Latest / Azadeh and Guy on AI / AI Insights
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone, hello from the first episode of Azadeh and Gayan.
- 0:05SPEAKER_01: AI.
- 0:06SPEAKER_00: AI, perfectly.
- 0:07SPEAKER_00: I'm Azadeh,
- 0:08I'm a third year PhD student here at the University of
- 0:11Nebraska-Lincoln and...
- 0:13SPEAKER_01: I'm Gai Tranin,
- 0:14SPEAKER_01: I'm a professor at the Innovative Learning Technologies...
- 0:19SPEAKER_01: Today we're going to talk about two things.
- 0:22SPEAKER_01: Azadeh is going to introduce me to perplexity,
- 0:24SPEAKER_01: which I kind of downloaded once but never actually did anything with it.
- 0:28SPEAKER_01: It sits on my phone still, but not much.
- 0:31And we're going to talk about what it can and can't do from
- 0:36very casual terms.
- 0:39And then the second thing is we're going to actually talk about
- 0:42the research paper
- 0:43SPEAKER_01: that I found that I find incredibly helpful.
- 0:46And that is a paper about generative artificial intelligence
- 0:49and misinformation acceptance.
- 0:52SPEAKER_00: Okay, perfect.
- 0:54SPEAKER_00: So the Gen AI tool that we are talking about today is perplexity.
- 0:59SPEAKER_00: And I think many people have heard about that.
- 1:02SPEAKER_00: Actually, in our last episode, I think we kind of talked about that.
- 1:07SPEAKER_00: We touched slightly on perplexity.
- 1:10SPEAKER_00: But today we tried to explore it more.
- 1:13SPEAKER_00: I find it a very useful tool for doing research.
- 1:17To be honest,
- 1:18I haven't explored all the features,
- 1:20but I'm very excited to try it more.
- 1:25SPEAKER_00: And I didn't download it.
- 1:29SPEAKER_00: I just used the desktop version of Perplexity.
- 1:32SPEAKER_00: I wanted to get more used to the different features of this tool,
- 1:36SPEAKER_00: and then I will download it on my phone.
- 1:39SPEAKER_00: So for perplexity, I think you have the pro version guy.
- 1:45SPEAKER_00: Am I right?
- 1:46SPEAKER_01: I do not have the pro version yet.
- 1:48SPEAKER_01: I have the version they share with educators.
- 1:50SPEAKER_01: So they have a version they share with educators.
- 1:53SPEAKER_01: They have a version for students who do get the pro version.
- 1:57SPEAKER_01: And so students,
- 1:58SPEAKER_01: if you are students and you can verify your university students,
- 2:01SPEAKER_01: they will give you a version of the pro version.
- 2:03SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure if it's the full pro version.
- 2:06SPEAKER_01: I'm a little bit lost in the versions.
- 2:07SPEAKER_01: But I'm right now playing with a...
- 2:11SPEAKER_01: Free version?
- 2:12SPEAKER_01: No, it's a pro version.
- 2:13SPEAKER_00: It's a pro version.
- 2:14SPEAKER_01: I'm a pro for anybody who didn't know.
- 2:18SPEAKER_00: Yes, you are a pro version.
- 2:20SPEAKER_00: And as you said,
- 2:21they offer a one-month free pro version for students as long as
- 2:25you just enter your
- 2:28SPEAKER_00: university email and they are able to verify your student status.
- 2:33SPEAKER_00: And then they provide you with some interesting features.
- 2:37SPEAKER_00: One of the features that I'm really interested about is,
- 2:40SPEAKER_00: we were just talking about that,
- 2:44SPEAKER_00: is spaces.
- 2:45SPEAKER_00: So if you look at the left navigation menu,
- 2:50SPEAKER_00: you can find spaces in a kind of,
- 2:53SPEAKER_00: they have a cubic icon for spaces.
- 2:55SPEAKER_00: And...
- 2:57SPEAKER_00: What I really like about that feature is that you can add your files,
- 3:03SPEAKER_00: you can add links,
- 3:04and you can create a kind of very personalized and maybe
- 3:09contextualized repository
- 3:11SPEAKER_00: of all of the things that you are trying to do research about.
- 3:17And you can also add your teammates,
- 3:20and you can all start a group project.
- 3:23SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 3:23SPEAKER_01: So this is,
- 3:24SPEAKER_01: I think,
- 3:25SPEAKER_01: the feature that's important because you could always share,
- 3:28but here is a feature where you have a shared space where you
- 3:32can all contribute
- 3:33SPEAKER_01: and it's more collaborative.
