Several faculty members in CMS/W have expertise, both technological and pedagogical, in what the use of ChatGPT and other A.I. tools may mean for the instruction of academic writing. Because instructors at MIT and elsewhere have expressed some urgency in better understanding what the effects and ethics of ChatGPT may be, two pairs of our faculty have provided an advisory memo and a response. It should be noted that with tools like ChatGPT being both so new and so quickly evolving, these pieces are the faculty's take and don't yet represent official guidance from CMS/W or MIT. First is an excerpt from "Advice Concerning the Increase in AI-Assisted Writing", a memo from Edward Schiappa, Professor of Rhetoric, and Nick Montfort, Professor of Digital Media. The full document is available at Montfort's website.

Are you ready to revolutionise the world of 3D AI? From gaming to architecture to product design, the potential for this technology is endless. And now we're on the cusp of a breakthrough that will change everything: 3D model generators. OpenAI has already made waves with its open-source Point-E, a machine learning system that creates a 3D object from a text prompt. But let's face it, there are limitations to this solution. That's why I'm excited to share with you new methods that are set to take the 3D world by storm.

Microsoft became the latest major tech company to announce massive layoffs on Wednesday. Roughly 5% of the company's workforce--or 10,000 jobs--will be slashed, CEO Satya Nadella announced in note to employees published online. In explaining the decision, Nadella pointed to global economic strife, changes in post-pandemic habits, and perhaps most notably, the impact of rapid developments in artificial intelligence. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, a company whose chatbot ChatGPT has both excited and frightened the world in the last couple months because of its ability to respond to written prompts with clarity and complexity. "The next major wave of computing is being born with advances in AI, as we're turning the world's most advanced models into a new computing platform," Nadella wrote.

I am someone who learns by building. To truly incorporate my learnings from the AI Writer project, I decided to build something that would help me at a personal level. I am terrible at giving gifts -- I always have a difficult time knowing what to get my friends or family, and am often running around till the last minute trying to find something memorable. To solve this, I built Gifthub. Gifthub is a gift ideas generator powered by GPT-3.

With regard to search, Microsoft has lagged behind Google for the last decade, but this partnership may enable them to overtake Google and take the lead. In this blog, we'll talk about what ChatGPT and upcoming LLMs might entail for the search industry, as well as how Microsoft might profit from them. A study from Surge AI [3] compared Google and ChatGPT results for 500 search queries and dubbed ChatGPT an "existential threat" to Google. Users have claimed to regularly use ChatGPT as a partial replacement for search. But not everyone was happy when it comes to ChatGPT, when we look at the detailed reviews for each candidate, we see that while ChatGPT does have a higher average score, it has a higher variance, with more highs and lows.

The Covid-19 pandemic may not truly be over, but the boom it spawned in online learning and tutoring startups sure is. Now, with kids back in classrooms and venture capital funding for edtech down near pre-pandemic levels, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have turned their attention to virtual reality, short form video and, first and foremost, artificial intelligence. "Investors are going gaga over artificial intelligence," says Tony Wan, head of platform at Reach Capital, a VC firm that invests in dozens of edtech companies. The education industry has been flirting with AI for half a dozen years, he notes, but suddenly, the relationship has turned serious. "Every business in ed tech--if it's not an AI business--needs to have an AI component," echoes Michael Moe, founder and CEO of GSV Holdings, a VC firm focused on the education and workforce skills sectors.

Microsoft is reportedly investing $10-billion in OpenAI, the owner of the somewhat controversial large language model chatbot ChatGPT. It uses a deep learning technique to generate text and conversations often indistinguishable from those created by actual humans. ChatGPT has dazzled amateurs and industry experts ever since its launch at the end of November last year. Given a prompt, ChatGPT can answer complex questions, provide suggestions and even debug programming code all while sounding extremely human. Microsoft's reported $10-billion investment in OpenAI shows that major companies are willing to invest in artificial intelligence software.

In 2022, artificial-intelligence firms produced an overwhelming spectacle, a rolling carnival of new demonstrations. Curious people outside the tech industry could line up to interact with a variety of alluring and mysterious machine interfaces, and what they saw was dazzling. The first major attraction was the image generators, which converted written commands into images, including illustrations mimicking specific styles, photorealistic renderings of described scenarios, as well as objects, characters, textures, or moods. Similar generators for video, music, and 3-D models are in development, and demos trickled out. Soon, millions of people encountered ChatGPT, a conversational bot built on top of a large language model.

A great deal of ink has been spilt recently following the launch of ChatGPT and the advent of AI that can generate text and answers of a sufficient standard to be used by students in their assignments. Responses, in my opinion, have thus far been rather predictably, if not troublingly, conformist. Writers here in THE and elsewhere have variously suggested that if we can't beat it, we ought to join it and that hybrid or asynchronous communication ought to be embraced and integrated as part of the brave new world of human-machine creativity. More informal discussions with colleagues have suggested that resistance seems futile and that we ought to embrace AI to equip students to operate in a hybrid world of the artificial and the real for the purposes of employability. Some slightly more ambitious voices have suggested that AI-generated assignments make the case for authentic assessment or a more "human" form of assessment even more urgent, but how this might transpire in ways other than falling back on the adage of assessment for learning, constructive feedback and alignment with skills seems less clear.

Ammaar Reshi used AI to write and illustrate a children's book in a weekend. He became the center of a fiery debate: Are these tools a grim reaper for the arts?