An interview with Dr. Dawn Armfield of Minnesota State, Mankato about how accessibility intersects with artificial intelligence. She shares about AI in teaching, visual AI, inclusivity, ethics, classroom technology, and her current research on virtual reality for young adults with cognitive disabilities. Find Dawn at her faculty bio or her Instagram @dawn_armfield.
Plus, what does AI have to do with fungus?
Sources and further reading
- Baquero, C. (2022, August 3). On the Ethics of Writing With AIs. Communications of the ACM. https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/263291-on-the-ethics-of-writing-with-ais/fulltext
- Who’s Afraid of A.I.? (2023, May 12). What’s Next: TBD. [Podcast]. Slate. https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2023/05/why-artificial-intelligence-needs-regulation-now
- Floridi, L., & Cowls, J. (2019). “A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society.” https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/l0jsh9d1/release/8
- IBM AI Ethics: https://www.ibm.com/impact/ai-ethics
- Post Reports: Meet the hackers trying to make AI go rogue https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/meet-the-hackers-trying-to-make-ai-go-rogue/
- What Next: TBD: Who’s Afraid of A.I.? https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2023/05/why-artificial-intelligence-needs-regulation-now
- Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnT1xgZgkp
- Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnT1xgZgkpk
- “The Slime Mold and the Universe.” 8 Apr. 2020. Planetary Radio [Podcast]. https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0408-2020-slime-mold-universe
Transcript
AB: Hi there. This is Abi with TC Talk. That’s Tech Comm Talk.
BB: I am Benton, also here with TC Talk.
AB: We are here for a special episode to be part of the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2023. The theme is Artificial Intelligence: Applications and Trajectories. This is the fourth year of the carnival and we had a great time contributing last year, our aliens episode.
BB: It was fun because we watched movies with aliens.
AB: Specifically how communicating with an alien life form is an epic technical communication situation. When I saw that the theme this year was AI, I thought, well, we have something to say about that. In fact, we did an episode on that in the spring that was possibly less informative than just entertaining for us to play around with, to see what stereotypes AI has about technical communicators. But things have shifted since then, the tools have shifted. Professors and researchers have had more time to figure out how to fit it into classrooms. That doesn’t mean there’s not still problems to be solved, like accessibility
BB: and workplace issues.
AB: Labor for sure. We’re good ones to be talking about this. Not as in you and me, but we, as in the field of tech comm,
BB: I think we should talk about it too, and we’re great.
AB: Oh, nice. Well, in fact, it occurred to me when I saw the theme for the carnival come out. Hey, we have an AI expert in my very own department.
BB: That’s right.
AB: So I figured this would be a great time to hear from her. She is surely more informed than you and me.
BB: Yeah, I don’t even read articles. I mostly just read headlines.
AB: Shame.
BB: I know
AB: because they’re probably AI generated headlines. Due to scheduling issues. Benton wasn’t able to be part of that conversation with Dr. Dawn Armfield, but we will play that interview in just a moment. Let me tell you a little bit more about her. She’s an Associate Professor of Tech Comm in the Department of English at Minnesota State Mankato. She teaches courses in visual communication, usability and user experience, content strategy, international communication, all areas in which accessibility and ethics play a key role. And we’ll see those themes come up in our talk. She has research interests in emerging technologies, AI, AR, VR and ethics. AI, of course, artificial intelligence, AR, augmented reality, VR, virtual reality. Those terms may come up in our talk as well. I will link to her faculty bio and her Instagram in the show notes so that you can follow what she’s doing. You couldn’t be a part of the conversation, but you did listen to it.
BB: I did.
AB: Let’s hear from you. What should not readers, listeners, be on the lookout for?
BB: My perspective coming in with a pro labor stance and wanting to be in solidarity with the writers strike and the actors strike. I was prepared to go Luddite and be like, no more AI. We stop them, we must fight them in the trenches. But the more informed perspective that Dawn brings, it helps to give pause and give consideration to that impulse for me.
AB: Good.
BB: In my mind it turns into a false binary of being an AI fan boy or post- technologist
AB: Living in the woods,
BB: living in my camper.
AB: That’s great to hear, and I think Hollywood does not do society any favors in terms of presenting AI as actually intelligent.
BB: It’s not a small part of the sci fi landscape. The robots takeover genre,
AB: that is not the issue that we’re facing. To treat it as such gives it too much power. Everything that chat GPT spits out is based on something that humans have already created. It’s algorithms deciding what to spit out. It’s not some mysterious mind behind it,
BB: Right
AB: Therefore, it’s not something that’s fully out of our control either. We don’t need to give into the doom and gloom perspective. Were there other things that stuck out to you?