- 3:35SPEAKER_01: Kind of reminds me of the idea behind Google Docs or something like that.
- 3:39SPEAKER_01: Everybody can contribute.
- 3:41It's not just me sending it to you,
- 3:43you doing something with it and sending it back to me.
- 3:45SPEAKER_01: It's a shared space.
- 3:48Or I can say Google Docs or Google Drive,
- 3:52but maybe three times more flexible.
- 3:55SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 3:56SPEAKER_01: But the idea is a collaborative space where you can work concurrently.
- 4:01SPEAKER_01: That's my analogy at least.
- 4:04SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 4:05SPEAKER_01: So what can you do there?
- 4:06SPEAKER_01: So you can add links.
- 4:07SPEAKER_01: I see you can add links.
- 4:09SPEAKER_01: You can add instructions.
- 4:10SPEAKER_01: You can add files.
- 4:11SPEAKER_01: So this is a productive idea.
- 4:14a productive space,
- 4:16and I love that notion that we can do some of our exploration.
- 4:22So the things we used to use the browser for or the search
- 4:27function in Google for,
- 4:29SPEAKER_01: I see this very,
- 4:30SPEAKER_01: very useful,
- 4:31SPEAKER_01: is you can ask a question and get the information that is more detailed.
- 4:38SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's true.
- 4:39SPEAKER_00: And the other thing about the spaces feature is that
- 4:47They have settings,
- 4:49and in that space,
- 4:50you can formulate your instructions.
- 4:54SPEAKER_00: You can say,
- 4:55SPEAKER_00: I mean,
- 4:56SPEAKER_00: the description says,
- 4:57SPEAKER_00: give instructions to perplexity to customize how answers are focused and
- 5:01SPEAKER_00: structured.
- 5:03So I really like that kind of,
- 5:04because you basically dictate Gen.AI about the outputs.
- 5:08SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 5:09SPEAKER_00: And you can also include web by default.
- 5:12SPEAKER_00: So you cannot just rely on your files.
- 5:16SPEAKER_00: You can ask Gen.ai,
- 5:17SPEAKER_00: or in that case Perplexity,
- 5:19SPEAKER_00: to go through the different websites to just amplify the output.
- 5:26SPEAKER_01: And so I,
- 5:27SPEAKER_01: for example,
- 5:28did a search about the relationship between state CS education
- 5:32policies and the
- 5:33SPEAKER_01: median salary in the state.
- 5:35SPEAKER_01: I just threw a question that I was interested about at the time.
- 5:40SPEAKER_01: And what I love about that is I got visuals, I got analysis.
- 5:45SPEAKER_01: I've got interesting analysis because it actually found that the –
- 5:50SPEAKER_01: The correlation is not very high.
- 5:53SPEAKER_01: So the R squared is 0.04.
- 5:55SPEAKER_01: That's nothing.
- 5:56SPEAKER_01: But it says there's actually detail behind it.
- 5:59SPEAKER_01: So it explores a little bit further and it says,
- 6:02SPEAKER_01: well,
- 6:02SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 6:03SPEAKER_01: there's an interesting correlation.
- 6:04And part of it is that states that have lower income seems to
- 6:09have more CSEs.
- 6:12education policy because they seem to be looking for ways to
- 6:18improve things in their state.
- 6:19And so I got this really nice report with visuals and text and
- 6:25all of these things
- 6:26SPEAKER_01: that would take me quite a while to correlate and collect together.
- 6:30SPEAKER_01: And that's something I appreciate.
- 6:32SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 6:32SPEAKER_00: That's very true.
- 6:34SPEAKER_00: The other option or feature of this Gen AI tool is labs.
- 6:40So Perplexity itself defined labs as advanced tools for
- 6:46developers and power users
- 6:48SPEAKER_00: to create custom apps,
- 6:49SPEAKER_00: perform deep analysis,
- 6:51SPEAKER_00: and automate complex tasks.
- 6:54SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
- 6:55SPEAKER_00: So if you go to Perplexity website,
- 6:58SPEAKER_00: they also provide you with a kind of sample of different labs.
- 7:04SPEAKER_00: And one of the samples that I checked was,
- 7:08SPEAKER_00: I can just read you the first few sentences of the form.
- 7:11SPEAKER_00: So they say you are a product designer,
- 7:14SPEAKER_00: AI researcher,
- 7:14SPEAKER_00: and behavioral psychologist in the year 2025.
- 7:18Your task is to design a futuristic social media platform made
- 7:22for the year 2030.
