I'm not sure where I first heard about /ai pages. Damola Morenikeji may have been the first to explain the idea: generative AI is getting so good that readers won't be
able to tell if the text they are reading was written by a person or generated by an LLM. One way for a writer to
engender trust is to be transparent, by linking to a page that tells readers how AI is used on the site.
I ran across Derek Sivers's /ai page again recently and decided I would
have one, too.
So, I have created https://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/ai.html.
The one-line answer to "How does Eugene use AI on this site?" is: not at all, and certainly not on this blog.
If you see any text here that isn't a quotation of another person's work, then I wrote the text myself. That page elaborates a bit on my thinking, but it all boils down to the fact that I like to write and don't want to outsource my writing to a program. If I want to have a writing assistant, I'll work with a student.
My /ai page does describe one time I used an LLM as part of a research project:
I have used large language models (LLMs) in a research project with a student. The student and I worked with a prospective author to train an LLM on the public writing of a well-known educator from history. We then queried the model to see what the educator might say about some modern issues in education and public policy. For me, this is just the sort of project for which LLMs offer a potential benefit that would be hard to attain in another way.
By the way, this is a really cool project... I've been meaning to write more about it here, but it's not ready yet for public exposure. Besides, I'm sensitive to the externalities imposed on creators and on the environment by VC-backed generative AI systems, so I'm reluctant to promote their use any more than the current AI bubble is promoting them.
Anyway, I have an /ai page now. I doubt my stance on generative AI is likely to change significantly in
the future. I like to write, I like to program, and I like for the presence of my name on a piece of work to reflect my
personal investment in that work. If that changes, I will update the page.
Recently, a link to the 2013 Computer History Museum article Adobe Photoshop Source Code was going around my social media feed.
That first version of Photoshop was written primarily in Pascal for the Apple Macintosh, with some machine language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor where execution efficiency was important. It wasn't the effort of a huge team. Thomas said, "For version 1, I was the only engineer, and for version 2, we had two engineers." While Thomas worked on the base application program, John wrote many of the image-processing plug-ins.
I'm not sure why a 12-year-old article about a 35-year-old software application popped back into everyone's attention, but it brought back good memories for me. My history with Photoshop does not go all the way back to the beginning of Photoshop, but it does go back to my beginning as a faculty member.
In 1992, I started as a brand-new assistant professor. A colleague worked with me to set up my office and lab computing equipment: a Macintosh Quadra 950, a massive Apple display (*), and a bunch of complementary hardware and software, including a flatbed scanner from LaCie, OmniPage OCR software — and Photoshop. I felt like I was living in the future.
(*) This display got warm... really warm. One day that year, I was down the hall teaching an AI lab section when we all smelled burning wire. My display had spontaneously combusted. Fortunately, we turned it off soon enough to avoid setting off the alarm and inviting a visit from the fire department.
With permission from Adobe, the Computer History Museum provides access to the source code of Photoshop 1.0.1 from 1990:
All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. There are 179 files in the zipped folder, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts.
Pascal — another connection to 1992 Eugene.
That first semester as a prof, I taught Pascal in our intro course, something I did again for the next couple of years. I had fun. Teaching programmers to beginners is a challenge that rewards you every time the light goes on in a student's eyes. Besides, Pascal had become one of my go-to languages halfway through my undergrad years, and I loved writing Pascal programs every day. It remains a favorite to this day, though I haven't written any Pascal in many, many years.
In the coming year, I intend to dive into the Photoshop source and see what I can learn from it. I like reading source code. This line from the CHM article says it all:
Software source code is the literature of computer scientists, and it deserves to be studied and appreciated.
... or, "How a Pair of Smart Glasses Jogged My Memory"
Earlier today, a student in my department tried to take a final exam while wearing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Fortunately, the prof noticed.
Now we get to monitor our students' eyewear. Good times.
We now range from students who can't afford to buy textbooks in their effort to learn, to kids who can afford to buy smart glasses in their effort not to.
As someone commented on Mastodon,
the thing that really sucks is that smart glasses ... can help with accessibility and have very valid use cases, but they are already so misused that any wearing of them is suspect now.
Likewise, LLMs may also have a valid use in support of student learning (*), but right now their dominant use among students seems to be as the sort of crutch that inhibits learning — which accounts for the desperation come exam time.
(*) modulo their negative externalities, of course
Unfortunately, a student who does not confront their lack of learning until exam time, even if only by being unable to perform, generally ends up paying a steep price.
After all these years teaching, I have a lot of sympathy for students who feel desperate enough to cheat. Yes, they put themselves in a bad position, often after their instructor has made a significant effort to inform them about appropriate ways to use technology in support of learning and to explain the risks of inappropriate uses. And yes, they are accountable for their own behavior.
Still, a part of me thinks of the adage, "There but for grace of God go I..."
The year is fourth grade; I am taking a science test. I want to say that the test was on the six simple machines, but it might have been on a biology topic. At this great distance, memory is unreliable...
In any case, I forgot one item from a list. Either I knew that I was underprepared for the exam, or I had simply rushed in the moments before it started, because my science notebook was open on top of the pile of papers inside my flip-top desk. I opened my desk, saw the list, and filled in the final answer.
The teacher noticed.
Mrs. Bell came to my desk, looked at my paper, and asked what had had happened. I told the truth. She shook her head and told me she was disappointed in me.
That was like a dagger. I was the sort of student who wanted to please all authority figures. But this wasn't me disappointing just any teacher. I loved Mrs. Bell. She remains to this day my all-time favorite teacher. She was a huge influence on me.
(Here's another memory: I remember once saying to Mrs. Bell something like, "I don't know if I'll go to college." She smiled and said, "Eugene, college was invented for people like you." From that moment forward, I never doubted my educational future.)
Anyway: I don't recall what else she did or said in that moment. Did she dock me points? Make me take a new test? I don't even know if she told my parents, but I don't think so. If she did, they never said anything about. They, like Mrs. Bell, knew me well enough to know how I embarrassed I was by doing something so wrong and, yes, being caught.
Whatever else she did or said, I remember her calm demeanor and her personal response to me.
The cost of failing a test in the fourth grade is significantly less than the cost of failing a final exam in college, or of failing a course. So, I may have been saved from paying a much steeper price later by succumbing to a temptation much earlier and paying the price then. I was also saved by a generous and loving teacher who knew just how to respond to the particular student in front of her at that moment. What she did and how she treated me obviously made an impression.
I can only hope that my colleagues and I have the wherewithal to respond in such situations in a way that both holds our students accountable (yes, that's important) and helps them learn from what could be a traumatic experience. Unfortunately, I think we are going to have plenty of opportunities.