 Hi everybody, I'm Michael Branson-Smith. I have been working on a project with a- Hello everyone, it's great to be here at Reclaim Open 2023. I'm Alan Levine and I am here today to talk- He's already going ahead and jumping in. Calm down, Alan. Yeah. So this is, let me just introduce Alan to you. Hey, I'm here. Yeah. And this is, he wants to, he's going to make this presentation. I'm here as just a passenger by the way. This is not my presentation. Or a medium. Yeah. And the internet is interesting, so we'll see how it goes. Hello everyone, it's great to be here at Reclaim Open 2023. I'm Alan Levine and I am here today to talk about my work on Splots or the simplest possible learning online tools. Splots is a project that has been very close to my heart for many years now and I'm excited to share with you- He did all the st- He gave me a local file, so maybe we should just use that. We'll be here at Reclaim Open 2023. I'm Alan Levine and I am here today to talk about my work on Splots or the simplest possible learning online tools. Splots is a project that has been very close to my heart for many years now and I'm excited to share with you all the story of its birth and growth. I first came up with the idea for Splots in 2014 during a workshop on digital storytelling that I was facilitating. The participants were struggling with the technical aspects of creating their own websites and publishing their stories online. They were intimidated by the complex and often confusing platforms that were available to them. It was then that I realized that there was a need for a simpler, more user-friendly tool for creating and publishing content online. And so the idea for Splots was born. The first plot I created was called the Story Box. It was a simple tool for creating and publishing digital stories online. The Story Box was designed to be as user-friendly as possible with a clean and intuitive interface that even those with no technical expertise could use. The Story Box was an instant hit. It was easy to use and it produced beautiful and engaging digital stories. I knew I was onto something and I began to think about how I could expand the concept of Splots to other areas of online learning. Over the next few years, I continued to develop and refine the concept of Splots. I created new tools and applications that were designed to be simple, intuitive, and user-friendly. I focused on creating tools that would help educators and learners create and share content online without the need for technical expertise. One of the most exciting things about Splots is that it has grown organically over time. It has been adopted and adapted by educators and learners all over the world who have used it to create a wide variety of content from digital stories to portfolios to online quizzes. One of the things that I am most proud of about Splots is that it is an open-source project. This means that anyone can use, modify, and improve the tools that I have created. It also means that the community of Splots users is constantly growing and evolving as new people contribute their ideas and expertise. Another key feature of Splots is that it is designed to be lightweight and flexible. It doesn't require a lot of server space or processing power, which makes it ideal for use in areas where internet connectivity is limited or unreliable. It can also be customized to suit the needs of different users and contexts. I believe that Splots has the potential to revolutionize online learning. It is a tool that puts the power of content creation and sharing into the hands of educators and learners. It empowers them to create and share their own stories and experiences and to connect with others in new and meaningful ways. Over the years, I have seen countless examples of how Splots has been used to create engaging and impactful learning experiences from the digital stories created by students in a small rural school in Australia to the online portfolios created by educators in a remote village in South Africa. Splots has proven to be a powerful tool for learning and sharing. One of my favorite examples of the power of Splots is the Instant Splot tool that I created in 2017. This tool allows users to create a custom website in seconds simply by filling in a few basic details. It is an incredibly easy and accessible tool that has been used by educators and learners all over the world to create online spaces for sharing their work and ideas. As the popularity of Splots has grown over the years, I have been amazed and humbled by the enthusiasm and creativity of the community of users who have adopted it. Overall, I believe that Splots have a lot to offer to educators and learners who are looking for a simple, flexible and customizable way to create and share digital content. I hope that more and more people will discover the power and potential of Splots and that they will continue to grow and evolve as a tool for teaching and learning in the digital age. Thank you, everyone, and remember to use... So... That's A.I. Levine. He and I have worked together on this project for a little time now. I'm going to give some background of how A.N.I, Levine and I were built, was built. So this was some madness born out of an idea that Jim and I have been working on for a long time. I'm going to