What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to Generate?

Feb 24, 2024

What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to Generate?

Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and Duane Searsmith

Hosted by Daniel Shea

Summary

Listen to Episode No.8 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. Today we welcome, too, Duane Searsmith, E-Learning Technical Specialist, Information Trust Institute, also at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the meaning of generation by machine.

It's stunning what Generative AI can produce, but what exactly is it there that is being produced? What does it mean, and what do we do with it? And actually, more important, what do we do with the AI that's doing the producing?

AI in our lives now and will continue infiltrating and embedding only more as each day passes and each new update and redesign is released. Therefore, we are the responsible parties in this — we, us, the users. We are the ones we must ask: What does AI mean to us? Because what AI just means, itself... well, that is still only whatever we can mean, ourselves.

Your Host

Daniel Shea

I am committed to helping scientists write at their best. To this end, I founded the Graduate Communication Services, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Here I work in the unique role of textician. Want to know more? Contact me at daniel.shea@kit.edu

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