Panel

Notes on a live conference event

I just returned from appearing a fascinating conference staged by the National Training & Simulation Association (NTSA), a range of experts that gathered in Norfolk, Virginia to swap ideas on how to use many of the disciplines spawned by Artificial Intelligence in education and training.

Called ModSim World 2023, the NTSA sessions focused on national security training, but the subjects on everyone’s mind ranged far beyond the need to educate military officials about defending the nation. In the panels and at the cocktail reception afterwards, the buzz was all about the promise and perils of AI and its technological cousins – machine learning, large language models and simulation.  

photo by Headway

To most Americans, AI is a new and potentially dangerous technology that burst on to the scene last November when OpenAI, a San Francisco based company, unveiled a version of ChatGPT that could perform many tasks, such as writing a blog item like this, better than humans. I’m writing this, by the way, not ChatGPT. 

The experts here were more familiar with these subjects than AI neophytes like me. The military has been using various elements of AI long before OpenAI provided public access to its version of ChatGPT last November.

OpenAI, which is backed by a huge Microsoft investment, pried the lid off ChatGTP so it could get valuable feedback on the benefits and challenges of the technology, thereby creating a tidal wave of speculation about how AI could do everything from save the world to destroy jobs on a massive scale.    

My panel, called “Special Event: The Simulation Century, Generative AI, the Metaverse and the Future,” was organized by Richard Boyd, a Chapel Hill, N.C. entrepreneur and visionary who for more than 25 years has helped create innovative game technology for everything from national defense and energy to health care, education, and motion pictures. He is currently CEO and cofounder of Ultisim, a Chapel Hill company that, among other things, specializes in simulation technology. 

Boyd is a cutting-edge thinker about AI who writes and speaks on the subject often and hosts a podcast called the Metaversial Minute. We satisfied our information needs in the last century, he told the audience, with text and images -- newspapers, TV, radio and internet sites. He says we are now living in the Simulation Century, where new technologies will dramatically reform our ability to originate, disseminate and consume information. 

The big question, he says, is whether we can make machines work for us or whether we will work for them because of our failure to marry human intervention with the development of AI.    

In my session, I talked about AI and its potential impact on journalism. In some respects, I felt out of place. One thing I find fascinating about many of AI’s apostles is that they came to the field from an industry that creates computer games like Minecraft or Cuphead, which are popular with kids. I’ve written many journalistic articles and a few books, but I’ve never played a computer game. 

That was not the case for my fellow panelists. Kyle Shannon came to Norfolk with more than 30 years of experience in innovative storytelling and digital marketing. As the CEO and co-founder of Storyline, a company that revolutionized video storytelling, he helps clients use AI techniques to create authentic content. 

He developed his interest and expertise in AI techniques after he began playing video games in his younger days and gave a spellbinding presentation on artistic platforms that he’s founded, including AI Salon, a community of curious AI adventurers exploring what makes AI possible for as many people as possible.

Another fellow on the panel, Steve Isaacs, a former special education teacher, began using computer games to improve learning skills for struggling students. He’s now the Education Program Manager at Epic Games, $10 billion computer gaming company based in Cary, North Carolina, where I live.   

He teamed up with Joe Ableidinger, a nationally recognized leader in educational innovation and executive director of Spark NC, which paves the way for students to develop careers in high-tech fields like AI, machine learning, software development and cybersecurity. At one point in his career, he started a family resource center at an underperforming elementary school as an AmeriCorps VISTA member with Center with Communities in Schools in Durham, North Carolina.

Ableidinger and Isaacs talked about how the designs in everything from desk placement in classrooms to the use of technology had impacts on educational outcomes, some for the better and some for the worse. 

I talked about an idea that arose after a discussion I had with Boyd, the organizer of the panel, about creating a Fourth Estate database, a massive national information data cloud that would provide instant access to every public record in America, big town and small. 

If we could create such a database -- and many technologists I’ve met think it’s possible – we could build a system in which individual journalists, capitalizing on the potential access that ChatGPT could provide, would enable independent journalists to tap the Fourth Estate database and use it to earn a decent living reporting the news.

The pieces for such a system already are falling into place with the many non-profit and for-profit news organizations such as Substack, the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative or The Assembly in North Carolina. These organizations. simply need the scope and scale that a Fourth Estate Cloud database would bring. 

I know there are many dangers lurking in the shadows of AI, particularly in its vulnerability to misinformation and fake news. And I know, too, that this proposal has many unanswered questions. But that’s’ no reason not to push forward.

AI can provide journalism with many opportunities  to compete with -- and defeat -- the hedge funds and newspaper chains whose business model amounts to draining cash from wounded newspapers until they are dead.  

The best thing about AI for journalism is it makes independent fact-based reporting ferreting out the good from the bad more important than ever. Every person at the ModSim conference I spoke with voiced concern over its potential for misinformation and the need for journalists to keep AI honest. We should rise to this challenge. We’ve seen the alternative and it’s not a kid’s game. 

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.