The best self-control
/People with the best self-control aren’t the ones who use it all day long. They’re people who structure their lives so they conserve it. -John Tierney
Vox Sine Persona (voice without person)
/Self-continuity is one of the things that underpins actual agency—and with it, the ability to form lasting commitments, maintain consistent values, and be held accountable. Our entire framework of responsibility assumes both persistence and personhood. An LLM personality, by contrast, has no causal connection between sessions. The intellectual engine that generates a clever response in one session doesn’t exist to face consequences in the next. -Ben J Edwards writing in ArsTechnica
AI definitions: Transhumanism
/AI definitions: Transhumanism is a movement that advocates attempting to unlock human potential through artificial intelligence and science, with the goal of overcoming biological limitations and combating aging and illness to achieve immortality. This might be accomplished through humans merging with machines or uploading human consciousness into digital realms. In effect, transhumanism seeks to redefine what it means to be human. In 1957, Julian Huxley summarized the term as “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” Critics warn that this effort could erode the very qualities that define humanity, such as empathy, vulnerability and shared experience, while exacerbating social inequalities.
If you cannot convince them
/If you cannot convince them, confuse them. -Harry S Truman (born May 8, 1884)
13 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators
/When AI Cheating Becomes a Legal Risk – Chronicle of Higher Ed
The Khan Academy degree in Applied AI is fast food dressed up as education – Sofia Fenichell
A University Is Scraping Course Materials for Its New AI Platform. It Didn’t Ask the Faculty. – Chronicle of Higher Ed
The newly announced Khan TED Institute plans to soon offer an AI degree for under $10,000 – Inside Higher Ed
College students are changing course in search of ‘AI-proof’ majors. But no one knows what they are – Associated Press
Can’t Get ChatGPT to Cite Your College? Try These Tactics. – Chronicle of Higher Ed
Nearly Everyone’s Using AI at Cal State. And Nearly Everyone’s Worried About It. – Chronicle of Higher Ed
Faculty Push Back Against OpenAI Deals – Inside Higher Ed
Why AI Policy Is Really A Workforce Question For Higher Education - Forbes
Will Agentic AI Break Higher Education? – Chronicle of Higher Ed
The Hottest College Majors in the AI Age Might Just Be in the Liberal Arts – INC
University of Minnesota professors concerned about AI faculty reviews - The Minnesota Daily
Faculty Concerned About ASU’s New AI Course Builder – Inside Higher Ed
AI Outperforms Doctors in Study
/A groundbreaking Harvard study has found that AI systems outperformed human doctors in high-pressure emergency medicine triage, diagnosing more accurately in the potentially life and death moments when people are first rushed to hospital. It also outperformed a larger cohort of human doctors when asked to provide longer term treatment plans. The study only tested humans against AIs looking at patient data that can be communicated via text. The AI’s reading of signals, such as the patient’s level of distress and their visual appearance, were not tested. -The Guardian
Feelng Understood
/Nothing is more validating and affirming than feeling understood. And the moment a person feels understood, that person becomes far more open to influence and change. -Stephen Convey
14 Things People are Trying to Get AI to Do
/I Asked ChatGPT to Manage a Stock Portfolio. Here’s How It Did. – Wall Street Journal
The Promise of Wearable AI: Opportunities Across Emergency Response - Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
The Federal Government Is Rushing Toward AI. Our Reporting Offers Three Cautionary Tales. – Propublica
AI could vastly streamline policing. Skeptics urge caution. - The Washington Post
Silicon Valley Is in a Frenzy Over Bots That Build Themselves – The Atlantic
An AI School, With No Teachers, To Open in Chicago This Fall – Blockclub Chicago
Google is using old news reports and AI to predict flash floods – Tech Crunch
Robots, cameras, and lots of data about garbage: Inside the recycling industry's new bet – Quartz
AI Predicts Experiment Outcomes Using Game Theory – Quantum Zeitgeist
How Burger King's AI headsets are transforming employee interactions – Associated Press
A new startup sets up a marketplace of humans to be rented for AI agents to use. – Inc
Doctors Couldn’t Help Them. They Rolled the Dice With A.I. – New York Times
Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.) – Mother Jones
Using AI for financial advice? Keep these 5 things out of your chats. - The Washington Post
Political Pros Use of AI
/According to a new survey, 83 percent of political professionals say they use AI tools for work at least once a week. That’s up from 59 percent a year ago. Even more striking: 48 percent now say they use AI multiple times a day – a 57 percent increase over 2025 levels and significantly more than the 26 percent who say they use AI a few times a week. -Campaigns & Elections
19 Articles about AI & Politics
/Congress Is Doing Little to Prepare for Potential A.I. Job Losses – New York Times
Will AI lead to more accurate opinion polls? – BBC
Maryland Is First to Ban A.I.-Driven Price Increases in Grocery Stores – New York Times
AI Use Among Political Consultants is Booming. Here’s How. – Campaigns & Elections
White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released – New York Times
South Africa withdraws AI policy due to fake AI-generated sources – Semafor
Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media - New York Times
Domestic Surveillance Is Expanding With New, AI-Powered Tools – Wall Street Journal
A violent reaction to AI is bubbling. But this isn’t the Luddites’ era. – Washington Post
Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media – New York Times
GOP campaigns go all-in on AI — Dems not so much – Axios
The Federal Government Is Rushing Toward AI. Our Reporting Offers Three Cautionary Tales. – ProPublica
The Team Behind a Pro-Iran, Lego-Themed A.I.-generated video Campaign – New Yorker
New pro-AI group preps $100M midterm blitz to boost Trump's agenda - Axios
Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War – 404 Media
As the US midterms approach, AI is going to emerge as a key issue concerning voters - The Guardian
AI-generated ads are trickling into political campaigns, sparking big worries – NBC News
One Issue Uniting Democrats and Republicans? Worries About A.I. - New York Times
My shame
/Nothing gets between me and my shame. – Lesley Wheeler
AI definitions: The Turing Test
/The Turing Test - Proposed by computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, the Turing Test measures whether a computer program could fool a human into believing it was human. This has led to what some people are calling the “Reverse Turing Test” where writers go out of their way to prove they are human.
