Shouldn't we start talking? How should we educate kids going forward?
And when this education could be a solid point?
And ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children, all ages, dogs, cats, robots, and everybody in between, welcome to HTTTA, how to talk to AI. I am your host, Wes the Synth Mind, Synth Mind Wes.
And as always, in a globe governed by gigabytes and genetic algorithms, one guide galvanizes to decode the grander, generalize the complexities and guide us through the uncharted grids of artificial intelligence.
Who is this, you may ask? It's GoToGo herself. Gee, how are you this week?
Hi, I'm great. I recomposed myself. I'm great. This is absolutely normal introduction. I'm totally used to that.
There you go. I am merely a conduit for generative AI to speak through with various adjectives that start with the letter G.
Episode two of video, episode 12, we're working out some kinks, but we appreciate the response from all our audience thus far. Here we are. Another week in AI. There's always exciting stuff happening in AI.
Some exciting launches in AI as well. Mid-Journey 5.2.
Sure. I mean, have you gotten a chance to noodle around with 5.2?
Yeah, everyone is super excited about zoom function. And I really want to still create this infinite zoom of image.
Which movie was it? Limitless? You know, this episode where it just keeps going.
So that's something I really want to recreate now with Mid-Journey. We had already tools for that before, but I think just fascinating.
But another feature, which I tested just from the curiosity standpoint, was shortened prompts.
You say slash, shorten, input your prompt and Mid-Journey is evaluating which parts of your prompt do nothing or you should eliminate and makes you, I think, five suggestions.
That was very interesting. So the next thing that I want to test now, I haven't done yet to take Prompt Perfect, optimize prompt and just see how that weights together with Mid-Journey's judgment.
Because usually that's exactly what Prompt Perfect was doing, optimizing for Mid-Journey.
I still use Prompt Perfect as opposed to the describe function in Mid-Journey.
For those that don't know, within Mid-Journey, I think what, five, five zero or five one and beyond, you can upload a image and say Mid-Journey describe it.
And it will use kind of like the reverse of a diffusion model to describe through computer vision and a bunch of other things what is in that picture and create a prompt.
However, I happen to always find Mid-Journey's version of that a little stale and our good friends over at Prompt Perfect's version of the same tool, which, mind you, they had debuted, I think, a month before, at least.
If not longer, I always think there's a better job with least with more colorful prompt language.
But now we have some measure to kind of go back and see if all that extra colorful flowery language even matters.
And from Perfect, you have more of the controls, like shorten the prompt, increase quality and stuff like that.
So it's not just that you upload image and it describes it, but you can adjust it to what you are actually looking for.
Listeners, hopefully know, check out the show notes for a little discount code to our friends over at Prompt Perfect.
Give it a shot. I have to imagine that the zoom feature is also pretty compelling to creators.
You said you got a chance to play with that a little bit, right?
Yeah, and I think it's interesting that this kind of mid-journey's way to respond to this generative fill in Photoshop,
where you have to expand and prompt it again to fill and this is just like does it automatically.
And the results are really, really compelling and really great.
It's becoming less shocking, this type of features.
I don't know how it is on your side, but when I saw it tested, I was like, yeah, cool.
That's how I imagine it should be functioning.
Am I just getting like completely numb?
We are really just getting a little numb to it because it's just like, you know, take any for those that can't really conceptualize right now what we're talking about.
We have a couple pictures of how the zoom out function works.
Basically imagine an image and then if you were to step back at certain degrees,
you know, 1.75 times, two times away from the main image subject, what would that look like?
What things would be happening around that image if you were to zoom out from the initial one?
So it can get very creative, adding people to a scene or a portrait image or a landscape, entirely different features as you zoom out.
It's a very interesting use for generative AI because it not only can be used for completely generated image creations,
but re-imaginings of images that were taken, existing photos or pieces of art.
What would that look like if, you know, they were to zoom out a little more?
Now you gave me an idea to extend my own images, but also extend my own paintings.
