These sixty minute, weekly sessions – facilitated by Technologists and Pedagogy Experts from the CTLT – are designed for faculty and staff at UBC who are using, or thinking about using, Generative AI tools as part of their teaching, researching, or daily work. Each week we discuss the news of the week, highlight a specific tool for use within teaching and learning, and then hold a question and answer session for attendees.

They run on Zoom every Wednesday from 1pm – 2pm and you can register for upcoming events on the CTLT Events Website.

News of the Week

Each week we discuss several new items that happened in the Generative AI space over the past 7 days. There’s usually a flood of new AI-adjacent news every week – as this industry is moving so fast – so we highlight news articles which are relevant to the UBC community.

Here’s this week’s news:

1. This article by Suresh Neethirajan on The Conversation discusses a study at Dalhousie University using AI to decode chickens’ complex vocalizations, suggesting their sounds reflect sophisticated communication and emotional states, potentially revolutionizing poultry farming and animal welfare.
2. The Mozilla Foundation’s report “Training Data for the Price of a Sandwich: Common Crawl’s Impact on Generative AI” examines the significant role of Common Crawl’s web data in AI development since GPT-3’s release, highlighting its influence, challenges in transparency and bias, and suggesting improvements for more trustworthy AI.
3. Lauren Goode’s Wired article from February 13, 2024, “OpenAI Gives ChatGPT a Memory,” discusses ChatGPT’s new memory feature, enabling it to remember and utilize user-specific details over multiple interactions, enhancing personalization but also raising privacy concerns.
4. Jack Krawczyk’s post on the Google Canada Blog announces the launch of Gemini, Google’s AI model, in Canada, available in multiple languages and designed to boost productivity and creativity, along with its advanced version, Gemini Advanced, as part of Google’s commitment to accessible and ethical AI development.
5. Researchers have introduced ‘Keyframer,’ a tool blending AI and animation, which animates static SVG images using natural language, offering an innovative, user-friendly approach to animation creation based on insights from professional animators and engineers.
6. SELF-DISCOVER enhances the problem-solving capabilities of Large Language Models like GPT-4 and PaLM 2 by enabling diverse reasoning methods, leading to significant performance improvements on complex tasks and mirroring human reasoning processes.
7. OpenVoice, a voice cloning technology, requires only a short audio clip to replicate voices in multiple languages, offering flexible control over voice styles and enabling zero-shot cross-lingual voice cloning without extensive language-specific training data.
8. Stable Cascade, a new text-to-image AI model featuring a three-stage approach for efficient training and fine-tuning, excels in prompt alignment and aesthetic quality, offering advanced features like image variations and efficient image generation with a compressed latent space.
9. Natasha Singer’s New York Times article from late 2023, made relevant considering Canadian Federal restrictions on admissions, examines exploring the impact on essay authenticity and the broader academic implications of AI in education.

Tool of the Week

Each week we demonstrate a Generative AI tool that can be used within teaching and learning. The GenAI space is evolving rapidly, and as such we demo new tools or new ways people use those tools.

As a reminder not all tools we showcase have successfully been through the PIA process at UBC.

This week’s Tool of the Week: Google Gemini

Google Gemini, recently made available in Canada, is a competitor to Open AI’s Chat GPT and Microsoft CoPilot. See our note on PIA-approved tools at UBC. It is a multi-modal large language model which can respond to chat prompts with text, images, charts, and code.

One differentiating factor between most large language models and Google Gemini is Gemini’s surfacing of its “drafts” where you can see alternative answers compared to the one it shows you immediately. Anecdotally, Google Gemini has a more restrictive set of guardrails in terms of what it is comfortable conversing about when compared to ChatGPT.

Questions and Answers

Each studio ends with a question and answer session whereby attendees can ask questions of the pedagogy experts and technologists who facilitate the sessions. We have published a full FAQ section on this site. If you have other questions about GenAI usage, please get in touch.