New tips for newcomers
There was a surge of new sign-ups this week, so here’s a recap of what to expect.
These emails are a review of last week and include thoughts on Communication as a Discipline, especially regarding Public Relations, and Technology, especially Gregory AI, the open-source project that I am developing with @António Lopes to help accelerate Multiple Sclerosis Research.
On the website, Tags aren’t just used to organise content. Sometimes they contain extra information for you, try the link for @António Lopes or Public Relations.
I believe in sharing, so I keep a link stream that updates every hour with what I am reading or paying attention to.
About last week
Quite a lot this week. School started and I had the first contact with the first-year students who will be working in our PR Lab. It’s a class I teach alongside Tatiana Nunes.
This brought me to the conversation about knowing how to use a computer and only dabbling with the apps. (Remember when we used to just call them Programs ?)
This generation seems to me to be less agile with technology. They can use the apps and understand the concept of a file but there’s a lot outside their grasp. Simple stuff, like using the automatic table of contents for MS Word for example.
It’s not on the curriculum for the PR Lab but I will try to challenge them to find new ways to use the computer.
Should students use AI tools?
Right now I don’t have any proof that they are using AI, and I believe they should. Our only concern should be what happens if they lie about it, or use it wrong. It’s a matter of transparency and professionalism.
The client, internal or external to the company, needs to be aware of what value we are adding on top of what we get from AI.
Are we whitewashing AI?
It’s no secret that ChatGPT is monocultural, biased, and it’s learning our values
So when Google had to apologise for Gemini-generated racially diverse Nazis, I wasn’t surprised.
Google has apologized for what it describes as “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” with its Gemini AI tool, saying its attempts at creating a “wide range” of results missed the mark. The statement follows criticism that it depicted specific white figures (like the US Founding Fathers) or groups like Nazi-era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to long-standing racial bias problems in AI.
Placing guardrails on AI systems is hard enough, when we try to force a new Values System on top of that, problems will surely arise.
I don’t think the solution isn’t in better guardrails but in better training datasets.
Is the AI pony out of tricks?
In my usual collection of AI tools the volume of new finds is slowing down, and some of the ones that pop up are almost always an interface between us and OpenAI’s engine. We can even group them into the same sort of features and purposes. AI Writers are a dime a dozen.
There are still some gems worth trying out.
Your AI tools for this week
I want to help you do more than just dabble with apps, here are last week’s tools that are worth a look.
https://fastsdxl.ai/ is yet another image generator that uses Stable Diffusion and is insanely fast.
https://www.gptshunter.com/ is a collection of plugins for ChatGPT with everything you can think of. From Wolfram’s computational engine to ElevenLabs Text To Speech using a voice of your choosing.
https://github.com/linexjlin/GPTs?tab=readme-ov-file is a list of leaked prompts of GPTs, with any persona you’d like from a Negotiator to an Interview Coach.