Ah, there you go.
That's an interesting, no?
Yeah.
So we talked a lot about the sentiment about prompts and generating prompts and prompt engineering as a career.
Multiple comments I saw is that you can just ask Charge GPT to create prompts for you or optimize prompts for you.
And I was like, yeah, of course it's logical that it does,
but we also know with hallucinations that Charge GPT will go extra miles to sound extremely convincing.
So I went and I was like, oh, optimize prompt for me journey.
Okay, fine.
Like I don't have any baseline to let's say evaluate that besides prompt perfect optimization or describe in image.
But then I was like, okay, let me put a research hat and be like, let's ask to optimize prompt and create prompt for
Wacuna text to image model, which is completely made up.
And yeah, it went and was like, yeah, the best optimization tactics for Wacuna image models are this and that.
And it created a prompt for this model and even told me that these tactics work very well for Wacuna image model.
So just to put it out there that yeah, Charge GPT will go ahead and create amazing prompts and optimize prompts for whatever model you come up with.
So it's just a question, you know, what is good enough and what is really optimized and what you can really do.
So I would always, you know, lean to the companies who specialize on this specific issue or a problem solving.
Exactly.
It's not going to truly performing optimization.
It's just going to reconfigure the prompt.
Whereas like some of the tools that you're given at prompt perfect where it can add different measures of quality, shorten it, elongate it.
That's actually done with an algorithm or a function that is improved over time and calculated and measured.
That's the way you actually truly want to optimize a prompt like that.
Well, speaking of optimization, we came across a little happenstance this week that made me smile a little bit with regards to AI in the classroom, specifically computer science classrooms.
Not sure folks are aware, but Harvard has a introduction to computer science course called CS50 and the social network movie.
It talks about this a little bit, you know, with Zuckerberg and in this course, it's a very famous and widely lauded computer science course.
Five thousand students at Harvard sign up for it every year.
And one great thing about it before I get into the article, the entire course is free on YouTube.
We have a YouTube channel, one million.
One point five million just for this course.
And the profile picture is a cat.
The primary instructor, Professor Mandlin, easily the most engaging instructor I've ever, ever watched, ever witnessed.
Even if you have no interest in coding computers, anything at all, it's undeniable that they pretty much are kind of foundational to our entire human experience now,
be it our phones, be it the technology in our cars, TVs, everything around us.
So I would encourage everyone to just watch at least the first video in the CS50 series.
I think it's a series of about 20 ish lectures that are on there.
Do yourself a favor. Watch the first one.
It was not until I found this course in grad school or I was in comp methods one just in over my head.
I'm just like, what is going on?
What is this like Python?
You're telling me about, you know, functions and lists and dictionaries.
And I'm just like, it's not gelling.
And I just happen to find this course and Professor Mandlin is just so engaging.
And just throughout the course of this by like the third or fourth video, it just like clicked for me.
It kind of gelled. I'm just like, oh, that's how you mean object oriented programming.
That's how binary works. It's got some great examples.
I think really anyone would find it terrific.
So I can't give a ringing enough endorsement for it.
But the reason I'm even telling this story is within CS50.
Now the students are going to have a chat bot teacher.
The AI teacher is going to teach part of the class beginning in September.
Is it just that AI avatar or is chat bot and personalized learning path?
And another thing is this for free with the AI teacher.
This whole course is online and also taught through their EDX platform listed on there all for free.
I have to imagine that the parents of these undergraduate students taking CS50 don't feel too great about an AI chat bot teaching their students
considering they're paying the tuition fees that I'm sure are quite substantial in Harvard these days.
That's true.
Which, you know, but I think the true intent and there's a quote here from Professor Mandlin.
Our hope is that through AI, we can eventually approximate a one to one teacher to student ratio for every student in CS50
by providing them with the software based tools that 24 7 can support their learning at a pace and in a style that works best for them individually.
Personalized learning. Here you go.
Personalized learning tailored to their needs.
