Demystifying AI

These are the resources for a webinar I have delivered in collaboration with Catherine Brys. If you’d like me to deliver this webinar for your community, please contact me.

Webinar description

In this webinar I cover:

• The difference between AI, Generative AI and Machine Learning and why it matters
• How generative AI tools used for daily tasks actually work – and what they can and can’t do
• What to be aware of when using generative AI tools or commissioning work that uses generative AI tools

Webinar slides

These are the slides from the webinar of 18 September 2025.

• Demystifying AI slides (PDF)

References

Part I: Generative AI vs Machine Learning

• A Two-Step Learning Model for the Diagnosis of Coronavirus Disease-19 Based on Chest X-ray Images with 3D Rotational Augmentation Hyuk-Ju Kwon & Sung-Hak Lee, Applied Sciences, 2022, 12(17), 8668

Part II: GenAI-based tools

• AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds; full report: Representation of BBC News content in AI Assistants, Oli Elliott, February 2025

• Australian government trial finds AI is much worse than humans at summarizing; full report: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) document summarisation proof of concept AWS Professional Services, prepared for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), March 2024

• AI Search Has A Citation Problem Klaudia Jaźwińska, Aisvarya Chandrasekar, Columbia Journalism Review, 2025

• Estimating the Increase in Emissions caused by AI-augmented Search Wim Vanderbauwhede, June 2024

• Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Elizabeth Barnes, David Rein 10 July 2025

• The GenAI Divide – State of AI in Business 2025 Aditya Challapally Chris Pease Ramesh Raskar Pradyumna Chari July 2025

• The Evaluation of the M365 Copilot Pilot in the Department for Business and Trade, Digital Data and Technology Monitoring and Evaluation team, Department for Business and Trade, August 2025

Part III: Ethical issues

• AI giants are stealing our creative work Good Law Project

• How Big Tech hides its outsourced African workforce Stephanie Wangari & Gayathri Vaidyanathan,April 2025

• Data Workers’Inquiry

• Contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Ashwini K.P., July 2024

• Insight - Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women Jeffrey Dastin, October 2018

• Tutoring firm settles US agency’s first bias lawsuit involving AI software Daniel Wiessner, August 2023

• Automated Racism: How police data and algorithms code discrimination into policing Amnesty International UK, February 2025

• The Climate and Sustainability Implications of Generative AI Bashir, Noman, Priya Donti, James Cuff, Sydney Sroka, Marija Ilic, Vivienne Sze, Christina Delimitrou, and Elsa Olivetti. 2024. ” An MIT Exploration of Generative AI.

• The insatiable hunger of (Open)AI Wim Vanderbauwhede, March 2024

Part IV: Societal impact

• Generative AI Can Harm Learning. Bastani, Hamsa, Osbert Bastani, Alp Sungu, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı, and Rei Mariman. 2024.

• The real problem with the AI hype Wim Vanderbauwhede, January 2025

Books

• The Intelligence Illusion Baldur Bjarnason

• The AI Con Emily M Bender & Alex Hanna

• Resisting AI Dan Mcquillan

Other Resources

AI-free search

• “Disable AI” browser plugin (for Firefox and Chrome only)
  • Disables Google’s AI Overview, DuckDuckGo’s AI Assist, Ecosia’s AI Overview, Brave Search’s Answer with AI, and Qwant’s AI Flash Answer
• Google specific, no plugin needed: add -ai to your search
• Or use a different search engine, for example Ecosia or Qwant.

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