutes sur ce dernier point et avait demandé à la Cour de Justice de l’Union européenne de se prononcer. La CJUE rappelle que le droit à réparation est subordonné de manière univoque à trois conditions cumulatives : « une violation du RGPD, un dommage matériel ou moral résultant de cette violation et un lien de causalité entre le dommage et la violation ». « Partant, toute violation du RGPD n’ouvre pas, à elle seule, le droit à réparation », ajoute-t-elle.

La Cour constate aussi que « le droit à réparation n’est pas réservé aux dommages moraux atteignant un certain seuil de gravité ». Enfin, le RGPD ne contient pas de dispositions sur des « règles relatives à l’évaluation des dommages-intérêts ».

Il existe dans les greniers de la langue tout un arsenal de mots, comme ce « événements », dont la principale fonction est d’éviter d’avoir à nommer. Plutôt que de violences policières, terme trop « connoté », BFM parle désormais de « dérapages ». Ainsi le Monde, hier, à propos de la répression du mouvement de protestation contre la réforme des retraites, a-t-il remplacé un titre sur « L’escalade sécuritaire d’Emmanuel Macron » par un autre : « Police et préfets en première ligne » (Pauline Bock le raconte en détail ici).  Dans le sous-titre a aussi été supprimée la phrase : « Le pouvoir exécutif multiplie les décisions à la frontière de la légalité, quand elles ne sont pas illégales ». Sans doute le mot « illégal » est-il, lui aussi, « trop connoté ».

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s large language model for chatbots, not only produces mostly insecure code but also fails to alert users to its inadequacies despite being capable of pointing out its shortcomings.

Amid the frenzy of academic interest in the possibilities and limitations of large language models, four researchers affiliated with Université du Québec, in Canada, have delved into the security of code generated by ChatGPT, the non-intelligent, text-regurgitating bot from OpenAI.

In a pre-press paper titled, « How Secure is Code Generated by ChatGPT? » computer scientists Raphaël Khoury, Anderson Avila, Jacob Brunelle, and Baba Mamadou Camara answer the question with research that can be summarized as « not very. »

Speed of Sound (songs at the link) was much derided upon its release in 1976, and more recently one scathing reviewer gave it a “1” score out of 10.  Yet I find this an entertaining and also compelling work.  At least Eoghan Lyng had the sense to call it “definitely infectious and decidedly hummable.”  But it’s better than that, and I would stress the following:

1. The album very definitely has its own “sound.”  Super clean production, a limpid clarity in the mix, and sparing deployment of guitar.  Not all of that works all the time, but there is a coherence to a production often described as a mish-mash.  The sound of the whole is best reflected by “The Note You Never Wrote,” a McCartney song sung by Denny Laine, placed wisely in the number two slot.  Nothing on either the disc or the original album sounds compressed, rather it all comes to life.  It’s better than the sluggish, overproduced, horn-heavy Venus and Mars.

2. The unapologetic presentation has held up fine, rejecting its own era of albums that were overloaded with ideas, overproduced, and too self-consciously parading their messages.  Speed of Sound is so deliberately unhip you can hardly believe it — who else in 1976 would pay tribute to “Phil and Don” of the Everly Brothers?  And Paul was thanking MLK (“Martin Luther”) when others were still flirting with the Black Panthers.  Surely he was right that “Silly Love Songs” would persist, so maybe people were hating on how on the mark he was.

[3]. At exactly the same time Wings was evolving into one of the very best live acts of the 1970s, far better than the Beatles ever were.  (Yes, I know it is hard to admit that.)  Their live act sizzled, and yes I did see it back then and I have listened to it many times since.  Check out the YouTube channel of jimmymccullochfan, for instance “Beware My Love” or “Soily,” or how about “Call Me Back Again“?  For Macca, Wings at this time was essentially a live band, and it proved to be his greatest live band achievement of all time (with some competition from his early 1990s shows), most of all pinned down by Jimmy McCulloch on guitar and Paul on bass.

James Sanders @jas_np@mastodon.social

Somewhere, I think there’s an engineer who is really good at meeting deadlines, now angrily shaking their fist at society because a bunch of people playing with LLMs are calling themselves “prompt engineers” and just like that, all of their personal branding has evaporated.

Apr 29, 2023, 06:48 · · Mastodon for iOS · 1 · 4

Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.

BlueSky’s faux-decentralization

BlueSky differentiates itself from Hive, Post, and other centralized social media newcommers by being ostensibly decentralized. It differentiates itself from the Fediverse by not being the Fediverse, and by being funded by *checks notes* Twitter. Oh, and by being built by Silicon Valley techbros, instead of weirdos who understand consent and how important moderation is.