- 7:25SPEAKER_00: So you can talk about the core concept,
- 7:28SPEAKER_00: key features,
- 7:29SPEAKER_00: growth mechanics,
- 7:30SPEAKER_00: and it creates a whole project for you,
- 7:34SPEAKER_00: answering all of those questions,
- 7:37talking about possibilities of connecting that kind of social
- 7:42media platform to VR
- 7:44SPEAKER_00: even experiences.
- 7:46SPEAKER_00: So this is also a very interesting feature of that Gen.ai tool.
- 7:51SPEAKER_01: And much like the other AIs,
- 7:53it does have a learn section where it supports you in learning
- 7:59step by step and
- 8:00SPEAKER_01: really making these kind of supports for learning.
- 8:03This is something that many of the AI companies are starting to
- 8:08figure out,
- 8:08and that is...
- 8:10SPEAKER_01: People want to study with AI.
- 8:11SPEAKER_01: They don't just want the answer.
- 8:13And that learn space is usually the space where it can scaffold
- 8:17your understanding
- 8:19and try to help you and give you tools instead of just giving
- 8:22you answers.
- 8:23SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
- 8:24And it's interesting because even in spaces,
- 8:27you can also activate a study mode lab.
- 8:30SPEAKER_00: And you can, by using that, you can do the step-by-step learning.
- 8:35SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 8:36SPEAKER_00: So I think most Gen.AI tools are becoming more self-explanatory.
- 8:40SPEAKER_00: They are trying to offer you some features.
- 8:44And at the same time,
- 8:45you can use Gen.AI to learn about Gen.AI and its features.
- 8:50SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that seems kind of meta.
- 8:52But the piece that I liked the best out of all of this is the
- 8:57ability to create automated tasks.
- 8:59SPEAKER_01: And this is available in a few of the generative AIs.
- 9:03SPEAKER_01: Actually, I think in most of them.
- 9:04SPEAKER_01: But I find perplexity's approach very, very simple.
- 9:09SPEAKER_01: So you can just give it a regular task.
- 9:11For example,
- 9:12I said,
- 9:13search for airline tickets under a certain price every Friday.
- 9:18I want to maybe at least dream about getting on an airplane and
- 9:21disappearing for the weekend.
- 9:23SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 9:23SPEAKER_01: So you can get a report at 1 p.m.
- 9:27SPEAKER_01: every Friday to say,
- 9:29SPEAKER_01: hey,
- 9:29SPEAKER_01: there's a cheap ticket from,
- 9:30SPEAKER_01: in my case,
- 9:31SPEAKER_01: Omaha,
- 9:32SPEAKER_01: most likely,
- 9:34SPEAKER_01: going to Cleveland,
- 9:36SPEAKER_01: which I had fun at this summer,
- 9:39SPEAKER_01: so I want to go again.
- 9:41And it's going to be only $250,
- 9:44and I'm in the airport that evening,
- 9:46and that'll be that.
- 9:47SPEAKER_01: So you can create this whole series of automatic tasks.
- 9:50So if there's something that you need to update on a regular
- 9:53basis in your
- 9:53SPEAKER_01: business,
- 9:54SPEAKER_01: in school or something like that,
- 9:56SPEAKER_01: this is a great opportunity to have that.
- 10:00SPEAKER_01: You can connect it to your email.
- 10:01SPEAKER_01: So,
- 10:01SPEAKER_01: for example,
- 10:02SPEAKER_01: you can say,
- 10:02SPEAKER_01: hey,
- 10:02can you give me a report on Friday about all the emails I
- 10:05missed and I should
- 10:06SPEAKER_01: probably respond to before the weekend sets in or things like that.
- 10:10SPEAKER_01: That seems to be a really reasonable way to work your workflows.
- 10:15SPEAKER_00: So they are not basically just tasks.
- 10:18SPEAKER_00: They can be customized or personalized agents, right?
- 10:21SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 10:22But the other thing that I want to mention that they kind of
- 10:27hide that very useful feature.
- 10:31SPEAKER_00: So if you want to access tasks,
- 10:33SPEAKER_00: you should click on your icon in the left navigation menu,
- 10:38and then you can click on task and then define the task and
- 10:41even talk about the
- 10:43SPEAKER_00: timing of the task.
- 10:45SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 10:46SPEAKER_01: And I think that in some ways,
- 10:48SPEAKER_01: I find that the secondary AI labs,
- 10:52SPEAKER_01: and we have to be honest,
- 10:53SPEAKER_01: OpenAI owns most of the market.
- 10:57SPEAKER_01: And so that forces the other AI companies to offer you something extra,
- 11:03SPEAKER_01: either cheaper,
- 11:04SPEAKER_01: which is happening...
