Meeting 7
Meeting 7
Do the first two activities in groups of 3-5. For the third activity, you may or may not want to be talking to others while you look through this private information about yourself!
First activity: Make your own AI art Turing test
Each of you should make a small test for the other members of the group.
Download a piece of art or an image that you really liked recently (it could be a historical work of art, a photo one of your friends posted recently, a still from a movie you like - if there’s a style you like, maybe look for an example of that style from Wikipedia or Wikimedia and download a version that is roughly 1000x1000 pixels).
Choose an image that you think the other people in your group won’t recognize. Make sure it doesn’t contain a recognizable person, or a trademarked brand name or logo.
Use a free AI image generator to create another image in the same style as this one, with roughly the same aspect ratio. Download that image too.
Upload both images to your group’s page (link removed), and see if people can guess which is the original and which is the AI imitation.
Once you’re done, check the ones the other groups have come up with.
Second activity: Discuss ideas for final project
Remind yourself of the final project (link removed). Think about the ideas you have for what you want to do for this and discuss them with each other, to see if anyone has suggestions for how to make it better, or how to choose between options. There might be some idea your fiction has inspired in you that is relevant to contemporary issues in AI, and you might want to do a 10 minute presentation on it, with a little bit of AI art or enhancements in the slides. Or perhaps you want to use AI to generate video or music inspired by your fiction. Or maybe you have ideas for a video game that extends the one you did in week 4, or does something very different.
Third activity: Digital privacy audit
Look through the information that various sites use to determine what ads to show you:
- Google: https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy - see what information is being saved and used to determine ads for you under My Activity and My Ad Center as well as “Customize ads”.
- Make sure to check “Third party apps and services” to see if there are any logins with Google that you can delete, or any apps that have access to your Google files that you think shouldn’t
- Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Meta: https://accountscenter.facebook.com/info_and_permissions
- Check “Your activity off Meta technologies” - this shows a list of websites that have told Meta that you visited them. Some of them might be “login with Facebook” that you actually use, but you might want to clear the others and “Manage future activity” to block others
- (Note - Meta still gathers the information that someone visited this site, just not that it’s you)
- Check “Ad preferences” and see what sorts of ads it thinks you want to see
- Check the other tabs as well to see if they’re relevant
- Check “Your activity off Meta technologies” - this shows a list of websites that have told Meta that you visited them. Some of them might be “login with Facebook” that you actually use, but you might want to clear the others and “Manage future activity” to block others
- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/yourstore
- Particularly check the “Your browsing history” and “Improve your recommendations” tabs
- Look at this apology from Canvas about the theft of your information last week: https://www.instructure.com/incident_update - notice that it’s almost certainly LLM-written
- If there are other services you use a lot, you might use Google or an LLM to find similar pages for them where you can customize
- (One category that might be difficult to look up is businesses where you leave your phone number to get a discount, in exchange for them linking all your purchases and gathering that data in one place.)
- California requires data brokers to remove information about California residents who request it. The site for submitting this request is here: https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/. You need some work to prove you are a California resident, so you might send a reminder to yourself to try this one later.
Fourth activity: Discuss this module’s ideas
Open up the Canvas page for module 7 (link removed) to remind yourselves of the videos for this module. Discuss these videos with each other.
Were there any ideas from any of them that you found particularly surprising, or interesting? Were there things you didn’t understand?
Look at the list of “Further watching/reading” links below the actual assignments. Are there some that look interesting to dig into further? Are there any you already looked at that some of the other people in your group might want to check out?