AI as Transcription Tool, Using Zoom

 

 

Even those afflicted with terminal Zoom-fatigue after the pandemic will enjoy a feature that recently
popped up in my Zoom room, a little button labeled "AI Companion." It has proven a good companion indeed.

I have been mentoring a mid-career director of a writing center on the West Coast, and by accident I triggered the feature. In return we got this, when the meeting ended:

• An executive summary of the topics we discussed
• A bullet-listed synopsis of ideas, suggestions, and strategies broken down by topic
• A nearly error-free synthesis of the entire meeting.

The software (Zoom's own proprietary AI) uses Zoom's captioning tool to capture what we say; no video gets recorded. I'm guessing that the data gets shared without our permission with the firm. Caveat emptor.

My mentee loved the accidental result and plans to try it himself. With a few writing students who agreed to use the Companion, I opened my Zoom room during a face-to-face meeting. When done, I e-mailed them the Zoom AI synopsis. Again, save for misspelling a name or two, the AI succinctly and clearly summed up what we had done.

Whenever I meet someone "scared" of AI, I mention uses such as this as good practices. While I remain a skeptical adopter of this new technology, I rather like a robotic note-taker who works with us openly (and not in secret) while freeing humans to focus on each other rather than on taking notes. 

For students with dysgraphia or other disorders that require them to record a class session, this little feature of Zoom is a godsend. Try AI Companion yourself and let me know what you think.

A False Filter in the Drake Equation: LLMs

I read a piece today at Space.com, about a fierce solar storm that hit our planet some 2687 years ago. Another such Miyake event today would likely spell the beginning of a new dark age (looks at wood stove. Better get busy splitting and learn to cut logs without my chainsaw).

The author, Daisy Dobrijevic, goes on, at some length for what I often find a casual venue, to discuss why the stability of our home star matters to our survival as a technological civilization. For once, the comments in these pieces prove as interesting as the source. Those leaving remarks compare Sol to others we observe, noting that our star's orderly behavior could mean that we are a solitary civilization in our galactic neighborhood. These respondents go on to discuss other "filters" to the famous Drake Equation. 

I stupidly had assumed that all stars like our own prove relatively stable. If not, the number of possible civilizations out there could plummet. 

Being alone proves bracing and  calming to me, personally. Yet there exists a difference between solitude and loneliness. If we are the only civilization in our part of the galaxy that seems less about solitude, a healthy thing for many humans, and more about isolation, a terrifying prospect to me.

Read both article and comments, including speculations as to the number of civilizations likely in our own galaxy. Let's forget, save as an intellectual exercise, those in galaxies beyond. The Deep Dark of millions of light years means that if they exist or once existed, we'll likely never encounter them, barring some difficult-to-imagine technology such as wormholes or other exotica far beyond our race, which cannot yet harness nuclear fusion.

I liked the piece by Dobrijevic and commentary a great deal, but in the comments I found one regret, that "Unregulated-LLM insanity" could spell the end of our species. That sort of claim needs challenging, though I'm not eager to start a flame war with a bunch of anonymous posters. Generally, the terms LLM (and AI) have been bandied about too casually.

When Doomscrollers, Doomers, and Millennial Cultists talk of an AI Apocalypse, they envision the sort of Hollywood fantasy of the Terminator or Matrix franchises. My brain goes right to to origin of these fantasies, Harlan Ellison's poignant and horrifying "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream." The story does get a visual homage in the first Matrix film. I don't worry about such horrors getting real.

Frankly, current large language models cannot even ask good critical questions as writing coaches. Thus I find it improbable to imagine ChatGPT or Anthropic Claude as planetary overlords, like the nightmarish AM in Ellison's story.

Were General AI to emerge, we might have the sort of "filter" mentioned by the commenters. Some AI companies have that sort of software in mind: a network with superhuman intelligence, able to reason and grow by itself, much as a human does. It could change its "training data," much as we do when we decide on our own to study something new. Like us, it would then we self-aware and have agency beyond answering questions. It could make decisions on its own, contacting us, for instance, with questions of its own. I consider that a new form of life.

Until then, we merely have energy-hungry LLMs in data centers, parsing our words and predicting the next one to appear in a sequence. I'm no neuroscientist, but that's not how a human mind works.

While I'd be a fool to say we have nothing to fear from AI, my concerns are more earthly: unemployment, lack of income, not to mention worries about climate change, nuclear proliferation, erosion of rule of law, regional or global war, civil strife. So I'd tell our forum pundits opining about AI threats this: we have filters aplenty closer to home than some super-intelligence.