Their chat bot delivers examples that resonate with them that are in their learning style.
Like, you know, perhaps they have some sort of like survey at the beginning that students can take to kind of give the chat bot a persona in terms of like how it's going to give them personalized instruction.
But this is the way it's going.
You know, the generative AI think is going to transform tons of classrooms, the entire learning experience and in a very good way, you know, a recall based learning paradigm.
Like it's always been.
It's not as necessary as it used to be back in the day.
Back in like the 1817 1600s, like you needed a recall based kind of learning style because the centers of knowledge were cities and the people that learned everything would have to go take this to areas where there weren't a lot of books.
There weren't a lot of population and recall facts and lessons and stories and things that are happening.
So like that's that kind of roughly built this entire framework of how at least probably you and I came up learning.
And here we have something where you could just kind of completely circumvent that.
You know, I don't think the need for recall is as important anymore because we can call upon information.
It's at our fingertips at all times.
So rather than being just a game of memorization game of to test your understanding.
Now we have these tools that can be all right, no matter what we're going to teach you in a way that will resonate with you from a accessibility perspective.
That's tremendous.
But also that opens up a means of constantly teaching like critical thinking skills throughout every single, you know, every single lesson, every single topic or course.
That to me is the true kind of magic of this, these generative AIs as tutors, because you're reinforcing a lot of different measures and practices of critical thinking that can be applied to every aspect of someone's life.
For me, just hearing you talk comes two points.
One is about parents paying this tuition.
I hope finally people realize what they pay money when they send their kids to university.
And I had this very interesting experience.
So I don't know if I told you, but before pandemic hit, I was visiting Paris and I was planning and very much on a go to study MBA at INSEAD.
It's a business management school.
It's always ranked at the top, at least in Europe, if not worldwide.
I think anybody at McKinsey would know that.
And I had some consultation calls and one lady and I had very good conversation with her.
And basically she was saying to me she did INSEAD back in the days and it cost over 100,000, which is crazy considering that, you know, all my educations were free, even though in prestigious schools, because this is just how like, I don't know, we are used to.
But this one specifically you pay.
Not here in the States, not in the States.
I know, I know.
But she told me this thing that when it comes down to education, especially these days, you don't pay for education.
You pay for networking opportunities and access to alumni network.
This is the two things.
Yeah, you can throw in experience, but I think especially at MBA and I was looking at the executive master's degree.
You come with an experience, you already experience, you know, a bachelor, you already experience corporate world or owning your own business.
So this whole experience going back to the school maybe is not the first touch point where you, you know, learn how to live in a dorm and all those things.
And then it went pandemic hit and I took this money and bought apartment.
And I can tell you, I don't regret right now that I didn't continue in Seattle, even though it's amazing.
It's still kind of on my list, but maybe down the line when 100,000 is not this ginormous number.
And the second point about education in general, which we both are parents, so it's super relevant.
I think it's rolling in your head how the whole education system is going to be looking in the future.
And that we are seeing this transition, especially in a Harvard University scale.
Like I want to understand, you know, some school somewhere, but this is Harvard putting out a statement like that.
Like they are standing for something and that education system that it goes, as you mentioned, all the way back to 18, 19th century.
But every Western education system is based on Prussian education system.
And Prussian education system was created back then in Germany, like current Germany.
And it was primarily created because Germans didn't listen to their soldiers during the Napoleonic wars.
So what can you do?
The idea was that you gather kids from age 6 to 16 and you put them in the classrooms and you teach them to listen, to follow rigid tables, to remember instructions.
The insane aspect of that is that nothing really changed throughout all the industrial revolutions, even just automation revolution, right?
Kids still go to school, sit in the tables, memorize text.
And this is the way we are learning. And by the way, back then it was just for boys because of the main purpose and the reason it was free.
And this is why it kind of was populating in Europe, free education, right?
It was for boys because the idea was to send them to military afterwards.
Right. And the girls were taught moms or maids.