BB: AI accessibility. It was really when Dawn was talking about it as a field, but putting those two concepts together. AI is already used a lot in increasing accessibility by auto subtitling. But in that context, it still needs to have a human looking over its shoulder.
AB: Yeah, I think there’s two issues at least, when it comes to AI and accessibility. And one is, how can AI be used to increase accessibility, which we talked about. And another, how can AI tools themselves be designed to be more accessible?
BB: Yes. Accessibility of AI.
AB:. Right. Cool. Stay tuned. After the interview, we will have our classic Fun with Fungus segment where somehow Ben is going to connect mushrooms and artificial intelligence. On to the interview with Dr. Dawn Armfield.
AB: I think a good place to start would be the big question, what does accessibility have to do with AI? And if in the course of answering that question you can give us a little sense of what you think of as AI and accessibility, that would be helpful too.
DA: Sure, when I think about accessibility, it’s mostly about how can a wide range of people access whatever it is that we might be working on. When I teach accessibility, I talk to my students about not just about computers and websites and things like that. While most of them are computer science students, that’s how they will think about it. But I also talk to them about when you’re going into the grocery store, are the aisles wide enough for a wheelchair or would someone with a walker be able to handle them? Are shelves too high for somebody who may have some reach issues or, you know, who might be impaired in the ways that they can raise their hands or have any tactile problems. So I actually use the grocery store a lot because we’re all familiar with the grocery store. So how accessible is a grocery store for somebody who might have some kind of difficulty, or even just for someone who is shorter than average or somebody who is taller than average trying to get to the bottom. You know, there are all these things that we need to think about. And so I want them to think about accessibility every time they walk out the door, and the majority of people access this space.
When we talk about accessibility, we really try to, of course, we talk about universal design, which means that more people can access it than not. And that we make everything as open as possible for as many people as possible. But we know that there will always be somebody who slips through the cracks because we just can’t make everything work for everyone. We try as hard as we can. Accessibility is that, is trying to make as much of whatever it is in wherever you are for as many people as possible.
AI, of course, is artificial intelligence. And when I think about AI, I’m not just thinking about the things that are in the news right now which are Bard and Chat GPT the writing, although Bard has expanded a bit to include visual, but there are a lot of visual tools out there right now that do AI. That is one of the problems that we’re seeing with the actors’ and writers’ guilds. They’re talking about how visual AI will be able to recreate an actor’s face or recreate, or how textual AI can recreate a writer’s tone. But AI goes even further. It can use machine learning in order to give us good search results. For instance, algorithms will use artificial intelligence to give us all kinds of information. It could be used in our cars, in especially the newer cars with computers, or the electric cars, especially to adjust the ways that the car functions in order to make it function more economically. AI is a vast area. While we tend to be more concerned with the ChatGPT and Bard areas or the visual areas in our work, we’ve been using AI for decades. At this point we just don’t realize it.
AB: I like how with both of those concepts, you’ve just expanded them so much from how we typically think of them, where accessibility is not just about computers, it’s about the grocery store. AI is not just about chat GPT, but it’s about electric cars. How do you see those two intersecting?
DA: Right. There’s actually a field called AI accessibility.
AB: Oh cool.
DA: Oh yeah, there is a field that really looks at the way that AI can help make things more accessible. For instance, when we are in our electric car, we can read a read out, but it can also talk to our phones, can talk to us now through Siri or Google Assistant or whatever. These are all AI functions that help us work through different ways of having accessibility to the things that we use. There is a caveat to this. In order for AI and accessibility to work together, we have to be diligent as the humans behind it and pay attention to whatever it is producing. There has to be human oversight at all times. We can’t just rely on the AI to make things accessible. We need to test it, and we need to make sure that it’s working properly and not giving output that would be disinformation or misinformation or that could be harmful or it’s just giving us gibberish, right. There always has to be that human oversight into the ways that AI is helping with accessibility.
AB: Yeah, and I think it’s really easy for people to have a set it and forget it mentality about AI, like let’s just let it do its thing. And our field of technical communication, I think we have this tendency towards being more critical. It seems like it’s a great fit for people in our field to be aware of those kinds of things.