Be mindful, then, of the terms used in discussions about AI. We who work with this technology do not want to propagate careless thinking about a very important, and still evolving, innovation. If you are still wishing to learn more about The Drake Equation, have a look at the NASA site where I got the post's lead image.

The Danger of Bad Journalism & Robert Plant's "Big Log"

If you like Robert Plant's songwriting, his 1983 tune "Big Log," with its enigmatic name, may be near the top of your list. It's a fabulous road-song ballad about longing. For example:

My love is in league with the freeway
Its passion will ride, as the cities fly by
And the tail-lights dissolve, in the coming of night
And the questions in thousands take flight.

Good work, Robert. I heard the song recently and decided to read more about it; 1983 was a momentous year for me, graduating college (barely) and embarking on a few bad jobs that finally led me to Spain, then grad school. So what on earth does a song that takes its name have to do with logs? The best explanation, linked to the song's theme, involves a trucker's log book, a document they need to complete constantly. Yes, it's still done on paper, too, though many truckers keep electronic logs as well.

Even when hauling big wooden logs.  And what does this have to do with artificial intelligence or any other topics I cover in this strange land?

This:

"Plant sings, 'My love is like a big log / Rolling down the road'. The comparison of his love to a log creates a sense of heaviness and weight, as if his love is too much to carry or too difficult to move. The log rolling down the road also creates a sense of inevitability and certainty, as if his love is on an unstoppable path."

I found this, amid gales of laughter, a web site called Beat Cave that demonstrates the laziness of online content-providers today. It's a poorly designed site with pop-up videos that block content, ads across the bottom, and other hallmarks of the junk-strewn highway that today's Internet has become. It's also just the sort of site that a lazy student in my old course "The Road," would go to "analyze" a road-song of their choosing.

Now where did author "Marty Pope" get this interpretation? The lyrics appear on none of the usual lyrics sites nor in the cover of the song by Allison and Viktor Krauss. I decided to put a question to a few AI. I used the laziest-student denominator: the free AI at Google and Bing searches.

Surprisingly, neither mentioned rolling logs. They both gave succinct answers about longing, travel, and destiny.

So I went to the dumbest AI on the block, the free ChatGPT 3.5 LLM and asked a few questions. Here we are, in Q&A Format:

Me: Are there any references to rolling logs in Robert Plant's song "Big Log"?

3.5: Yes, there is a subtle reference to "rolling logs" in Robert Plant's song "Big Log," although it isn't the central metaphor of the song. The lyrics include the line:

"I see the rolling logs, I see the rolling logs."

This line appears in the latter part of the song, and its meaning can be interpreted in a couple of ways, depending on how one reads the context of the song.

Me: No offense, but the lyric you cite does not appear anywhere in Plant's song.

3.5: You're absolutely right, and I sincerely apologize for that mistake! There is no reference to "rolling logs" in Robert Plant's song "Big Log"—I must have made an error in recalling the lyrics. Thank you for pointing that out!

The actual lyrics of "Big Log" contain various vivid images, but they don't include the specific mention of "rolling logs." The song focuses on themes of longing, emotional weight, and movement, often using imagery like "a big log" and references to "the desert" or "dry land," but not rolling logs specifically.

I don't see any references to "dry land," "log," or "desert" in the actual lyrics. These words do appear in forums online about the song's music video, shot in the desert.

I thanked the AI and logged off. I see here exactly how students who are anxious, lazy, confused, or all of above can use the software really poorly. Maybe they don't expect their teachers to be lyrics geeks.

Some of us are. Verdict?

"You are clobbered by a big log. Your grade=zero. Redo and resubmit, and I'll average your two grades."

 Lesson learned? For now but from the actual song, "There is no turning back on the run."

And we are on the run from critical thinking when we use AI that way.

Why the Hype Cycle Does not Quite Work For Generative AI

(Not) The Same As It Ever Was

Many years (!) ago, I wrote here about why the Virtual World Second Life had followed, fairly well, the Gartner Group's well known "hype cycle" for new technology. Follow the link here to read about the history of the concept.

I'm reminded by Wagner James Au of New World Notes that other virtual worlds such as Fortnite and Minecraft have thrived, and indeed, have seen some good use-cases made for education.

At the same time, I don't hear of anyone at Capitol One's hive using virtual worlds. We don't see links from Office 365 or Google Workspaces to a virtual world. I have a sense that AI is a different animal for these worker bees and their daily applications, as well as my own students.