And then only later with industrial revolution that we need workers in the factory.
So we need administration workers. We need people to operate sewing machines.
Therefore, girls started going to school to memorize tables and follow orders.
Yeah, so I am incredibly excited for education system to take different shape and form.
What better endorsement is there than like, hey, our entire system is based on kind of a need for soldiers to listen to their superior officers on the battlefield.
Maybe it's time to reinvent the wheel here a little bit with regard to how our young folks are educated.
And just the point that when you have small children, I find it fascinating that a lot of times AI and how you train AIs refer to how you interact with kids and how you observe kids learning.
And this is the truth that you adjust the information or the tools or the toys to introduce to the kid based on their development, based on their interest.
And this is how you follow through their education. But you do that as a parent or if you're trying to be active parent with educating against and then you place them in the school and then put a stamp on them.
But OK, now you have to learn this. Sit here. Listen, even though if it's not relevant, not interesting at all.
I just so can't imagine going back to sitting in a classroom for for 12 years.
I was kicking around the idea of getting a PhD and my wife's like, no, you've been a student your entire adult life.
You better rest. But now with the onset of generative AI, why would you the same way unless you just want the pedigree?
I mean, there's we found an interesting research paper this week to that.
Like, hey, here is here's here teachers. Here is some direct things that you can do with prompts and prompt engineering in the classroom.
Like right now to help things like your lesson plans, your, you know, the types of questions, the way you evaluate things.
I think it was a it was a study by a couple of professors at the Wharton School of Interactive Education and University of Pennsylvania.
And this is an important topic to me. I'm actually with some of my partners at SynthBinds.
We're actively developing a course on AI for educators that we hope to get deployed in front of some teachers before the upcoming school year,
because there's just so many things that they can do to better evaluate not only, you know,
offload some of the burden of lesson planning and creating content for their students, but like also to educate them on it.
Hey, this is a very real thing that your students will be using, you know, maybe let's have an understanding of it.
It's limitations. And hopefully, you know, they work for a district that is open minded and embraces some of this stuff,
as opposed to puts their head in the sand and pretend pretends it doesn't happen and says, no, you can't use any of this stuff.
OK, I have a question to you. So then I was doing my keynote at this tech conference in Berlin.
Bunch of questions. But the last question was like this cherry on top.
And it was a grown man. And he read about me and he was like, oh, your motivation to go full on in the direction of AI and to emerge
in technologies, which is maybe not going to be just AI. Right.
But that direction was because I want to be part of my children's life and I want to be the reference point and I want to understand what type of world we live.
So he referenced that and it was like standing with a huge smile.
But then he asked me that he has teenagers are like eight, twelve and I think fourteen.
And the question was that how now, right now, can I motivate my kids to learn this and start using this tool?
This what he told that his kids are like, oh, yeah, it's dad talking about his stuff at work.
Like, I don't want to deal or touch this techie stuff.
And it also is reflected to when you look at the usage of chat GPT or image and narrative tools.
It leans towards older segment of population, not teenagers who would be jumping on.
Oh, my God, this is exciting new tech.
So the question to you. So this is the premise.
The question to you is, how do you imagine parents right now?
How would they deal about this?
How where do you even start educating your kids or motivating them to learn and to have this advantage even in school?
Right. Or in university going forward versus all the other aspects that they need to know, like hallucinations, how to prompt.
Well, security issues, personal data, you know, leaks.
Would you jump to teach your kids? Yeah.
OK. Oh, I mean, as both of us being optimistic, you know, generative A.I.
optimists in terms of how this is going to shake out.
I think so much of it goes back to a just the opportunities that abound.
It provides a wealth of opportunities, a wealth of means to connect to teach your kids about critical thinking and problem solving.
You know, being able to go like, hey, well, first off, from a moral standpoint,
if you're going to put something into chat GPT and say, hey, write me a book report about this,
like that's an opportunity to talk to them about morality and ethics being like, you know, this isn't something that you wrote.