AI Cheating Consequences
/If the consequence of AI cheating extends beyond the assignment — to course failure, a transcript notation, suspension, or expulsion — the institution has entered disciplinary territory. The student is owed due process, regardless of what the professor calls it or how the institution categorizes the proceeding. The administrative must)distinguish between a faculty member exercising professional judgment about a piece of work and an institution making a formal finding of misconduct. -Chronicle of Higher Ed
5 Tips for a Healthy use of AI
/The following strategies can help you maintain a healthy balance between your expertise and AI assistance:
Generate rough drafts from notes, rather than from a blank page: It’s fine to generate drafts with AI, but do your thinking first, put together some structured notes, and treat AI-generated content as a first draft that requires critical review and substantial editing. This approach can help mitigate the risk of anchoring bias.
Rotate between AI-assisted and non-assisted writing: To develop and maintain your own writing skills, interweave AI tools into your writing workflow, rather than relying on them for chunks of text. This will also help you maintain your own voice.
Customize AI prompts: Learn to craft specific prompts that guide the AI to produce more relevant and useful outputs for your particular needs.
Ethical considerations: Be transparent about AI use, especially in academic writing, and follow any guidelines or policies set by your institution or publication venues.
Fact-check and verify: Always verify facts, citations and specific claims made by AI. These tools have a tendency to generate “hallucinations,” plausible-sounding but inaccurate chunks of information.
From The Transmitter
Possibility
/If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential. And what wine is so sparkling.. what so fragrant.. what so intoxicating.. as possibility! -Soren Kierkegaard, born May 5, 1813
A Scam Supercharger
/OpenAI’s new image tool particularly excels at creating fake screenshots. Need to fabricate confirmation of wire transfer from Chase? A Wells Fargo alert for unusual account activity? A receipt for an Uber ride? Done, done, and done. These images could supercharge all kinds of commonplace scams. - The Atlantic
AI definitions: Ethical Debt
/Ethical Debt - Ethical debt is the result of not considering societal harms and unintended consequences of new technology during development. It means putting off ethical considerations until later, so it becomes a debt to pay later. This can easily happen in the fast-moving production of AI tools. The people who incur it are rarely the people who ultimately pay for it. Similarly, "technical debt" is a software development term referring to the cost of choosing fast solutions now and putting off fixing issues until a future time.
A Grand Performance
/Not a grand performance but an act of love.
13 Webinars this week about AI, Journalism & Media
/Mon, May 4 - Strategic AI for Nonprofit Leaders
What: This session isn't about tools. It’s about fixing the decision layer that comes first. You’ll learn how to move from scattered, individual use to a more coordinated, human-led approach grounded in your mission, values, and your team’s real capacity.
Who: Ryann Miller, Founder of Spark & Signal.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: TechSoup
Tue, May 5 - Open Sesame: Opening the Algorithmic Black Box with Practical Explainability Use Cases
What: This presentation addresses the practical gap between organisational expectations and the technical implementation of explainable AI (XAI). Through two real-world use case scenarios, credit scoring and employee attrition prediction, we demonstrate how state-of-the-art XAI techniques, including SHAP (SHapley Additive Explanations) and LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), can be integrated into organisational processes to meet compliance and ethical demands.
Who: Marcus Becker, Assoc. Prof., Digital Transformation & Innovation Management, Management Center Innsbruck; Ana Moya, Lead, WAN-IFRA Data Science Expert Group.
When: 10 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: World Association of News Publisher
Tue, May 5 - Finding opportunities within business journalism and B2B publications
What: This webinar is focused on how journalists can build careers and thrive in business and industry-focused newsrooms. Our panelists will share insights on how their teams operate and what they look for in job applicants and potential colleagues.
