Experiencing AI in your everyday life – Real life stories!
Share your story!
Have you ever realised with “delay” that the information you were receiving had been produced using artificial intelligence? A press article? An answering service? An image on social networks?
How did this make you feel? What reaction did you have? What effect did it have on your relationship with this information?
Share your anecdote!
A Webinar on this story collection will be held on Thursday 03 April at 5pm on tadam.education!
What a surprise it was when, without realising it, I installed an AI assistant in my Teams online meeting software. It seemed that I had subconsciously made a small adjustment and now a robot was systematically joining all my online meetings! It was even connecting 10 minutes in advance! This made me break out in a cold sweat: was a participant starting the meeting earlier than planned? Or was it me who was late? After a bit of research, I found a way of disabling this intrusive robot… so that I could stay connected just between humans….
I am in charge of a bachelor’s program. About two years ago, at the very beginning of the emergence of ChatGPT (playground version), I had a journalism writing course holder who approached me about suspicions of irregularity in the context of his course. As part of an assignment, he had asked the students to submit an editorial on a certain topic, with the instruction to express a personal opinion. It was clear that several of the students’ texts were strangely similar (some of the examples in brackets were the same and in the same order). However, the plagiarism detection software produced some surprising results. The first text entered did not match any of the databases in the anti-plagiarism tool. However, as soon as the other student work was compared with this text, the anti-plagiarism software displayed a degree of similarity that was deemed “suspicious”. Had the students found a rare source and shared it? After interviewing the 10 students concerned, it turned out that the explanation lay elsewhere. In fact, the students had recently become aware of the ChatGPT tool and for various reasons (being late, lazy, stressed, etc.) had copied the title of the assignment word for word as “prompt”. In other words, 10 people using exactly the same prompt on the same version of AI at a similar time and therefore without much difference in training (especially at a time when getting to grips with AI was just beginning) had a high probability of obtaining very similar results. The students thus unwittingly discovered plagiarism 2.0, which consists of producing a text with a high degree of similarity to another text, without copying it in the traditional way. Above all, this story proves the need for intelligent and ethical use of generative AI.
Social networks are being crowded with AI generated images and videos, and certain pages I follow try to warn people of this phenomenon. At a certain point, the warning regarded videos displaying sea animals, like otters, covered by small shells. It looks as if the animal is parasitized. Eventually, a human being helps the animal and at the end, the animal is clean creating in the viewer a feeling of relief. Well, even though I had been warned, I came across a such video and couldn’t stop watching it, realizing only at the end that it had been AI generated (AI-generated humans are more easy to spot). Nothing amazing at this point, I’ve just had lost 1 min. of my life. But I had this strange feeling of having been manipulated, stupid of not having recognized the trick, and a bit scared (either by my own lack of vigilance, or AI’s power of tricking you, or both).
When I was looking for jobs this summer for my son as an animator, I came across an ad using an image clearly created by an AI. My reaction was one of suspicion: if the organization was using this facility to illustrate its ad, wasn’t it being just as expeditious in organizing youth stays? I didn’t feel like passing on the ad to my son.
Last Fall, just as ChatGPT began incorporating sources and browsing the web to provide more accurate and up-to-date answers, I decided to test its limits by asking about false information and recent news. It ended up mixing sources, but couldn’t correct them properly. In the end, it kept repeating the same false information over and over—even after I corrected it and provided reliable sources or instructions to help it find the right facts. It just kept contradicting me. That was so frustrating, especially since it tends to mirror what the user says with little to no pushback. And realizing that I got irritated by a chatbot, somehow, made it even worse…
Some months ago I was in a workshop called “AI in Education” organised by a big Foundation in Greece. The workshop was addressed to teachers, to educate them in creating lesson plans through AI. The room was filled with teachers, most of them not acquainted with ChatGPT. Next to me there is a teacher, who has not used before the ChatGPT and came late to the workshop. So the trainer just told her to open CHAT GPT and ask for a lesson plan for her classroom. The lady next to me started typing “Hello AI. Please, could you make a plan for my class, please? Thank you very much in advance!” When I saw it, I wanted to laugh because she was asking soo politely AI, when the rest of us were typing “Act as a teacher. Make a lesson plan”. These days I am thinking though, should we provide feedback and thank AI?
Currently working at a French university, I’m in charge of collecting applications for a prestigious summer school in Neuroscience. After reading dozens of amazing applications, I realized that, in one of them, the applicant had forgotten to delete a mysterious sentence: “[insert your university name]”. I was surprised and disappointed, since the application was actually really interesting. Surprised also because I thought that people applying for such a program would, at the very least, take the time to write their research proposal and cover letter on their own