You shouldn't represent yourself this way because that's cheating.
And that's an opportunity to talk about cheating with them even at a young age.
But if they take a little bit of time to understand how these things work,
like, for example, why they hallucinate, how the language models work, just even at a basic level,
it kind of opens up this opportunity right away to go, OK, yeah, well, let's put this in there and see what it says about,
you know, about to kill a mockingbird for your book report.
And then when it comes out, let's talk about how you're going to evaluate what it said, because we know it can hallucinate a little bit.
So invariably, if you have a discussion about going, all right, well, how can you how can you verify that the things that the language model is outputting are incorrect,
are correct or compelling arguments? Well, you kind of have to then go figure out if it's accurate, you know, and maybe you have to read the material.
And then along the way, they actually learn it. That to me is like the opportunity that is kind of dangling in front of parents right now as someone who's going to be a parent of a teenager eventually.
She's not there yet. It's a conversation I'm going to have early because these things are not going away.
I would much rather her have the tools or think about these things as to tools to do the execution part of writing, of brainstorming, of thinking, not the assemblage, not the evaluation and not the planning portion.
Planning essentially is your prompt. What are you going to put into the prompt? How are you going to, you know, make sure that it outputs a good essay?
All right. Well, if you just say write an essay, that's not very specific. What you're trying to make an argumentative essay, you're trying to make it persuasive essays.
It has to be a thesis. What's the format? These are all very important questions that would go into it that that make the kid think.
I mean, isn't that the kind of whole point of learning confronting your reality and facts and thinking about it and evaluating and see how you feel?
That's prompt engineering right there, like thinking about it, having a plan, writing clear instructions and the better instructions you give the better result.
That sounds like a good, good idea to me. I don't see why we want to go back any old way of just memorize this thing and then forget about it once you've done it on the test.
So what you're talking this structure and systematic thinking and I saw this conversation going about once again, you know, prompt engineering that it's so easy,
but it had the interesting twist saying that this just exposed how bad we are at communication and how bad we are at giving clear instructions.
And if I think about managers I worked with, that's so true.
You and I talked about how using more of these tools actually improve our communication, at least written, especially emails.
And never thought going back to education.
So what you said, developing a course for educators, for teachers and school system.
Eventually we got computer class, right?
Yeah, it was maybe a bit delayed and some kids who had access to computers, Elon Musk, got way, way better advantage going forward with playing with these tools.
The same goes to Bill Gates, but some kids, let's say going back to Europe and Eastern Europe, we got our computers so late.
Knowing how to use AI and how to apply that in your daily basis.
Shouldn't we start talking?
How should we educate kids going forward?
And when this education could be a solid point,
because one thing is to put it on parents and say that, okay, you are the parent, this is up to you.
But if we look at the statistics, that what it's 52% of US, which is primarily using child GPT, 52% of US heard of it,
14% tried and tried it doesn't mean mastered it and understand it and all of those aspects.
And the courses what we are seeing are also at the level of comprehension, not of a teenager, let's say.
So I think we need to start having conversation for the people who, you know, 14, 15, 16, whatever age it's appropriate.
How do we introduce education to kids about this emerging technology?
I completely agree.
I mean, I hope to be part of that conversation.
I will take a look at some if there is anything happening, looking at the education system as it is right now,
how long it takes to just update books.
You know, I think I've used this analogy before.
As you mentioned, the computer, we gave students calculators in the 60s, 70s, 80s.
We didn't get rid of math.
We just changed how we evaluated them on it.
Same is going to happen here.
It might be a little bigger and broader and it's hard to kind of picture right now,
but it's going to take place.
And I think with that is a good enough place as any to say for Go2Go, I am West the Synth Mind saying happy prompting everybody.
Happy learning prompting everybody.
Thanks for listening to How to Talk to AI with your hosts, Go2Go and West the Synth Mind.
As always, you can check out the show notes and links at howtotalk2.ai.
That's all for this week's episode.
Happy prompting, everyone.