Who: Paul F. Albergo, a journalism educator at American University; Maya Earls, deputy team lead for the Environment and Energy team at Bloomberg Law; Thai Phi Le, senior managing editor at Informa TechTarget.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: National Press Club
Tue, May 5 - From Vectors to Tensors: Expanding the Possibilities of AI Search
What: Vector embeddings transformed how we build search and retrieval systems, and if you’ve shipped production applications on top of them, you already know what they can do—and may also be starting to discover what they can’t. Vectors are powerful, but they represent a single point in space, while complex search problems involving multiple signals, multimodal data, or nuanced relevance ranking require something more expressive. Tensors extend what’s possible, enabling richer representations, more sophisticated scoring, and retrieval that can reason across dimensions that vector search simply wasn’t built to handle.
Who: Vespa.ai’s Bonnie Chase, Director of Product Marketing; Zohar Nissare-Houssen, Strategic Presales Lead Engineer.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The New Stack
Tue, May 5 - Skill Lab: Build Your First Workspace Agent
What: Join us for a practical OpenAI Academy session on how to identify, scope, build, test, and scale your first workspace agent for a team workflow. We’ll start with the basics: what agents are, how they work, and how they differ from other ways of using ChatGPT. Then we’ll walk through how to identify a strong workflow, write an “Agent Requirements Doc,” build a first version with tools, skills, and triggers, test and improve the agent, and roll it out safely with permissions, approvals, and feedback loops.
Who: Juliann Igo, GTM, OpenAI.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: OpenAI Academy
More Info
Tue, May 5 - Beyond stress: What journalists should know about burnout
What: You will contribute anonymously to a series of prompts to learn actionable insights for reassessing and repairing your relationships with work. Created specifically for those working within news organizations, this session will help journalists.
Who: Sam Ragland, API’s senior vice president.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: American Press Institute
Wed, May 6 - Advanced AI Course: Building AI agents to make you a better journalist
What: In this session you will learn to: Understand what AI agents are and see a live demonstration of building one; Explore an example agent she has created, nicknamed; NewsBot Identify realistic ways agents could streamline your reporting and reduce repetitive tasks.
Who: Parvathi Subbiah, Tech Lead, AI Lab at The Economist.
When: 7:30 am
Where: Zoom
Cost: Member: £15; Nonmember: £25
Sponsor: Women in Journalism
Wed, May 6 - Canva + AI
What: In this tactical Mini Lab, you’ll see how school communicators can use Canva’s AI features to create social graphics, animated posts, and scroll-stopping videos that support enrollment, recruitment, and everyday district storytelling, while maintaining brand consistency and trust.
Who: Kate Crowder, Communications Coordinator, Germantown Municipal School District (Tenn.)
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: National School of Public Relations
Wed, May 6 - The Missing Layer How Conversational AI Turns Student Reflection into Institutional Intelligence
What: Learn how structured, conversational AI–guided reflection generates continuous, actionable insight into student learning and persistence, without adding new reporting burdens.
Who: Rebecca Thomas Pathways, ePortfolio Director and Associate Teaching Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Bucknell University; Jeffery Yan, Cofounder & CEO, Digication.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: American Association of Colleges and Universities
Wed, May 6 - How AI Can Improve Colleges’ Communications with Students
What: This webinar features a panel of campus leaders discussing how institutions are using AI and other technology to strengthen student communications and keep humans in the loop. We’ll also dig into findings from The Chronicle’s national survey of administrators and faculty on AI for student communications, including perceptions of virtual assistants and why some are funding their own AI tools.
Who: Ian Wilhelm, Deputy Managing Editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Thu, May 7 - Codex for everyday work: Take ambitious ideas from start to finish
What: This is a beginner-friendly session on using Codex for real work and everyday tasks. We’ll explain what Codex can help you do in everyday work, and how to start with work you can review, build on, and trust.
Who: Diana Stegal, Customer Education, OpenAI; Charmaine Pek, AI Deployment, OpenAI; Kelsey Pedersen, Codex, OpenAI.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: OpenAI Academy
Thu, May 7 - Journalist Workshop: Incorporating science into every story
What: Explore the Science Reporting Navigator to incorporate scientific evidence, perspectives or context into your work, even when on deadline. In this hour-long workshop, participants will spend half an hour learning how to use the Science Reporting Navigator as a reporting tool and half an hour workshopping ideas and stories to turn into successful pitches.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: New England Newspaper & Press Association
Fri, May 8 - AI-powered personalization and its risks
What: Experts from Smith School and an industry leader explore the pros and the cons of this revolutionary change.
Who: Balaji Padmanabhan, Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Business, University of Maryland; Eaman Jahani, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland; Robert H. Smith School of Business; Robyn Tomlin, Executive Director, American Press Institute.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: University of Maryland
Delight
/No one can live without delight and that is why a man deprived of spiritual joy goes over to carnal pleasures -Thomas Aquinas