OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?
Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, Sanmi Koyejo, 2023/05/22

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'Emergence' is when something seems to appear out the background; when you see a face on a video screen made up of unrelated pixels, that's emergence. Emergence exists not just for pictures, but for anything we humans perceive, including sounds and music, patterns and trends, or - in the present case - skills and abilities. When we see, say, an AI demonstrate a skill like 'answering a question', this is an emergent behaviour. The important part of this fairly technical paper (16 page PDF) is the first paragraph in the Discussion section: "for a fixed task and a fixed model family, the researcher can choose a metric to create an emergent ability or choose a metric to ablate an emergent ability. Ergo, emergent abilities may be creations of the researcher's choices, not a fundamental property of the model family on the specific task." So if the 'skill' is not in the AI, where is it? As I have argued before, emergence requires recognition. We are looking at what the AI does and 'recognizing' it as 'answering a question'. There's nothing wrong with that; we do it all the time for other things. The picture is not 'in' the pixels; we look at the pixels and 'recognize' (or 'interpret') it as a face. So it's not surprising we would do it with AI as well. Via Graham Attwell.

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Let's Hear It for OER: Creating an Audiobook
Brian Barrick, YouTube, 2023/05/22

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Presented as video, this is an audio talk with slides describing the process of creating an audio book. It would also be useful for aspiring podcasters, though viewers would have to find their own information about uploading and syndication. Brian Barrick covers topics like audio recording equipment (budget and dream setup), finding funding, and how to make editing a lot easier. There are questions but for most of it the questioner's audio was really low. Via Rachel Becker.

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How Arguments Work - A Guide to Writing and Analyzing Texts in College
Anna Mills, LibreTexts, 2023/05/22

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I spent too much time with this book this morning. "How Arguments Work takes students through the techniques they will need to respond to readings and make sophisticated arguments in any college class.  This is a practical guide to argumentation with strategies and templates for the kinds of assignments students will commonly encounter. It covers rhetorical concepts in everyday language and explores how arguments can build trust and move readers." It's a very practical guide for students, well-written and accessible, with lots of examples and patterns. Though I have quibbles here and there, it's quite good, and would make a huge difference to students, especially those in the social sciences and humanities. It's all open access, downloadable, and accessible with an audio version. Via Shagun Kaur.

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Supreme Court rules against Warhol foundation in copyright fight over Prince images
Lawrence Hurley, NBC News, 2023/05/22

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This story is all over right now. I'm going to surprise people, I think, when I say the Supreme Court decision is correct. A photographer created an original photo of Prince. The photo was licensed by a magazine to serve as the basis for an artistic interpretation which would then be published once in the magazine, crediting the photographer. And Warhol did the art, the photo was published, and that was it for 30 years. But unknown to the photographer, Warhol didn't stop at one interpretation; he created a whole series of them. The magazine then licensed on of these from the Warhol estate and published it, this time without crediting the artist. Now my reasoning is simple here: if it needed a license the first time, according to all concerned, then it needed a license the second time. Otherwise, it's like paying for the first Beatles song you record but deciding that all others should be free. But one final comment here: the only person not being compensated is Prince (or his estate). If it's not for the fact of Prince being Prince, nobody cares about any of this. But that's what commercial art is, whether it's by the magazine, the artist or the photographer: the extraction of from the community of something somebody else created in order to charge money for it. See also: Creative Commons.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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