give some background of how A.N.I, Levine and I were built, was built. So this was some madness born out of an idea that Jim and I... I was struggling to come up with a conversation for my talk, so I was talking to Jim about some ideas and we were talking about Allen as this poor human being who shared so much about himself on the internet. He became the target of sockpuffeting. If you've read Allen's blog, he's talked about how he's been a target in the past. And so, we thought it would be really interesting if he could produce A.I. Levine. And, you know, it was one of those things where I was like, well, I think I have just enough skills to maybe pull this off, right? And it started with... The hard thing is I had to restart my computer with a post where people are building avatars from scratch and using tools to do so. I had to restart. Let me get... And I can... Should I bring Allen in to talk about this, too? He... He's on the chat. I don't think he's very happy, though. Oh, okay. I just don't want to let you know if we do bring him on. Okay, well, I feel like, you know, we spoke about this and he should be able to, you know, I'll send him a DM with this address and maybe he'll jump on there. Okay. So we'll leave that there. Oh, there he is. A.I. Levine. How are you doing? You're muted. I know that. I did that on purpose. Who you calling A.I. What is this? Did you have a Creative Commons license? Did you obey the license? Okay, let's talk about this. You agreed that it was okay to, you know, produce this monstrosity. It's you. It's not me. Michael, I have always been A.I. I have always been artificially intelligent. Okay? I read and train myself on the entire Internet and then I generate things and I am A.I. This is a mockery, Michael Branson Smith. I thought you were an artist. Wait, I thought I'd share the first version. You know, I mean, I don't know if you've seen it. This is it. This is about me and turning me into some kind of... No, that's not it. That's a good fellow. This is it. So what mean ye splot? Splot? Pick your acronym. There's a few. I get confused. I don't know who I'm talking to anymore. I'm confused. I don't know who I am anymore, Michael. I thought those were you but I'm not quite sure. Maybe this one's you. Round 2 or 3 a.m. No, that's not you. I think you've demonstrated the complete inevitability of A.I. This is you. This is it. Hello, Alan. You told me so much about you. Looking forward to working on our speech for Reclaim open 2020. Now you can see why I get all the keynotes. That was definitely you. So that's... Yeah, so that's how it started, right? I mean, that was definitely you, Alan, right? Yeah. How does it work? What does it do? My A.I. Levine, which is so enjoyable to be in charge of, and I hope to include him in my presentation as well, he's going to be talking about copyright and Photoshop's use of their... What was that tool your friend A.I. Levine was talking about? A generative film? Yeah, yeah. A.I. Levine's going to talk about that in my presentation too. Speak in my... He's smarter. And he's better looking too. So yeah, I mean, when A.I. and I started, we were looking at ways we can take tools that exist out there to build avatars. And first, I was like, okay, there's lots of open source tools, and I have to restart my computer. I had things open that aren't open. Here we go. And now I need my glasses, because things are very tiny. This is a long way from a... This is a long way from a GIF, isn't it? Yeah, no kidding. So there's all these what they call text-to-speech models, right? And so text-to-speech models are effectively data-driven A.I. models that can be used in the context of it's a version of a large language model type of tool or image models like stable diffusion and things like that. It gathers all this data where it comes from. It's not necessarily ever revealed to us, which is always interesting and problematic. But there were some tools that... The last one you just re-claimed open was an open source tool, right? And it was... and downloaded it and ran it and was successful. And I think I can find it. Yeah, no, it's this one right here. You know, you can see Voight Allen is here. Not you, Allen, but the other Allen, A.I. And we built a model and I was able to train it off of three samples that were very short and it produced... You know, I could enter a script, I'm sorry, a sentence and it produced it, but it was based on a model rendering engine that isn't on the Macintosh. Inside Baseball doesn't matter. And it took eight hours. I was like, oh my god, this isn't going to work. But in the meantime, I had discovered a way of building, using... There are a number of companies out there and this is terrifying and A.I., you're fine. Don't worry, I haven't given you away. Where we were working on models of A.I. Right? There's a few different models. There's one more to share with you. That's kind of interesting, is this one? So what mean you... Not that one. So what mean you splot? Splot! Pick your acronym definition. It doesn't really matter. But it comes from the conviction that there's a great value of learners and educators sharing their work on the open web. Does anybody remember the open web? What? You can't shut them up. So there was a lot of experimentation going on and we