DA: Yeah, so this summer I actually had my foundation level students do an e-mail using AI. So they had to write me an AI about what is technical communication and how will it work for them in their field, right? So they actually had to bring their discipline into the AI output, but then I also asked them to answer a few questions afterwards and say, okay, so what did it get right and what did it get wrong? Where can you see this going way off the rails? And what did you have to correct in that e-mail to me in order to make it correct? I think it’s up to us in tech comm to really think about these things and say it’s a tool, that’s what it is. It’s a tool and it’s an awesome tool, but it can also be a really dangerous tool. And we have to be those critical thinkers about AI and think about how can we use it to make our jobs easier, but not use it to the point of where we just do leave it to do its thing.
AB: Mm hmm. So now that we have the broad strokes of accessibility and AI, now I want to move on to the tell me about yourself question. But I’m especially interested in what kind of background, whether it’s teaching, or professional, or personal, that led you to your interest in this topic.
DA: I’ve worked in IT since I was in my ’20s and I worked in IT departments and did a lot of the IT work. Usually it was for public service, like the county or a university or things like that. I’ve always worked in and around the computer area of those businesses or those organizations. Whatever it is with computers or with technology, I’m always really interested in what is coming and how will it affect the humans. On the other end, even in the early ’90s when I was first doing online chat, and I would think about online chat at that time, people were always thinking, all right, it’s just a computer out there, right? We weren’t thinking about the people on the other end. And then eventually we got to this place where we were thinking, okay, there are actually people on the other end, but I’ve always thought about that, how is this affecting the people who are either using it or who are engaging with it or who are having it used on them. So how can we think about these technologies and the humanity that is engaging with them? My professional life engaged in that.
But then when I started doing my education, all of my work was about technology. I didn’t major in technical communication in my undergrad, but I actually did a website for one of my junior level writing classes. And my professor said, oh, there’s an entire field that does this kind of work that you might be interested in, right? That’s how I got introduced to technical communication. And it just seemed like that right fit for me, that I am very technology oriented and even though technical communication is not just about that, it fit with the kind of person that I am and the kinds of interests that I have, but also with accessibility. Having worked in web design and in distance learning and in instructional design and things like that, taught me about how accessibility is super important. I’ve had these two things coming at me all of the time, the technology and the accessibility, and thinking about the people at the other end of this and how to use both of those in order to meet our audience’s needs at all times.
AB: You majored in geology, am I right?
DA: Yeah.
AB: Okay. Glad I remember that correctly.
DA: Was a double major actually, it was English and Geology, but I wanted to write for National Geographic.
AB: Oh, that sounds fun.
DA: I thought, oh, if I have a science background and an English background, then I could do that.
AB: My next question, you answered this earlier. What are some examples of accessibility challenges with AI technologies?
DA: Yeah, of course, it’s the human oversight, but it’s also that we need to think about AI just as that tool and not think about it as a cure all. AI can be an amazing tool. Like this summer, I was playing with it quite a bit to create visual information, just to play with it and to use images that I was creating in AI for say like a logo or, my nephew and I were making up band names and we were creating band paraphernalia with AI. But we also had to be really careful and think about are the things that that AI is pulling in, are they copyrighted? So we have to think about where’s this information coming from or where’s this image coming from or where is this data coming from? Is it copyrighted information that we are using? And if I wanted to use it as a logo or just to have fun, am I being a responsible user to the artist who first created this or is this a wholly newly created thing that the AI actually came up with just by me telling it what to create? The answer is typically no, that it’s pulling images from all over the place to pull into the system to use in whatever it is that you’re creating. We have to be really responsible and think about the ethics behind it as well.
And then I think that an overreliance on AI could create spaces that might seem accessible, but that could actually cause problems. For instance, we might use AI to create a syllabus which is fun. I did that for a class and it was fun. Of course, I had to tweak it quite a bit. But one of the issues with it is that when I asked it to, and creating a syllabus for a class that I’m not even teaching, I was just trying to play with it. It had information that could be considered not appropriate for all audiences. Not that it was using swear words or that it was using information that was R rated or X rated or anything like that. It was nothing like that. But there is a bias in AI because typically AI algorithms are written by white men, right? And so there is a natural bias built into this, where if I asked it to pull up authors, it was pulling up white male authors for me for that syllabus. I think I saw one female author in there and no people of color. So we have to really think about those biases that AI is creating as well.
