EASIE AI - For learners, parents, and teachers [Issue 7]

Welcome, cutting-edge educators and aspirational parents

Introducing your no-nonsense EASie guide to using AI to support your kids’ learning and growing your own AI literacy

Today, we’ll cover:

• Trending AI Apps

• Using new tools - Data Secure Email Assistants

• Generating Images with AI - Making Small Edits

• AI Beginners Jargon—Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

• AI Adepts Jargon—Weak/Narrow AI

• AI News

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Reading Time 4 Mins

Trending AI Apps

AI apps delighting educators and parents.

• Coursebox is an AI-driven learning management system (LMS) that will design courses from your typed-in prompts, documents or videos in a few seconds and reflect your requirements.

• Course Hero: Homework Helper Students upload their documents to Course Hero, and the AI takes over. A typical experience sees the app extract questions from the file and offer answers.

• scite.ai Scite has the tagline of ChatGPT for science. It lets you search academic articles, journals, and papers by asking questions and receiving answers with high-quality and relevant citations.

Using New Tools - Staying Data Secure

Where does your data go?

When you write a personal email with your AI-based assistant turned on, do you know what actually happens?

Let’s consider the worst case.

Your private email goes to an AI model hosted in the cloud, which processes it.

• Every time your data leaves your device, it could get stolen.

• Every place your data reaches may store a copy.

• AI may absorb your message for future training.

• AI could aggregate your data to build a profile.

Teachers often deal with confidential data about lots of children, and parents are naturally protective of their children’s privacy.

AI assistants can speed up your communications and productivity, but always check on their terms and conditions about how and where your data gets used.

Look beyond the leading AI players for those who prioritise privacy.

One example is Proton, which offers multiple tools, including an email assistant with clear data usage policies and open-source software for better scrutiny.

Step-by-step

• Create an account at Proton

• Sign up for a free account (no payment details needed) or choose a $1 trial for a premium account.

• The free account will give you access to the Proton email service which offers enhanced privacy

• If you have elected to trial the $1 upgrade you will get access to the newly released Proton Scribe a privacy centred email-writing asssitant.

Generating Images With AI

Making Tweaks

When we were first impressed by AI imagery, we were restricted to the given output. We could ask it to try again with a slight adjustment, but the inherent randomness in LLMs meant that the subsequent image would be very different.

Most recent AI image generators let you make small changes. Each works slightly differently, but I’ll show you the process using ChatGPT. The key takeaway is that this is possible, but not everyone has realised.

• Click on the image.

• Select the leftmost icon in the top left of the screen (it looks like a paintbrush drawing a squiggle line).

• Highlight the area you want to change.

• Say what changes you want, such as removing the letter.

How does this help in education?

It is a quick way to get acceptable images to enhance your resources but it can help in other ways too.

Recently, I wanted an image of a dam for children to label. The AI clearly has training images for this kind of task as it produced a reasonable picture, but it kept including distorted labels. Even when told not to show them, it still included lines to irrelevant elements or included partial labels

The solution was to use the method above to highlight each line and word and ask the AI to remove them. The result was a diagram good enough to use with children, especially after I manually added lines to the relevant places.

AI Jargon - Learning

We’ll help you increase your knowledge of AI by explaining a beginner and advanced concept each week.

For AI beginners—We all start somewhere.

API (Application Programming Interface).

APIs are like a set of rules and tools that allow different software applications to communicate with each other. They are common in lots of software, not just AI, as they allow different software components to pass messages between each other.

When you use an AI that uses a large model such as ChatGPT, your app or browser will send your prompt to the AI and receive an answer. The API defines how the send and receive commands work.

As a user, you won’t need to worry about APIs; however, they touch on an important aspect - your app and its AI are often separate entities with different terms and conditions. The API is how your app sends your inputted data to the AI.

Currently, AI is usually hosted in the cloud, meaning your data does not remain on your device. Small models are beginning to emerge, which are more limited but could perform focused tasks on your device without sending your data elsewhere.

For AI Adepts—Next-level AI Knowledge!

Weak AI/Narrow AI

Weak AI, also known as Narrow AI, is a type of artificial intelligence designed to perform a specific or narrow range of tasks. Unlike strong AI, which aims to understand, think, and learn like humans across a broad spectrum of activities, weak AI focuses on one particular area.

All current forms of AI (unproven rumours of breakthrough AI in labs aside) are weak. ChatGPT is good at creating text but doesn’t understand it in a human sense and cannot learn brand-new skills. Midjourney can create images but can’t challenge you to a game of checkers.

Weak AI is still a powerful tool which can automate many mundane tasks and can support human creativity.

AI News

Your one-stop, in-brief AI newsstand

• UK School Reprimanded for using AI Facial recognition without carrying out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) before introducing the new biometric technology for lunch payments.

• Meta AI (Facebooks,Instagram) is now powered by Llama 3.1 405B one of the largest open source AI models available. Reports suggest it improves on earlier Meta AI models, excels in a few areas, but doesn’t quite compete with ChatGPT or Claude.

• Microsoft has brought Designer, its AI-based Canva competitor, out of preview. You can download it for free on mobile and PC