were working on a bunch of different models. But finally I came to, and just for fun This is eleven. Let's log into this one. If we want I want to hear Alan talk about what would you like him to talk about? Jim Groom maybe? Let's say Well there's another, the other thing to recognize is A.I. Levine was built off of five blog posts in which No, I'm not using large text models. April, isn't April? It's really good at Oh here it is. So I asked another A.I. because A.I.s are really collaborative. It's kind of cool. And No, they really like one another. And so I had chosen five posts that were about Alan had written these posts about plots that I had chosen dating back to 2015 and rated 800 word speech in Alan Levine's point because I thought A.I. might do a better job. Look, fewer typos. For sure. And so I wasn't totally satisfied and I would ask again and to write a conclusion. It's a rub text that made A.I. Levine give such a wonderful speech today from a teleprompter. And so with that we can feed. So if we wanted to say Oh, I don't know. Let's let's see if let's see what we can see if we want to have Jim Groom talks about DS 106 history in 200 words right? And so you know, I'm sure A.I. Levine agrees with all of this so it might be good to make sure we hear at least this at least this last No, we'll never hear the end of this Michael. At least this last line, you know, it might be great to have A.I. Levine agree for once with Jim Groom. Jim Groom's vision and leadership have been instrumented shaping DS 106 into a vibrant and influential learning community. His work continues to inspire educators and learners to embrace the power of digital storytelling and engage in creative expression in the digital age. So so this no I mean we could have if you want to, you know, if you think Alan was rushing we can say like actually I'm not sure so but A.I. you can see A.I. Levine was a voice that I generated using 11 labs and this uses a I have 5 minutes so good thank god do anybody have any questions but I can talk more about how this works if you want me to the harder part actually was the audio model we came to you what was your thinking you've been writing a lot about A.I. so what should we don't know what the hell we're doing the idea that we can sort of detect A.I. is farcical and I think also like our preconceived notions are getting in the way in terms of what we think of and so none of the rules are applying at the same time like some of the things that it's capable of are the kind of things that we get excited about so we're dancing with that devil of the dark side and the light side here but the dark side is really damn dark and I'm sure people can imagine generating people's speech patterns it's good that it's bad right now and you can obviously see a fake but you know it's going to get better and so like what we think of as content is kind of headed for this big soup of mixed and stuff together where we're not going to know what was generated by an algorithm and what wasn't how's that for a dark vision right yeah I mean Alan was actually very we did not touch this without his support we had thought about it yeah we had thought about it Michael thought about it it's not my fault no no and we brought Alan in to see like are you okay if we did and he actually gave the original training data to me and then the funny thing is it didn't work well so I went and got my own but again I was like hey you know from youtube videos so it's actually built up with stuff I just found and I talked to him about how I said like let me know if it's okay because I changed the model the things that were the model was built on so the idea of building a Jim Groom model would be a piece of cake because he's so prolific and endlessly on the internet yeah basically a dollar or two spent there's a friend of money podcast where they have Robert Smith who has left the podcast and doing other things with life they got a company to give them $20 for their services to produce a voice that's good enough that they released it as an episode oh yeah no it is already good enough I did speak to an actual company about you know because there was enough audio of Alan to work with and they like to work with at least 20 minutes right but it was going to be like $3,000 I didn't tell you about that and I was like I can't do that I was like on to the next possible way of doing it but this one was actually I think even though it's monotone you know if you hear them out of context and if I made an effort to actually edit it and vary his speech patterns which I can if you didn't know Alan like I know Alan so I know he doesn't speak and he's always making emphasis and that was what made the video training he was actually subdued thankfully this one video that I found right so they want and it's kind of scary because they want subdued monotoned people right and that's what they're producing like you just stay still as long as you're still looking at the camera talking in a normal speech pattern and reproducing Jim Groom is their nightmare I want to thank Alan I want to thank you Michael I want to thank you this is an amazing project and really a creative, thoughtful view into the dark figure that you rock Michael you too that was so fun thank you so much thank you man you're the best bye everybody