OLDaily

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

Presentation
The Fediverse Six Months From Now
Stephen Downes, Nov 05, 2025,

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[Slides]

AI firm wins high court ruling after photo agency’s copyright claim
Robert Booth, The Guardian, 2025/11/05

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This article reports on a ruling (205 page PDF) in a case brought by Getty Images against Stability AI. Long story short: Getty lost. "An AI model such as Stable Diffusion which does not store or reproduce any copyright works (and has never done so) is not an 'infringing copy'." This short overview on LinkedIn by Barry Scannell is a useful read. "Justice Smith was clear that while an infringing copy can be an article under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, a trained AI model is not one. It is not a library of images or text. It is a network of statistical weights and parameters that describe relationships, not the data itself."

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Statement on Educational Technologies and AI Agents
Modern Language Association, 2025/11/05

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The Modern Language Association (MLA) has issues a statement on AI urging that faculty and instructors be fully involved in decision-making regarding the use of AI in education, and "to ensure that academic institutions have the ability and option to block agentic AI when needed." If no action is taken, argues the MLA, then there's the risk of "assignments are generated by AI with the support of a learning management system, AI-generated content is submitted by an agentic AI on behalf of the student, and AI-driven metrics evaluate the work." What's interesting, I think, is that this loop would isolate precisely the actual human work involved in each of these three steps, which would be the only differentiator between interactions of the loop, and therefore probably a pretty good basis for grading, without all the busy-work the AI is now completing on its own.

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The EPOCH of AI: Human-Machine Complementarities at Work
Isabella Loaiza, Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan School of Management, 2025/11/05

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This paper (12 page PDF) falls into the well-established genre of "AI's roles in augmenting versus automating work" via the mechanism of the EPOCH framework (Empathy, Presence, Opinion, Creativity, and Hope) that captures (argue the authors) "human capabilities that complement, rather than substitute, artificial intelligence." It's interesting that individual personal experience - probably the most important thing humans bring to the table - is missing from the picture. Also, the role of community, the result of person-to-person interaction, is nowhere present. Anyhow, the framework is applied to a series of vocations to estimate their vulnerability to AI. "EPOCH scores are calculated at task, task-cluster, and occupation levels, while automation and augmentation scores are computed at the occupation level." I don't think we have a good analysis yet of AI capabilities, especially as compared to human capabilities, and the metric depends on this.

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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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