Using Artificial Intelligence to Create OER

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Larry Green

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Oct 20, 2023, 3:45:23 PM10/20/23
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Hi All,
A faculty member at my college is moving his anthropology course to OER and just let me know " I used a lot of AI to create some of the text and all of the images."  
When we use AI, such as ChatGPT, to create material, is that considered OER?  If so, I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes the new norm for creating OER materials.
Thanks,
Larry

Stephanie R Walker

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Oct 20, 2023, 4:13:50 PM10/20/23
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There’s currently at least 1 lawsuit against an AI company (one that works with song lyrics) for violating copyright by using all sorts of copyrighted materials in its mash-ups, etc.  So I wouldn’t necessarily consider them OERs.  It depends how the AI was used, and what materials were used as inputs.  There’s all sorts of copyright-violating material on the internet…

 

Stephanie Walker

 

 

 

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Subject: Using Artificial Intelligence to Create OER

 

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Amy Hofer

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Oct 20, 2023, 8:06:03 PM10/20/23
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Hi all, I can't resist a repeat plug of an upcoming webinar on this topic! :)

Exploring Artificial Intelligence in Open Education Contexts (not so scary after all?). Does AI give you the creeps? Join our panelists for a 90-minute conversation this Halloween to demystify current and future uses of AI in open education. October 31, 11-12:30.

FYI, 
Amy  

Brown, Olivia

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Oct 23, 2023, 10:09:58 AM10/23/23
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Hi Larry,

 

In regards to this comment, " I used a lot of AI to create some of the text and all of the images."   I think this is the norm now.  I use it to create SLOs for many of my courses and lesson plans. 

 

Olivia Brown, Program Chair and Instructor

Business Management & Marketing Management program.

Athens Technical College

800 U.S. Highway 29 North

Athens, GA 30601

Monroe ( Location).

212 Bryant Rd, Monroe, GA 30655

Office: (706) 355-5077     

Email: obr...@athenstech.edu

 

 

 

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Subject: RE: Using Artificial Intelligence to Create OER

 

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Ross, Heather

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Oct 23, 2023, 10:26:12 AM10/23/23
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From a legal standpoint I don’t think we can use it in OER. A CC license requires an item to be eligible for copyright. Copyrighting AI created content has not been settled.

From an ethical (and legal) perspective, using AI to create OER (or commercial work) is highly questionable as the content may use inputs that were added to the AI tool without the permission of the copyright holder. A good friend of mine has had at least one of her books (memoir, not textbook) added without either her or her publisher’s permission. 

Just because something seems to be becoming the norm, doesn’t mean it’s either legal or ethical.

Heather M. Ross
University of Saskatchewan 


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Jonathan Poritz

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Oct 23, 2023, 11:57:42 AM10/23/23
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Heather,

While I think it is a nightmarishly bad idea for the open education world to use generative AInt for OER ... I don't know that I think it is a copyright problem, in many of the situations in which it is used.

Warning: IAmNotALawyer, and this is not legal advice.

But my understanding is that the copyright situation regarding the outputs of generative AInt falls into two categories, based on where the use is made: outside of the US, I think there are as yet very few formal legal regulations or laws or decisions -- so, maybe, anything goes?  (The EU is working on its "AI Act", but that actually has very little to say about issues like the status of genAInt outputs.)

On the other hand, within the US, the Copyright Office has ruled, essentially, that the outputs of genAInt are not eligible for copyright protection.  The official ruling leaves some wiggle room, but they also ruled on particular works (e.g., famously, the graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn) in a way that makes it seem like this ruling would likely apply to many of the uses in open education.

So to the extent that this ruling applies to OER, the entire work will be born into the public domain, or else there will be a thin copyright if an OER author selects and arranges public domain genAInt outputs, or else there will be a large, human-created, OER with author as rightsholder into which the creator will have inserted a few public domain genAInt outputs -- in the latter two situations, the human will have a copyright they can use to apply a CC license, while in first situation, the whole work is in the public domain ... which counts as OER (by the UNESCO OER Recommendation definition of OER, which I usually use as the canonical definition of OER ... but most other definitions agree on this point)!


The nightmare of genAInt in OER is instead because it is basically a fancy autocomplete tool, why in the world would we create educational materials with fancy autocomplete?