When I’ve done visual information and I’ll just say create a woman walking a dog, it almost is always a white woman. I have to specify a person of color, we have to think about those biases as well. That does create a barrier to accessibility, because if people of color are not seeing themselves in the AI or not finding that accessibility within the AI, then they’re not a part of that conversation and they need to be. Accessibility can be even more foundational. I think it’s not just about getting along and getting into a space, but it’s about how we fit within those conversations.
AB: And with the syllabus example, it’s a good reminder that when you use AI to generate a genre, it’s pulling from what is, not what ought to be right
DA: Right.
AB: or not what’s inherently right. I was wondering too, if your syllabus had policies, because I can imagine from an accessibility standpoint, if it’s drawing from what’s out there already, then if instructors haven’t been thinking in terms of accessibility, then that’s not going to be reflected in things like attendance policies or what mediums you can use to create in. Did you see any of that?
DA: Yeah. In fact, one of the biggest ones was you cannot use a phone in this class. But in my classes, that is never a rule. I’m like use whatever technology you can, just be responsible about it. I would never have that in my syllabus, but it seems to be a big enough rule out there. I’m guessing, especially say like in a math class where they might use it for tests or whatever, things like that. But I don’t do tests. I want them to use their technology. But that was one of the big ones. But that’s also an accessibility issue. We might have a student who needs to record the class because their brain just might not process things as fast as we’re talking. So they might have to go back and re-listen, and re-listen and re-listen in order to get to where we need them to be. Right? So that could be an accessibility issue. Or they might need to be able to pull things up because they can’t remember things as easily as somebody else might be able to. And that’s okay. I think these phones have made my memory go. So I totally understand that. Right. Because we have so much at our fingertips now that we don’t have to remember as much. So creating those kinds of policies is definitely an issue.
AB: Yeah, yeah. And I can see instructors possibly pushing back and saying, well if somebody needs an accommodation, they can ask for it. And it’s like, yes, that’s usually built into like a university’s accessibility policy. But the point of accessibility is to not require someone to have to overcome that obstacle in the first place.
DA: Yeah, so that’s really interesting. I also follow some Reddit forums on accessibility and on professors. And a lot of professors write about accommodation, a lot of them do. And how they demand that their students bring in a form from disability services before they will ever make accommodations. So that might be built into policies as well. And I didn’t see any of that in mine, but I also did, I didn’t have it look for disability services policies. So yes, there would definitely be that kind of an issue as well. Because I know that that conversation is going on with other professors, not just in the United States but also in parts of Europe, because the Reddit boards have people from all over the world on them. I think that that definitely could be an issue.
AI has actually been a really big conversation in these discussion boards. I think so many of them are against it. It’s really interesting, even computer science professors are against their students using it. But isn’t it incumbent upon us to be the responsible people to say use it wisely? Let me show you how to use it, or let’s talk about how we can use it, because you might be able to show me a different way of using it, right? Let’s have that conversation about using it and being ethical about it. The very first thing I have my students do is they read an article about the ethical use of AI. We start there, then we build from that.
AB: Yeah, because people are going to use it.
DA: They are. I don’t see it as any different as using a graphing calculator. That’s how I look at it. For a long, long time, those were barred in classrooms. But then it got to the point where so many students had it that there had to be policies made up about it, right? There had to be talks about how to ethically use this in the classroom.
AB: Don’t get distracted playing snake or whatever that little game was.
DA: Right. Exactly.
AB: That would be the least of the concerns I’m sure.
DA: But, but the AI things can totally be that way. We can totally have a lot of fun with it. But you can also see where if you’re not asking your students to think about it critically, then they could just use it to write a paper, not even think about that paper. But then they’re missing out on the whole point of the paper, right? They’re missing out on that growth potential in creating something. Even if they use AI and they go back through and they edit it. At least they’re thinking about it. They’re thinking about that topic. They’re seeing what AI is saying about it. But then they’re also saying, okay, but that didn’t quite make sense and I need to rework this. So if we give them those tools to use it responsibly, then I think that we’re doing a better job.
AB: Yeah. That active engagement and that reflection is so important.
DA: Yeah.
AB: My next question is about, well, you’ve talked about teaching a little bit, but what has your research revealed about accessibility and AI? And I know you’ve been on sabbatical for the past year, so this might be your chance to let us know what you’ve been up to.
