Category: Personal

Media and AI workshop to journalists

I was invited by the Department of Information & Public Relations, Belagavi to deliver a workshop on Media and AI to print and new media journalists.

My objective was to demonstrate a few different ways of how I use various AI chatbots and point out some of the issues one needs to be careful about.

Figure 1: Swapneel Patnekar presenting a workshop on Media and AI

Image of presentation agenda, Media and AI

Figure 2 – Agenda of the workshop

OpSec best practices

The first thing that I spoke was about being cognizant of the fact on the information that is shared with the AI chatbot. From an operational security (OpSec) perspective, this is extremely important.

I’ve seen people putting in PII and other sensitive information into the AI chatbot without knowing the implications of it.

Media and AI – Biases, logical fallacies and misinformation

Then, I introduced the journalists to Spinscore. Using AI chatbots, the creation and modification of content is extremely easy, thus, it’s important to separate the facts and the misinformation.

Welcome to SpinScore – an advanced AI tool designed to analyze and score potential biases, logical fallacies, and misleading information in content. Our system uses a combination of state-of-the-art Large Language Models and sophisticated mathematical algorithms to deliver comprehensive insights into the content you explore.

I’ve personally used Spinscore in the past few months and I have found it quite useful to uncover potential biases and incorrect information. I also tend to use it lately with my own writing to find my blind spots, so that I can improve my writing.

I encourage anyone, not just journalists to use this tool to optimize their reading/writing of news on the Internet.

A large focal point of my presentation was spent on using various chatbots for translating text from a link or a video from English to Kannada or Marathi language. If you have used an AI chatbot for translation of text, you will know, it’s not a hundred percent perfect.

I also spent sometime in prompt engineering, explaining the methodology and demonstrating a few use cases to generate content based on topics such as industrial waste, climate change etc.

Self-hosted AI chatbot

And lastly, I showed what a self-hosted LLM using Ollama and OpenWebUI looks like.

Image of presentation slide outlining options for Self-hosted AI Chatbot

Figure 3: Self-hosted AI Chatbot

The benefits of self-hosting and running a local AI chatbot are many.

The workshop gave an exploratory tour of using AI chatbots for translation of text, video and generation of text based using prompt engineering.

My gratitude to the Department of Information & Public Relations, Belagavi for having me.

If you enjoyed reading this blog post, you might find Why I’m rejoining social media interesting.

Why I’m rejoining social media

Hello again! Starting today, I am back on these platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) after quitting them a long time ago. Here, I am outlining why I am rejoining social media.

The primary reason to quit these platforms was for a number of reasons, and I will not get into this bit here. If you are interested, I urge you to read the book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”

Book image - The age of Surveillance capitalism

In the past couple of years, aside from building a cyber security company, I have tried my best to educate folks in my network by conducting seminars and workshops about some of the cyber scams and cyber security best practices. Rejoining social media will help me reach a wider audience.

One of the consistent feedback I have received from many is that awareness of on these cyber scams and cyber threats does not spread enough.

Considering that fellow Indian citizens lost ₹11,333 crore to cyber scams in the past year(2024) alone, rejoining social media platforms makes sense, as per data from the Home Ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) division, it’s no brainer that awareness and education are need of the hour.

The figure could be more than ₹11,333 crores, considering folks who haven’t reported the cybercrime.

Considering that, to many, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc is the Internet it would be foolish to not use these platforms.

I am flipping the switch today by rejoining social media and will be using these social media platforms to share the latest cyber scams and best practices in safeguarding your accounts and data.

If you are following me on any of these platforms, and feel this is noise or spam, please feel free to mute/block me 🙂

If you believe these cyber scams and best practices to counter these need to be amplified and shared with others, please spread the word.

For the nerds reading this, irrespective of how futile this attempt is, I am following OpSec practice by compartmentalizing each website in it’s own VM 🙂

If you enjoyed reading this blog post, you might find Media and AI workshop to journalists interesting.