#222 AI in Education with Becky Allen

And the question I always ask before we dive too much into the education side of things is what's your personal history with AI, Becky? So like whenever ChatGPT launches 2017, are you straight on it? Are you excited? And what role does it play in your day-to-day non-work life?

When ChatGPT arrived, I kind of knew what I was seeing in the sense that a very long time ago when I was a PhD student, some of my contemporary PhD students were working on what I think was the precursor to all of this, which was image classification and neural nets, and they were working within health research.

And so because I'd taken a lot of time to try and make sense statistically of their work, as a result, I kind of had half an eye on the scientific side news that was going on around the translation of that from image generation into text creation.

So I knew what I was seeing.

I was incredibly excited and I think anybody who has known me for the past few years was known that I have been an optimist about not only the state of the models, but also like how good the models were going to get.

I often wonder like why I've been like that compared to other people.

I think maybe I'm not very romantic about the nature of human brain.

I don't think like we are as special and weird as we think we are.

So I've always been kind of optimistic about like the capabilities.

of us developing technology that will allow us to do the kind of cognitive work that I do and you do and that we think we are uniquely able to do, but maybe we're not.

I think the other thing that meant I had a really good experience early on was that early on these models were immediately pretty good for coding.

So I could immediately just read and understand parts of the teacher tap code base that had been written by our tech team and that I had no capability to be able to read and understand them.

And then from there, I was very quickly writing in like coding languages that I'd never learned in order to just like hook up our data, you know, into automations and other things because I couldn't be bothered to wait for a techie person to do it for me.

So I had all those kind of like reinforcing good experiences of AI, perhaps in that age in the early models where actually it wasn't great for loads of things early on because it didn't because it couldn't write that well and it hallucinated madly.

But it was good at helping you if you wanted to code.

But now, you know, how do I use it today? Well, I use it for almost everything that I'm doing.

And I've changed the way I use it quite a lot.

So I now... almost exclusively don't type back and forth with it unless I'm in a private place.

I use a piece of software called WhisperFlow.

Now,

Becky,

let me pause you there.

I see it's changed my life.

So I only discovered this about three weeks ago.

Good God, it's good.