- 11:05SPEAKER_01: Or something extra.
- 11:07SPEAKER_01: And in this case,
- 11:08I think Perplexity is doing some really interesting things with
- 11:11their interface
- 11:12that allows you to get quicker into having an agent or doing
- 11:18something on a regular
- 11:19SPEAKER_01: basis like in Tasks.
- 11:20SPEAKER_00: Sure, sure, yes.
- 11:22SPEAKER_01: All right, I think it's time to talk about the paper.
- 11:24SPEAKER_00: Sure, yeah.
- 11:25All right,
- 11:25so we talked about perplexity,
- 11:27and now I want to talk about the paper.
- 11:29SPEAKER_01: This is a problem everybody's talking about, hallucinations, which...
- 11:36SPEAKER_01: Just recently,
- 11:37SPEAKER_01: we found out from some research,
- 11:38SPEAKER_01: may actually be a result of the training,
- 11:43SPEAKER_01: the post-training reinforcement and not the actual LLM.
- 11:49So there has been this hypothesis with some support that the
- 11:55LLMs hallucinate
- 11:56SPEAKER_01: because in reinforcement learning.
- 11:59So when people interact with them...
- 12:01Based on the feedback that they get from...
- 12:04SPEAKER_01: And that feedback is always on the positive side.
- 12:08SPEAKER_01: It never rewards them when they say just, I don't know.
- 12:14So they are much more likely to try and invent and maybe hit a
- 12:18home run than not.
- 12:20So it's a reinforcement thing,
- 12:22which is really interesting to think about.
- 12:23SPEAKER_01: But here are two researchers...
- 12:26SPEAKER_01: Huang and Zhong,
- 12:28and they are looking at generative artificial intelligence and
- 12:33misinformation
- 12:34SPEAKER_01: acceptance,
- 12:35an experimental test of the effect of forewarning about
- 12:38artificial intelligence
- 12:39SPEAKER_01: hallucination.
- 12:41SPEAKER_01: Long title.
- 12:43SPEAKER_01: First, I want to say that...
- 12:46SPEAKER_01: Area of AI in general,
- 12:48SPEAKER_01: especially AI in education and in society,
- 12:50SPEAKER_01: is seeing an explosion of articles.
- 12:53SPEAKER_01: Not all of them are great, even if they are peer-reviewed.
- 12:56And too many papers are getting air and publicity before they
- 13:01are peer-reviewed.
- 13:02SPEAKER_01: This is a peer-reviewed article.
- 13:04SPEAKER_01: And at least from reading it, it is fairly well executed.
- 13:09SPEAKER_01: So the sample size, for example, is 208 Korean adults.
- 13:13So we're talking about a large enough sample to learn something
- 13:18about,
- 13:18obviously.
- 13:19SPEAKER_01: And they say that these are Korean adults.
- 13:21It might work or not work in other countries,
- 13:24but you've got to start somewhere.
- 13:25SPEAKER_01: You've got to start with a place that you're at.
- 13:27SPEAKER_01: And what they did for them is they really had them...
- 13:32look at AI results and examine whether they were accepting
- 13:38misinformation or not,
- 13:39SPEAKER_01: and they had two conditions.
- 13:41SPEAKER_01: One of them was just,
- 13:42SPEAKER_01: here it is,
- 13:43SPEAKER_01: here's the AI,
- 13:44SPEAKER_01: here are the results,
- 13:45SPEAKER_01: and in the other one,
- 13:45SPEAKER_01: they just did a reminder.
- 13:47SPEAKER_01: Remember,
- 13:48SPEAKER_01: AI sometimes gives misinformation,
- 13:52SPEAKER_01: and we as consumers should be really careful because...
- 13:59SPEAKER_01: It does that.
- 14:00SPEAKER_01: And what they found is something as simple as just telling people,
- 14:06SPEAKER_01: you need to be careful,
- 14:07SPEAKER_01: you need to think about what you're consuming,
- 14:09SPEAKER_01: did make a big difference.
- 14:12SPEAKER_01: And it made an interesting difference because they examined this.
- 14:15SPEAKER_01: It made people not trust hallucinations when they were wrong,
- 14:19SPEAKER_01: but actually trust the results differently.
- 14:21SPEAKER_01: When they were right.
- 14:23SPEAKER_01: So it just made them better consumers.