I do know a freelance graphic designer who lost her primary client to AI work; the client outsources graphics to AI run by semi-skilled staff in-house. My friend has moved on to ramp up her greeting-card business. That may color my skepticism that AI is a "fad," as Second Life clearly was.

SL and Gartner

I joined the virtual world in 2007, and yes, I was foolishly an enthusiast. Since I believe in being forthcoming about personal mistakes, I recall telling my students investigating this Strange Land that "you will all have avatars in a few years, for work!" I let slip the same to some colleagues, one of whom aid "you never met a technology you didn't love!"

Cringe. 

I'll own being horribly wrong. Prognostication is a dicey thing! A silly image I cobbled together years ago shows the evolution of Second Life avatars (namely, my own, Iggy). At the same time, my update to the old image points toward a new direction in desktop and mobile computing that we all felt, a decade ago, to be far over the horizon.

For many reason, including the difficulty of building simulations, a clunky interface, heavy system requirements, even poor management by Linden Lab, Second Life began a descent from what Gartner calls a "Peak of Inflated Expectations" in 2007.

By 2012 Second Life was well into a "Trough of Disillusionment." As early as 2008 I sensed that the media-party was over. A year later, I cited three factors working against academic use in a post here: Lack of rewards and incentives for faculty, the time needed to master the interface and content, Linden Lab's vacillating leadership and policies, the presence of what I and my students called "the creepy treehouse" of adult users doing sometimes naughty things.

In the for-profit sector, businesses that set up virtual storefronts in 2007 soon fled; a professor of Marketing I helped get started found SL fascinating, but after interviewing in-world merchants, she put it plainly: for brick-and-mortar firms, there's little return on investment in Second Life.

SL continues to be a large virtual world, with better graphics, promises of a new physics engine, and a dedicated base of users, but it did not become a daily experience on the job or at school. The Hype Cycle proved accurate. This has happened before: stand-alone creative hypertexts such as Michael Joyce's afternoon also map onto the cycle, though never regaining the popularity they enjoyed in the 1990s or even a steady base of users. Creative hypertexts appear to have faded utterly.

When a colleague in our campus digital pedagogy cohort claimed that generative AI would follow the same path traced by Gartner, I bristled because this time I feel that Gartner's model does not fit what I am seeing, daily, among students.

I could be wrong if a series of issues afflict AI. So let's compare the Second Life experience to that of generative AI:

The Browser

SL was never browser-based, even as a plugin, unlike the easy-to-master Unity 3D interface; AIs are built already into tools we use daily or can be queried from any Web browser.

Client v. Server Side

SL has high client-side requirements, whereas AI puts the burden on the server farms; these use enormous amounts of energy that my students and colleagues only recently started to notice, with all the inherent dangers related to sustainability.

The Interface 

SL has a difficult interface, employing menus worthy of an entire operating system and arcane coding options, whereas Gen AI's query features resemble (for now) those of a familiar search engine but with natural-language input. 

Platform Independence

SL and AI both work on multiple operating systems, but SL has never worked well with mobile devices; AI is baked into many apps now, with some Google searches automatically invoking Gemini results and Apple promising Apple Intelligence in their next phones. 

Creepy Treehouse

 SL has adult content that troubled my students; the guardrails we increasingly see with AI tend to keep users (sometimes clumsily or incompletely) from making Napalm or pornography.

Investment Sources

Investment in SL comes from individual users at this point; AI attracts venture capital, user subscriptions, and big-tech investment (Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google).

Source of Growth in Academia

Faculty and campus-technologist curiosity spurred interest in SL; student use erupted for AI spontaneously in the Fall of 2022 and remains very strong. 

A Shaky Prognosis

To be fair to Second Life, system load has largely remained steady in the last decade. In my recent experience, I can run SL and a third-party client called Firestorm on my MacBook using no more than my phone's hotspot to connect to the world. That's astounding progress.

I don't foresee any of these differences posing a stumbling block for AI, leading to a Trough of Disillusionment, save energy use. We have a climate crisis; the last thing we can afford as a civilization would be to ramp up emissions of Carbon Dioxide.  

Yet if Moore's Law continues apace, we'll see AI reap rewards of lower power use because of more powerful processors in the servers that run it. Any disillusionment is likely to be temporary and its "trough" quite shallow.

For these reasons, I don't see the Hype Cycle apply to Generative AI in the same way as it has to several earlier technologies. I may be wrong, but for now Gartner's model does not fit it well.

Image Sources: Wikipedia Commons for Hype Cycle.