DA: Well, the majority of my research has been on using, using extended realities, which AI does have a part in this, especially in augmented reality. You’ll see AI in augmented reality quite a bit, but it’s also in virtual reality. Not necessarily as much in the ones that I’ve been working in, but what we have seen, because we’ve actually been using AI models in helping us think about how to create our presentations or how to think about different parts of our writing process. Or to even think about what kinds of questions could we ask our participants in our project. Our project has been working with young adults with cognitive disabilities to create their lived experiences of using public transportation and going to work. They create their lived experiences through virtual reality experiences. They take a lot of pictures and they do recordings of their voices. And they do videos, and then they put these into a virtual reality environment.
But one of the things that we were doing when we were actually creating one of these is thinking about, okay, well, how could they use AI to help them do this as well? How could I assist them in creating their spaces more easily. Because virtual reality environments, even if you use the easiest one out there for someone with a cognitive disability, it can be difficult. Or if they have mobility issues moving anything, right? So we have these accessibility issues in creating these environments. So how can we use AI in order to help them create this?
One of the things that we thought about doing is actually having the students talk to the AI and use voice recognition instead of typing. Talk to the AI and say, I want to create an environment that talks about this and this is my experience. And then they can get a more robust description of their experience. And then they can copy those words and place them into a VR environment. Or they can use the visual. The visual, sorry, I have way too many acronyms going on in my head. They can use the visual AI in order to create a scene that they hadn’t actually participated in on the bus or that they had and they hadn’t gotten a picture of, right. So they could do a scene.
And my nephew and I actually did this. We were talking about, okay, You didn’t get a picture of you at night time on the bus. So let’s create an image of that using AI. And we did, but we actually did it riding a bus in space, right? So he had a moon behind him and he had this space mobile or something like that. But it actually added his personality into that environment in a different way than just his image and his voice. So he and I had talked about doing that. We didn’t actually put it into our final presentation, but it was something that we had discussed and we had talked about making in order to kind of give him some creativity in that. Because sometimes virtual reality can seem like you just replace this here and this here and this here. And where’s that creativity when you’re trying to explain a situation or give instructions? Even because really, basically what the VR experiences are, are instructions on how to ride a bus when you have this kind of a disability. How can we put some creativity into that, beyond just creating the environment? That’s what we’ve been working on and the ways that we’ve been thinking about using AI.
AB: It seems to me that one of the goals of this work is to help designers gain more empathy for these audiences. Does that sound right?
DA: Yeah, not just designers, but also thinking about community services. If somebody from the transportation department in this specific community sees how people are using their buses or having difficulty using these buses, how can they make accessibility to the buses better? Or how can the teachers understand the issues that the young adults are having? Because they’re in a transfer program, so they actually have teachers that are doing all of this with them. Accessibility is at the core of this research. It is everything in this research, understanding accessibility to public transportation or accessibility to jobs is really where we started, and we just are using technology to help build that out and help create more equitable spaces.
AB: Yes, you’re using AI really thoughtfully and intentionally to create more access, whereas I can see how uncritical use of AI could shut out more audiences.
DA: Right, exactly.
AB: What do you want technical communication students or instructors or professionals to know about accessibility and AI?
DA: Oh, that’s a good question. I think this would be with anybody. I want them to know that AI is a powerful tool when it comes to accessibility. It can open up spaces, but it’s also incumbent upon us to use it just as that tool, use it as one of the tools in our toolbox to create a more equitable space. We have to be intentional and we have to be empathetic about the ways that we use it. We have to understand that it automatically leaves some demographics out and it will be important for us to bring them back in. It’s just a tool, that’s all it is. It is not a cure. All it can help us create these environments that are more accessible, but they are not completely accessible. We have to intervene and make the space even more accessible.
AB: So it’s not a cure-all, but it’s not necessarily something to be scared of either.
DA: I don’t think we should be scared of it at all. I think that we should just see it as an extension of our documenting process, right. Word has been telling us and giving us suggestions or Google Docs has been giving us suggestions for years. It’s already using AI. But now instead of just giving us a little words or phrases to end our sentences or to include, now it’s giving us entire paragraphs or entire papers. But we have to really think carefully about that, would you? When you’re writing your e mail and it says, here’s the end of that phrase, right? And you can hit your enter just to include that phrase. Is that really the phrase that you wanted to use? Does that convey the meaning? As we in technical communication know every way that we use a word has a different meaning and it can impact our audience in either positive or negative or neutral ways. We have to think about are those words that the AI is using, Are they the right ones? If they’re not, where do we go in and correct for that?
AB: I did get a suggestion in my Outlook as I was drafting an e mail that I probably should have listened to. But at the time I was like, what does that have to do with anything? It was like giving suggestions for tone. And I’m like, this is the most boring e-mail ever. How could tone matter? And after I sent it, of course, I saw that instead of hello, I had typed, hell, I mean, I doubt the recipient thought I was, you know, opening an e-mail with profanity. But it was just kind of funny.
