Pure Manaʻo

  I am currently taking a Google AI basics course and have reached the "play with generative AI" phase. A central theme of the course is the importance of a "human in the loop" approach—emphasizing human oversight and the value of an iterative process. Questions to ask when evaluating an AI workflow Is the task generative?   Yes. I was tasked with creating a social media post using generative AI tools—Gemini for the text and Gemini's image generation tools for the photo. Can the task be iterated on to achieve the best outcome?  Yes. For the photo, the tool asked for a selfie, but I uploaded a group photo instead. The AI flagged that it wasn't a selfie, but offered to crop/isolate one person from the group. For the text, once I had the image I wanted, I asked Gemini for a caption prompt. The initial output didn't quite match the mood of the photo, so I described the image in more detail and refined the request. I then selected a concise paragraph from ...

Background: These final questions came out of an Indigenous Mixed Methods Convening held as a post conference workshop for the 50th Pacific Circle Consortium Conference, May 19-23, 2026 on the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa campus. At the end of the day, these are the four questions to chew before we were sent home to ponder further.  Source: For question 1, we were given the appendix from the Moanaroa Pacific Research Guidelines, a publication out of the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Moanaroa Pacific Research Network:  https://moanaroa.aut.ac.nz/pacific-research-guidelines As our own collective, we were just given the appendix:  Moanaroa Pacific Research Guidelines_Appendix The question and my thinking-out-loud sense-making (a dialogic with myself) are based on Table 1, "Examples of Pacific Methodologies," in the Appendix.  He Nīnau: What stands out to you in Moanaroa Pacific Research? He Manaʻo: Based on a quick glance and a few deeper dives -- • Tonga and S...