Even if one could find an answer to that question ("why would we..."), there are so many downsides to genAInt:
  • it generates reasonable-looking text which can be filled with errors
  • it has no understanding of anything, so cannot write with insight, empathy, pedagogical experience...,
  • it is often based on exploitative labor (e.g., LLM companies are literally outsourcing the content moderation which is supposed to prevent horrific (even illegal, such as CSAM) material being generated to terribly paid workers in developing countries),
  • it is based on material scraped from the 'net which could be a copyright violation itself (legal experts disagree; personally, I do think there are copyright violations in making and distributing the models), and which reiterates the biases and injustices which are so rampant on the 'net
  • it consumes enormous amounts of power and water (like the last tech hype cycle to go bust recently, the one based on blockchains, the server farms for AInt are consuming power which approaches that of an entire country!)
  • it sends exactly the opposite message we are trying to send in education, that we care about people and we believe there is a value in people knowing things and gaining expertise ... rather we want fancy autocomplete to do the work of human experts,
  • and on and on....
I spoke about these problems in a presentation to the Creative Commons Global Summit with title Will Generative AI DDOS The Commons?, joint with Kathryn Kure.  A video of the presentation as well as slides can be found on my web page https://poritz.net/j/share/WGAIDDOS/ .

Oh, I guess there are two responses I can imagine people giving to my "why would we hand education over to fancy autocomplete?" question:
  1. It will be used by experts to get a start, they will then edit the genAInt output and fix all the errors.  This will save them time and effort.
  2. We don't have the money to pay for people to do the important work of making OER, so this is a way to get something ... and something, even of very low quality, is better than nothing.
To which I would reply:

First of all, there are all of those big, systemic problems mentioned above, so these lukewarm justifications are doing a lot of work!

Second, for point 1: Well, OK, if it saves you time, go for it.  When I make videos, I use YouTube's voice recognition autocaptioning ... and then spend a lot of time fixing all of its mistakes -- but I think real experts will have to spend a very large amount of time and energy to get genAInt OER into usable form, putting in all of the pedagogical insight and correcting all of the (plausibly worded) mistakes genAInt makes.  I would be very surprised if this were a faster way to make higher quality OER.  ...I guess, up to the system problems already mentioned, I'd be happy to be proven wrong about that.

Finally, for point 2: if it's just a question of money and institutional priorities ... I'm willing to keep fighting the good fight against the defunding of quality education, I don't see why open education folks accept this more draconian attack on quality education and on educators' livelihoods -- other creatives fought against this nonsense (see: the Hollywood writers' strike), why aren't we?  Instead, we seem to be happy to grease the slide into this particular dystopia.



Sorry, that got a bit rant-y.  I apologize.  My main point was that I don't think copyright will save us here.

best,
Jonathan


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Kelly, Stephen M

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Oct 23, 2023, 12:22:21 PM10/23/23
to Ross, Heather, Brown, Olivia, Stephanie R Walker, Larry Green, CCCOER Community Email

Good morning everyone,

 

Lawsuits are making their way through the courts related to copyright protections and whether they will or will not apply to AI training data, outputs, and and matters of fair use.  No one knows how these cases will unfold.  The two I am watching most closely are:

 

 

Here is a decent list for anyone interested in more reading.

 

For the time being, the U.S. Copyright Office has made it clear that the outputs of GenAI are public domain since machines cannot own rights to creative work and the office has determined that genAI outputs do not include sufficient human effort to merit copyright approval.  For anyone interested, the Office is currently accepting public comments related to genAI and copyright through Oct. 30, 2023.  Public domain materials can be included in OER, however, those materials maintain their public domain status.  Creative Commons provides guidance for the use of public domain materials.  Some considerations:

 

  • A collection that includes AI content but that also exhibits significant human creative effort may be eligible for limited copyright.  In this case, the collection itself and human created portions are copyright, but the AI generated portions are not.  See Zarya of the Dawn Letter from the US Copyright Office for more details.
  • Other jurisdictions may grant copyright to computer generated content, and OER practitioners must be mindful of this.  For instance, see the United Kingdom.  As is always the case with OER, knowing the laws of the jurisdiction where the material was created matters.
  • Creative Commons is providing guidance on the interplay between CC licensing and GenAI created materials.  In short, they recommend the use of CC0 in situations where a collection is predominantly AI generated (as originally presented by Larry Green, the OP).

 

I hope this information is helpful for those navigating these waters.  We are all doing our best.

 

Stephen M. Kelly

Project Manager – NextGen Student

Educational Development & Technology

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Minnesota State

30 East 7th Street, St. Paul, MN 55101

o: 651-201-1813

stephe...@minnstate.edu | minnstate.edu |

 

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Ross, Heather

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Oct 23, 2023, 3:43:43 PM10/23/23
to Kelly, Stephen M, Brown, Olivia, Stephanie R Walker, Larry Green, CCCOER Community Email
Again, the input must be considered both legally and ethically. Not only are copyrighted works being inputted without copyright holders permission, but there is the danger of content that was never eligible for copyright to be inputted. I have concerns about someone inputting cultural sensitive content such as traditional Indigenous knowledge that cannot be copyrighted nor is it in the public domain. 