- 14:25SPEAKER_01: It didn't,
- 14:26SPEAKER_01: because,
- 14:26SPEAKER_01: I mean,
- 14:27the fear everybody's talking about right now is that with so
- 14:31much AI slop,
- 14:33SPEAKER_01: the fear is not that we will believe lies,
- 14:36SPEAKER_01: but the fear is that we will not believe anything.
- 14:38SPEAKER_00: Anything, yeah.
- 14:39SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 14:40SPEAKER_00: So raising people's awareness about, yeah.
- 14:43SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
- 14:44SPEAKER_01: And that's a really good design from a study perspective.
- 14:49SPEAKER_00: It's an online experiment, right?
- 14:51SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 14:51SPEAKER_00: They had two groups.
- 14:53SPEAKER_01: It is an online experiment.
- 14:55SPEAKER_01: They worked it out.
- 14:56SPEAKER_01: They're working with adults.
- 14:57So this is not a result for kids,
- 14:59but we're working often with college students and adults.
- 15:02SPEAKER_00: They also talked about the age range of the participants, right?
- 15:06SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 15:07SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 15:07SPEAKER_00: They range from 20 to 59.
- 15:08SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 15:12SPEAKER_00: That's a good range.
- 15:13SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 15:13SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 15:13SPEAKER_01: So it is very convincing and it seems to be well executed.
- 15:19SPEAKER_01: So thank you for the authors of that.
- 15:21SPEAKER_01: And basically what it says,
- 15:23SPEAKER_01: if you are using AI with your students,
- 15:25SPEAKER_01: if you are using AI in general,
- 15:29SPEAKER_01: just remembering it can hallucinate.
- 15:32SPEAKER_01: Even warning yourself, I think sometimes.
- 15:33SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 15:34SPEAKER_01: Remember.
- 15:35SPEAKER_01: And the AI sometimes do that.
- 15:37The problem is when the same warning comes up every time,
- 15:40you stop paying attention.
- 15:41SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
- 15:42SPEAKER_01: So that specialized warning, it's like, this is great, but let's check.
- 15:47SPEAKER_00: Let's check, yes.
- 15:48SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking about this thing we did with perplexity.
- 15:51And with perplexity,
- 15:52for example,
- 15:53when I did my query,
- 15:54it did give me the sources.
- 15:56SPEAKER_01: It says, oh, this thing I got from code.org.
- 15:58SPEAKER_01: This thing I got from this.
- 16:00SPEAKER_01: So it showed me exactly where the data came from, and that was powerful.
- 16:03And it even showed the code that it created in Python to create
- 16:06the charts and all that.
- 16:07SPEAKER_01: So it was lovely.
- 16:09And you can always click on those links to make sure that they
- 16:13are directing you to
- 16:14SPEAKER_00: the right website.
- 16:16Or even sometimes the content is well aligned with what you
- 16:19have in your mind.
- 16:22SPEAKER_01: And so really, what am I trying to say?
- 16:24SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to say two things about this study.
- 16:27SPEAKER_01: One is that we can do something about hallucination,
- 16:31and that is be careful and use our human minds to sort through
- 16:35and make sure,
- 16:36SPEAKER_01: validate,
- 16:37SPEAKER_01: but also just process through,
- 16:39SPEAKER_01: is this really,
- 16:40SPEAKER_01: does this seem reasonable?
- 16:41SPEAKER_01: And the second thing is that there is good...
- 16:46SPEAKER_01: Because there's so much.
- 16:47SPEAKER_01: I mean, we were talking about this earlier today.
- 16:50SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of not so good research out there.
- 16:53SPEAKER_01: The sample sizes are too small.
- 16:55SPEAKER_01: It's selective.
- 16:56SPEAKER_01: There's bias.
- 16:58SPEAKER_01: The instrumentation is not very good.
- 17:01SPEAKER_00: The analysis is not... Yeah, solid and yeah.
- 17:04And this seems to be one of those studies where you're like,
- 17:06okay,
- 17:07there's quality out there.
- 17:08SPEAKER_01: We just have to go and look for it.
- 17:10SPEAKER_01: And if you're consuming that information, take a look at the methodology.
- 17:14SPEAKER_01: Make sure that it's peer-reviewed,
- 17:17but also make sure that the methodology makes sense and it
- 17:20really answers what they
- 17:22claim it answers and not something else because we want to
- 17:27learn from research,
- 17:27SPEAKER_01: but only from good research.
- 17:29SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, sure.
- 17:31SPEAKER_01: All right, so today we talked about... Paraplexity.
- 17:34SPEAKER_01: And about avoiding believing in hallucinations.
- 17:40SPEAKER_01: And we'll see you next time on Azadeh and Guy on AI.