Tag: A.I

Copilot Notebook

Notebook is a new feature in the Web version of Microsoft Copilot, which Newcastle University staff and students currently have licenced access to via https://copilot.microsoft.com (make sure you sign in using your University credentials – you may also need to use “Switch to a work or school account” in the profile menu).

Screenshot of Copilot Notebook

The first thing to notice about Copilot Notebook is it’s extended character limit of up to 18,000 characters, which is much more than the standard Copilot chat, which has a character limit of 4,000. This is particularly useful when you need assistance with longer content, such as essays, papers, or articles that require proofreading or summarising.

The true power of Notebook lies in It’s facility for prompt iteration. In many A.I. Chat tools, tweaking a prompt usually generates brand-new results, often losing the context of the previous answer. However, in Notebook, your previous prompt remains intact after initial answers are generated. This means you can more easily tweak the original prompt and iteratively refine it, to optimise the answers that the A.I. generates.

Of course the disclaimer “Copilot uses AI. Check for mistakes” remains true of generative AI services in general. A.I. can generate many accurate answers, but occasionally have “A.I. Hallucination”, where convincing answers may include false or misleading information, presented as fact. Nevertheless, the time-saving benefits are potentially significant.

Using A.I. effectively involves you developing the skills and experience to write more precise prompts and to take the time to read results and quality assure them. The layout of the Web version of Copilot Notebook, with prompt on the left and results on the right (see screenshot), complement the development of these skills.

The current licence held by Newcastle University doesn’t include Copilot integration with your documents, Outlook Emails, Calendars etc. So don’t expect great results for questions which are University, Faculty or School specific (integrating contextualised University and Faculty-specific information is something we are exploring in our ERDP A.I. Chatbot project). However, Copilot Notebook can be very useful for generating general subject related answers, or refining your specific content.

In summary, Copilot Notebook gives you a new interface to refine your prompts to get more precise results. The more generous character limit is helpful, for example when drafting plans, generating ideas, or organising information.

FMS AI Project

A drawing of two different halves of a brain left side is connected with electronic circuits representing logic and the right side full of 70s style paint drops representing creativity.

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLM) and their potential this year the FMS TEL Team have been successful in an application for funding. We are in the very early stages of planning out how we can integrate some of our services with a LLM whilst also maintaining security over the data.

We have looked at feedback from a recent survey and are taking on board ideas from colleagues and students, to help guide us through this exploratory work.

This is just the beginning and we will keep you updated on our progress.

Presentations powered by A.I – Gamma.app Review

Gamma.app is an A.I-based tool which generates presentations, documents, and webpages. It’s focus on presentations makes it of potential interest to those involved in teaching and learning. https://gamma.app

Quick Look:

In ‘guided mode’, I gave a title ‘history of Newcastle upon Tyne’, and Gamma provided a choice of templates and then generated a suggested presentation structure within a few seconds. It then generated a deck of 8 slides in about 1 minute. The slide deck included relevant images and could be exported as Powerpoint or PDF. Additionally, Gamma allows for the import of custom text, which it adapts and converts into a slide deck or document. The ‘AI editor’ provides options, such as “Suggest a professional theme”, “Give more detail”, “Give me a more exciting way to say this” etc.

The Gamma app in use showing chat interaction with AI and the 3 slides generated.
Cost:

Gamma currently (October 2023) has a three tier model:

  1. Free limited use – you get a one-off 400 ‘AI Credits’ (credits used each time you generate a document), exported slides and documents are branded
  2. ‘Plus’ – £78/year, 400 ‘AI Credits’ per month
  3. ‘Pro’ – £147/year, unlimted credits and extra features
Thoughts:

Gamma is a powerful tool which can quickly generate slide decks and documents which are ‘usable’ with little modification. With all the focus on the tools of the ‘big players’, such as Microsoft/Chat-GPT and Google, it is refreshing to see a tool from a seemingly independent company (though, like many other A.I. apps, it may well be using the back-end services of Chat-GPT ).

Of course, to use A.I. generated materials, it is important to have grounded subject knowledge and critically review and adapt outputs, to avoid mistakes. It is also important to carefully word the prompts which you provide to the A.I.; for example, a presentation generated for me by Gamma, about “Newcastle University”, included accurate information about the 19th century pre-cursors of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, but then mentioned a merger with UCL in 2002, and included a photo of Newcastle University in Australia.

There are obvious plagiarism and academic integrity issues to consider. In common with most other A.I. apps, there is no acknowledgement of the source materials used in training of the A.I. As such it may be part-based on copyrighted materials and licenced content such as Wikipedia, which has an Attribution-Share-Alike licence. Likewise, the source of images aren’t acknowledged – though the ‘A.I. Editor’ does give the option of ‘all images’ (even if licencing unknown), ‘Free to use’ (which seem ‘loose’, by including sources which don’t generally display image licence information, such as Facebook and Twitter) and ‘Free to use commercially’ – and you can click through to the source of the image. The pricing model for Gamma is similar to that of other A.I. tools, all of which lead the universal problem of inequality of access, giving advantage to students from more well-off backgrounds. But these tools are widely available now, and this is the new reality that H.E. needs to adapt to.