Heather 

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On Oct 23, 2023, at 10:22 AM, Kelly, Stephen M <Stephe...@minnstate.edu> wrote:



Good morning everyone,

 

Lawsuits are making their way through the courts related to copyright protections and whether they will or will not apply to AI training data, outputs, and and matters of fair use.  No one knows how these cases will unfold.  The two I am watching most closely are:

 

 

Here is a decent list for anyone interested in more reading.

 

For the time being, the U.S. Copyright Office has made it clear that the outputs of GenAI are public domain since machines cannot own rights to creative work and the office has determined that genAI outputs do not include sufficient human effort to merit copyright approval.  For anyone interested, the Office is currently accepting public comments related to genAI and copyright through Oct. 30, 2023.  Public domain materials can be included in OER, however, those materials maintain their public domain status.  Creative Commons provides guidance for the use of public domain materials.  Some considerations:

 

  • A collection that includes AI content but that also exhibits significant human creative effort may be eligible for limited copyright.  In this case, the collection itself and human created portions are copyright, but the AI generated portions are not.  See Zarya of the Dawn Letter from the US Copyright Office for more details.
  • Other jurisdictions may grant copyright to computer generated content, and OER practitioners must be mindful of this.  For instance, see the United Kingdom.  As is always the case with OER, knowing the laws of the jurisdiction where the material was created matters.
  • Creative Commons is providing guidance on the interplay between CC licensing and GenAI created materials.  In short, they recommend the use of CC0 in situations where a collection is predominantly AI generated (as originally presented by Larry Green, the OP).

 

I hope this information is helpful for those navigating these waters.  We are all doing our best.

 

Stephen M. Kelly

Project Manager – NextGen Student

Educational Development & Technology

-

Minnesota State

30 East 7th Street, St. Paul, MN 55101

o: 651-201-1813

stephe...@minnstate.edu | minnstate.edu |

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Paul Stacey

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Oct 23, 2023, 7:24:15 PM10/23/23
to Ross, Heather, Kelly, Stephen M, Brown, Olivia, Stephanie R Walker, Larry Green, CCCOER Community Email
As so many have noted there are a lot of not just legal, but ethical questions associated with using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to generate OER. I agree with almost everything posted here so far. 

For a more macro look at how AI affects "open" more generally a post I wrote called AI From An Open Perspective might be of interest.

Clearly the current AI environment is in major flux and specifics about AI relative to OER will be dependent on court cases, regulations and policy that are still forthcoming. My own push has been around thinking there is merit in trying to arrive at a set of values, principles, and recommendations those of us in the open movement can bring forward around what policy and regulations ought to say. Toward that end I was happy to play a role in formulating the "Making AI Work For Creators And The Commons" statement developed at the recent Creative Commons Global Summit in Mexico City.

Best.

Paul Stacey
https://paulstacey.global/
Blog Posts: AI From An Open Perspective and Sustainability Models



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Rachel Rose

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Oct 24, 2023, 8:32:17 PM10/24/23
to Paul Stacey, Ross, Heather, Kelly, Stephen M, Brown, Olivia, Stephanie R Walker, Larry Green, CCCOER Community Email
There are accuracy considerations! As an instructor who checks sources and am an expert in my field, there is consistently inaccurate information in chatGPT as well as journal referenced that do not exist! Please do not write any legitimate OER gaining any facts from chat GPT that you have not checked at an original source.  

Rachel Rose

On Oct 23, 2023, at 4:24 PM, Paul Stacey <paulgord...@gmail.com> wrote:



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Alan Levine

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Oct 25, 2023, 12:21:06 PM10/25/23
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As indicated well in this message string, looking for clear rules "is this OER or not" and how licenses will accommodate will be murky. I might go back to Larry's original question from an Anthropology prof stating, "I used a lot of AI to create some of the text and all of the images."  is something I would interrogate further:
  • Is the author saying they are using AI generated text wholesale? Some as mentioned here might use it to draft objectives, perhaps summarize other sources, develop practice exercises.  What is the difference in our usual research practice of searching, finding examples, and re-writing for our own context? If it's copy/pasting generated text as our own, well.... I'd be concerned.
  • I also have trouble believing AI is used for "all the images"? Are we talking cover art? Metaphors? I'd think images for Anthropology would need to be based on observations in the world, figures, diagrams. Have I missed some AI image generators that do this to this level?
The standards for attribution too are formative, but if it was me, I'd urge authors to be very clear in whatever way of citing how the content is being created,.

I am very keen to know more specifically in what ways OER content creators are using AI as a tool, not as a writer.

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