DA: But it’s true, right? It gives us that opportunity to just click, and just go through or to click no or whatever. And we do it just automatically these days because it’s just right there. We’re so used to it, but we have to start thinking about all of that intentionally. I don’t always use those suggestions like you didn’t. Sometimes I do. Especially if it knows that I’ve written the same sentence like 50 million times, I’m going to use that. Or it might also make me think, okay, you might overuse that phrase, why don’t we try something new? AI has this really great possibility of helping us think even more deeply about language or even communication as a whole. Because if we’re talking about the visual AI as well, I think it can help us really think about the way that we communicate. Deeper ways to ask us to be more exact and to be precise in the ways that we communicate. It’s going to pull in a lot of randomness or a lot of generalities. But in most things that we do, we need more precision. It will require us to really read carefully and think about that precision.
AB: That’s such a good point. Is there anything else that you want to share? Anything I should have asked you that I didn’t.
DA: I think maybe about AI policy, when we’re thinking about AI policy, instead of thinking about it as something that could ruin a classroom, think about it in ways that it can be a positive fixture in a classroom. But beyond that, I was actually listening to a podcast this morning about the writers’ strike. And they were actually talking about AI and how the writers are really concerned about AI taking over. The podcaster said something to the effect of, right, well if it’s the writers now, it could be the teachers tomorrow, right. AI could take over their jobs or AI could take over a secretary’s job or something like that. It’s up to us to start creating policy about the use of AI and to encourage our unions because that’s what they were actually talking about, was unions to include that in the language of our contracts, to say AI is a tool but it is not a replacement for the kind of works that work that humans do. We have to be, again, very intentional about AI and how we let it run us or we run it.
AB: Perfect. Thank you so much.
DA: You’re welcome.
AB: What about Fung?
BB: What about fungi?
AB: Yeah
BB: This summer I’ve got a stack of logs in the backyard that had oyster mushrooms spontaneously fruit out of them, which made me happy. Oyster mushrooms are relatively easy to identify because they only grow on wood and they don’t have poisonous lookalikes.
AB: Excellent. Did we eat them?
BB: We did. I mean, at least I did.
AB: Okay.
BB: I think you did too.
AB: You snuck them into something?
BB: I think that I just sauteed them and had them with like rice or something.
AB: Oh, okay.
BB: I thought you had some, but maybe not.
AB: I probably did and forgot. Let’s try to connect it. Do you think AI could be used to successfully identify mushrooms that are safe to eat? It probably already is. I know there’s got to be an app out there somewhere.
BB: I know that in my foraging groups, not only for mushrooms but for plants too, people will use something like Google Lens. You know, it’s basically AI. Take a picture of this with my phone and tell me what it is,
AB: like a reverse Google Image search,
BB: Kind of. Yeah. So again, if you haven’t heard me say before, the first rule of foraging, never eat anything you cannot positively identify.
AB: Google lens is not sentient.
BB: No, it is not. This is definitely a case where we do that whole human over the shoulder thing. On the foraging groups, like someone will have a screenshot of like Google lens told me it’s this, is it actually this? Mushrooms are pretty hard to discern in some cases anyway. Real mycologists will weigh in and say, no,
AB: You have real mycologists in your foraging group?
BB: Amateur mycologists are real mycologists, but there are a few in there.
AB: Citizen technical communicators.
BB: Yeah, there was something I was going to say
AB: About oyster mushrooms?
BB: Oh, it does connect to AI. I believe the growth patterns of slime mold actually map fairly well onto the distribution of dark matter in the universe.
AB: Mind blown.
BB: Yeah, I actually heard about this on Planetary Radio. Host interviewed the person who noticed the similarity and used the growth pattern of
AB: slime mold,
BB: of slime mold to help inform the automated looking for dark matter algorithm? Algorithm.
AB: That is wild stuff.
BB: Yes.
AB: There you go folks. That’s your fun with fungus segment. I wish I could say that you can follow TC Talk on Twitter, but I have been using it less and less.
BB: Why is that?
AB: Let’s not get into it now.
BB: He who shall not be named?
AB: Right. I will still engage minimally just for TC Talk promotion purposes but it’s A R, underscore Balle B A K, K, E if you want to follow me there and if I decide to jump ship, I will let you know to where I am jumping.