28 April 2023 12h00 – 14h00

Zwischen Militär, Journalismus und Politik
Internationale Perspektiven
Bruno Lezzi – Autorenlesung

The conference is held in German and is exclusively on-site at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

  • Light snacks following the event

The dramatic changes in world politics call for a renewed approach to security policy. It is difficult to find tangible solutions without knowledge of how the situation developed during the Cold War and after the strategic shift in the early 1990s.

Bruno Lezzi, a security and defence policy specialist, recalls essential milestones in this history in his latest book Von Feld zu Feld – Ein Leben zwischen Armee, Journalismus und Politik. He presents an unvarnished analysis based on his experiences as editor of the NZZ, lecturer for security policy at the University of Zurich and colonel (general staff) in the Swiss Armed Forces.

His visits to hot spots during the wars in the Balkans, Chechnya and Afghanistan have enabled him to draw concise portraits of the descriptions of these decades of tension.

You should have a personal website not because you need to grow an audience, and turn your hobbyist writing into a profession.

You should have a personal website not because you’re an expert on some subject, and it would be cruel to deny the world your wisdom.

You should have a personal website not because you think you’re important.

You should have a personal website not because the world is in need of your highlight reel.

You should have a personal website because I think the online world is as real as the offline world. You have a presence in one, and you should have a presence in the other.

 

Stock images strongly influence the ways in which non-expert audiences think about and understand the topics they illustrate. This is why it is worrying that research has repeatedly shown that many images of artificial intelligence are misleading and unhelpful.

This guide presents the results of a year-long study into alternative ways of creating images of AI, involving roundtable and workshop conversations with over 100 experts from fields including the tech sector, media, education, research, policy and the arts. Its aim is to advise people who work with images of AI – from journalists to communications officers, from educators to activists – on sourcing and creating the best images for communicating accurately and compellingly.

mdjrny-v4 the tree which hides the forrest

Voilà plus de 6 mois que le (petit) monde des NTIC a été happé par la déferlante des IA génératives. Un raz-de-marée médiatique qui éclipse les autres sujets et nous fait croire à l’échec d’usages et technologies innovantes que l’on nous annonçait comme révolutionnaires il y a encore quelques mois. Ne laissez pas l’appétit des médias pour les “Breaking news” obscurcir votre vision, car le Web3 et le métavers restent des sujets d’actualité comme en témoignent les nombreux signaux faibles (et certains forts) que l’on peut capter si l’ont fait l’effort.

Comme beaucoup de professionnels du numérique, vous avez pu constater l’énorme brouhaha médiatique de ces deux dernières années autour du Web3 et du métavers, deux sujets maintenant retombés dans l’oubli, car toute l’attention du marché est accaparée par les IA génératives.

Si l’on suit la courbe de médiatisation des nouvelles technologies de Gartner publié en 2022, effectivement, ces deux sujets étaient en haut du pic des attentes exagérées. Depuis, ils sont très clairement tombés dans le creux des désillusions (What’s New in the 2022 Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies).

Savoir discuter avec ChatGPT devient un art qu’il faut maîtriser. Voici nos conseils pour réaliser des prompts efficaces et réussir ses requêtes.

Matthieu Eugène / Publié le 17 avril 2023 à 09h20

Enchaîner les prompts ou donner un rôle et du contexte à l’IA sont autant de bonnes techniques à utiliser pour ChatGPT. © Montage BDM

ChatGPT a étonné par sa capacité à rédiger sur presque n’importe quel sujet, mais maintenant que le temps de la découverte est passé, vient celui de l’optimisation de l’utilisation de l’outil. Pour tirer le meilleur de l’IA, il faut savoir faire les bonnes requêtes et tout passe par le « prompt ». Le prompt est le terme anglophone qui désigne l’ordre à exécuter. Dans le cas de ChatGPT, il s’agit donc de la demande que vous lui faites. Et cela peut tout changer. Voici quelques techniques pour optimiser vos prompts sur ChatGPT afin d’obtenir de meilleures réponses.

A cyberpunk trainer in front of a library

IndieWeb for Education is the application of indieweb principles to one’s personal site with a particular emphasis on use cases for education, pedagogy, research, academic samizdat, and collaboration. It is generally synonymous with the aims and goals of the A Domain of One’s Own or DoOO movement.

While the general principles of IndieWeb can apply to anyone’s site, in an attempt to help foster the next generation of potential IndieWeb adopters who may be focused on teaching, education, and research, whether at the K-12, undergraduate, graduate, post-doc, or other levels, we’re compiling some specific hints, tips, pointers, and examples which may be germane to these particular audiences to assist in their motivation and adoption.

I mean, what does an alternative to ed-tech as data-extraction, control, surveillance, privatization, and profiteering look like? What does resistance to the buzzwords and the bullshit look like?

I don’t have an answer. (There isn’t an answer.) But I think we can see a glimmer of possibility in the Indie Web Movement. It’s enough of a glimmer that I’m calling it a trend.

—Audrey Watters in Hack Education