Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

5 minute read

Weeknotes are where I share what I’m working on / thinking about this week and a few things to share without worrying too much about the ideas being fully formed.

This is really more a midweek reflection because I was teaching on Monday and Tuesday and also got sick with the current campus cold, so I didn’t get to it until now. Also it’s the last week of the semester, so every routine is in chaos.

This was mostly written using dictation on my phone, so expect errors.

Thinking About / Working On

Collaborating with / on AI workshops

I taught another workshop on collaborating with / on AI this week to a mixed group of faculty and admin. I tried something totally new, and while I need to make a bunch of changes I’m excited about the way this workshop is structured.

Basically, the workshop involves the group designing the workshop itself, starting with a prompt that bootstraps a basic structure and then collaboratively making changes to subsequent sections through group prompting activities.

This was an attempt to fix the problem that people really need to have some level of domain expertise to prompt models and understand their outputs, but from previous experience I know that people have also been understandably hesitant to bring their actual work to a session. My assumption is that everyone who works in a university has at least some experience with designing, teaching, or attending workshops. And since we are all in the workshop, we should be at least interested in the result.

One observation is that most people, even those who have some experience, don’t really understand how to interact with models and approach them in overly formal ways. Everyone need more time and examples of how to prompt models and what is possible, or even with the idea that nobody really knows what is possible or best.

Another observation is that it’s difficult to balance teaching people enough to use AI in interesting ways so they can assess its value, while also remaining neutral about its value.

I remain convinced that AI is only useful, if it is useful, for domain experts. I really want these workshops to be grounded in this idea: expertise gives you the key to making prompts specific enough to get something that isn’t generic or cliche, and also the experience to judge the outputs. This provides the basis for understanding what this technology can do and if it is good or bad or something in between.

It’s hard to balance that with the process of giving people enough knowledge and experience to use the technology; I inevitably end up coming off as more of an enthusiastic promoter than I feel like I want to be at this point.

Anyway, I’m thinking I’m going to do a bunch of these workshops next semester because they have been really interesting, and I am loving the conversations we’ve been having in these sessions.

Blue Sky

Everyone is on Blue Sky now, especially the academics, and the timeline feels interesting and more positive than Twitter or the other alternatives.

I have mixed feelings.

Part of me loved social media circa 2014-2016 when I felt like I had this really active professional and personal community on twitter. Another part of me is thankful that Musk destroyed twitter and freed me from my compulsive scrolling.

I am also not sure how to build a new network. My old network has mostly dispersed into the winds - the part that is left often feels like a high school reunion. We’re all doing different things now, and it feels like we should be close and quippy but really we’re strangers. It feels weird to come back to a medium I once felt so comfortable in and instead feel so… outside.

Anyway, I am @franklinsayre.bsky.social

A good reminder about the purpose of these devices - TechScape: Why the US wants to force Google to sell Chrome - The Guardian

Without Chrome, Google would also lose the extremely valuable youth market. The tech giant’s Chromebooks are a low-cost item for schools that distribute laptops to students. Those laptops use Chrome OS, an operating system designed for web browsing and web-based tasks. Children introduced to one company’s products become accustomed to using them, and may seek out that company’s products as an adult. Apple has stated that training school-age users on its products can nurture a major pipeline of new customers.

People prefer A.I. art because people prefer bad art

What was more interesting to me is that it seemed pretty easy, going over the images, to pick out original work by esteemed human artists, but much harder to distinguish between humanand A.I.-generated from the mass of images left over. Put another way, I rarely wondered if the good art was generated by A.I. prompting, but I was often uncertain if the bad art (of which there was a lot) was made by human or LLM. Galler’s image of the riverside cafe above is slop any way you cut it–art for a dentist’s office–but at a glance, on a computer screen, I have no definitive way of telling if it’s slop painted by a hack or prompted by an Astral Codex Ten subscriber.

Daniel Engber on The Fraudulent Science of Success

But here’s another explanation: Maybe Schroeder saw the Gino scandal as a warning that the data sleuths were on the march. Perhaps she figured that her own work might end up being scrutinized, and then, having gamed this out, she decided to be a data sleuth herself. She’d publicly commit to reexamining her colleagues’ work, doing audits of her own, and asking for corrections. This would be her play for amnesty during a crisis.

Matt Pearce on Lessons on Media Policy at the Slaughter-Bench of History

The 2024 election ended, for all time, any argument that Donald Trump is a political accident. His thunderous reelection to the presidency Tuesday night was the ratification of a revolution whose scope has yet to come into focus. Many such cases, as they say: “In all periods of the world a political revolution is sanctioned in men’s opinions, when it repeats itself,” Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of History. “Thus Napoleon was twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence.” No messy recount fights, dickering judges, or philosophical debates about the Electoral College this time. Last night voters graciously gave us democratic clarity to see where America stands. The people really want this, and now they’ll get it good and hard.

You May Also Enjoy

WeekNotes for 2024 Week 50: Reflections

7 minute read

Weeknotes are where I share what I’m working on / thinking about this week and a few things to share without worrying too much about the ideas being fully...