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Great article - that gets to the heart of the ITGS syllabus...

How cool is this - great advertisement for the power of the net....

"There's a certain irony that, in fields outside of computer science, plagiarism is a sign that you didn't understand the question. Within computer science, the opposite is true. Not only have you found an acceptable solution, you've understood it enough to use it within the parameters of your own project."

"Learning from rewards seems like the simplest thing. I make coffee, I sip coffee, I'm happy. My brain registers "brewing coffee" as an action that leads to a reward. That's the guiding insight behind deep reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that famously smashed most of Atari's gaming catalog and triumphed over humans in strategy games like Go. Here, an AI "agent" explores the game, trying out different actions and registering ones that let it win."

"Students on online courses report insufficient interaction and familiarity with their instructors and a lack of motivation. Feedback in one study included: "I want a real teacher", "I prefer a course taught by a human" and "There is no instructor personality interjected into the course". So, how do instructors overcome this perception and ensure students view them as "present" in online courses? "

"The camera never lies. Except, of course, it does - and seemingly more often with each passing day. In the age of the smartphone, digital edits on the fly to improve photos have become commonplace, from boosting colours to tweaking light levels. Now, a new breed of smartphone tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are adding to the debate about what it means to photograph reality. Google's latest smartphones released last week, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, go a step further than devices from other companies. They are using AI to help alter people's expressions in photographs. It's an experience we've all had: one person in a group shot looks away from the camera or fails to smile. Google's phones can now look through your photos to mix and match from past expressions, using machine learning to put a smile from a different photo of them into the picture. Google calls it Best Take. "

"Wikipedia lives and dies by its references, the links to sources that back up information in the online encyclopaedia. But sometimes, those references are flawed - pointing to broken websites, erroneous information or non-reputable sources. A study published on 19 October in Nature Machine Intelligence1 suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) can help to clean up inaccurate or incomplete reference lists in Wikipedia entries, improving their quality and reliability."

"That's why the best systems may come from a combination of AI and human work; we can play to the machine's strengths, Ilievski says. But when we want to compare AI and the human mind, it's important to remember "there is no conclusive research providing evidence that humans and machines approach puzzles in a similar vein", he says. In other words, understanding AI may not give us any direct insight into the mind, or vice versa."

"In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. "It makes my writing look fancy," one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text. My students also relied heavily on AI-powered paraphrasing tools such as Quillbot. Paraphrasing well, like drafting original research, is a process of deepening understanding. Recent high-profile examples of "duplicative language" are a reminder that paraphrasing is hard work. It is not surprising, then, that many students are tempted by AI-powered paraphrasing tools. These technologies, however, often result in inconsistent writing style, do not always help students avoid plagiarism, and allow the writer to gloss over understanding. Online paraphrasing tools are useful only when students have already developed a deep knowledge of the craft of writing."