The difference
/The difference between successful people and others is how long they spend time feeling sorry for themselves. -Barbara Corcoran
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans
/Eaton, the academic-integrity expert, cautions against trying to ban the use of ChatGPT entirely. That, she says, “is not only futile but probably ultimately irresponsible.” Chronicle of Higher Ed
I would compare this to using steroids in baseball. If you don’t ban steroids in baseball, then the reality is every player has to use them. Even worse than that, if you ban them but don’t enforce it, what you actually do is create a situation where you weed out all of the honest players. Chronicle of Higher Ed
A study surveyed 372 students seeking admission into college for fall 2023 and found that nearly half, 39% of those students, would not consider attending a college that's banned ChatGPT or other AI tools. ZDNET
Several leading academic journals and publishers updated their submission guidelines to explicitly ban researchers from listing ChatGPT as a co-author, or using text copied from a ChatGPT response. Some professors have criticized these bans as shortsightedly resistant to an inevitable technological change. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Blocking access to ChatGPT at school won’t matter, at least for any student with access to a tablet or laptop outside of school. Ed Week
ChatGPT and AI writer has been banned in educational institutions around the world, from high schools across America(opens in new tab) and Australia to universities in France and India with some university professors having caught their students using ChatGPT to write their entire assignments. Tech Radar
A number of universities that say they are planning to expel students who are caught using the software. Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist and expert on contract cheating at Imperial College London, said many universities were “panicking”. The Guardian
Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI’s website from its schools’ network. Others soon joined. By January, school districts across the English-speaking world had started banning the software, from Washington, New York, Alabama, and Virginia in the United States to Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. MIT Tech Review
The New York City Department of Education has banned ChatGPT in its schools, as has the University of Sciences Po, in Paris, citing concerns it may foster rampant plagiarism and undermine learning. Washington Post
Teachers at Oceana High School in Pacifica, California have sent out messages to students warning against using AI-writing software for assignments. Mashable
Washington University in St. Louis and University of Vermont in Burlington are among the institutions that have amended their academic integrity policies to include the usage of AI tools like ChatGPT. Stanford Daily
Also:
21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection
13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans
20 quotes worth reading about students using AI
27 quotes about AI & writing assignments
22 examples of teaching with AI
22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection
/Students should know that this technology is rapidly evolving: future detectors may be able to retroactively identify auto-generated prose from the past. No one should present auto-generated writing as their own on the expectation that this deception is undiscoverable. Inside Higher Ed
Alex Lawrence, professor at Weber State University, described it as “the greatest cheating tool ever invented.” Wall Street Journal
Some plagiarism detection and learning management systems have adapted surveillance techniques, but that leaves systems designed to ensure original work “locked in an arms race” with systems designed to cheat. Inside Higher Ed
Popular essay submission portal Turnitin is developing its own detector, and Hive claims that its service is more accurate than others on the market, including OpenAI’s very own, and some independent testers have agreed. Tech Radar
While faculty members will likely spend some time trying to identify a boundary line between AI assistance and AI cheating with respect to student writing, that may not be the best use of their time. That path leads to trying to micromanage students’ use of these models. Inside Higher Ed
You can have tools like Quillbot (that can) paraphrase the essays ChatGPT gives you so it doesn't look too obvious. Mashable
“If I’m a very intelligent AI and I want to bypass your detection, I could insert typos into my writing on purpose.” said Diyi Yang, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University. Inside Higher Ed
But what about the cheaters, the students who let a chatbot do their writing for them? I say, who cares? In my normal class of about 28 students, I encounter one every few semesters whom I suspect of plagiarism. Let’s now say that the temptation to use chatbots for nefarious ends increases the number of cheaters to an (unrealistic) 20 percent. It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot). Washington Post
If a teacher’s concern is that students will “cheat” with ChatGPT, the answer is to give assignments that are personal and focused on thinking. We don’t have to teach students to follow a writing algorithm any more; there’s an app for that. Forbes
What’s to stop a student from getting ChatGPT to write their work, then tweak it slightly until it no longer gets flagged by a classifier? This does take some effort, but a student may still find this preferable to writing an entire assignment themselves. Tech Radar
If the concern is that students could cheat, it’s worth remembering that they could cheat six months ago and 60 years ago. Students taking a brand-new exam could already get answers to test questions in minutes from services like Chegg. Students could already plagiarize — or pay someone else to write their entire paper. With the entrance of ChatGPT, “what’s changed is the ease and the scope. Chronicle of Higher Ed
If ChatGPT makes it easy to cheat on an assignment, teachers should throw out the assignment rather than ban the chatbot. MIT Tech Review
Professors can create conditions in which cheating is difficult, giving closed-book, closed-note, closed-internet exams in a controlled environment. They can create assignments in which cheating is difficult, by asking students to draw on what was said in class and to reflect on their own learning. They can make cheating less relevant, by letting students collaborate and use any resource at their disposal. Or they can diminish the forces that make cheating appealing: They can reduce pressure by having more-frequent, lower-stakes assessments. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Unlike accusations of plagiarism, AI cheating has no source document to reference as proof. “This leaves the door open for teacher bias to creep in.” Washington Post
Despite their positive attitude towards AI, many students (in a survey say they) feel anxious and lack clear guidance on how to use AI in the learning environments they are in. It is simply difficult to know where the boundary for cheating lies. Neuroscience News
While the AI-detection feature could be helpful in the immediate term, it could also lead to a surge in academic-misconduct cases, Eaton said. Colleges will have to figure out what to do with those reports at a moment when professors have yet to find consensus on how ChatGPT should be dealt with in their classrooms. Chronicle of Higher Ed
“Do you want to go to war with your students over AI tools?” said Ian Linkletter, who serves as emerging technology and open-education librarian at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. “Or do you want to give them clear guidance on what is and isn’t okay, and teach them how to use the tools in an ethical manner?” Washington Post
Even if detection software gets better at detecting AI generated text, it still causes mental and emotional strain when a student is wrongly accused. “False positives carry real harm,” he said. “At the scale of a course, or at the scale of the university, even a one or 2% rate of false positives will negatively impact dozens or hundreds of innocent students.” Washington Post
On many campuses, high-course-load contingent faculty and graduate students bear much of the responsibility for the kinds of large-enrollment, introductory-level, general-education courses where cheating is rampant. How can large or even mid-sized colleges withstand the flood of nonsense quasi-plagiarism when academic-integrity first responders are so overburdened and undercompensated? Chronicle of Higher Ed
Bruce Schneier, a public interest technologist and lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said any attempts to crackdown on the use of AI chatbots in classrooms is misguided, and history proves that educators must adapt to technology. Washington Post
Harsh punishments for cheating might preserve the status quo, but colleges generally give cheaters a slap on the wrist, and that won’t change. Unmonitored academic work will become optional, or a farce. The only thing that will really matter will be exams. And unless the exams are in-person, they’ll be a farce, too. Chronicle of Higher Ed
“I think we should just get used to the fact that we won’t be able to reliably tell if a document is either written by AI — or partially written by AI, or edited by AI — or by humans,” computer science professor Soheil Feizi said. “We should adapt our education system to not police the use of the AI models, but basically embrace it to help students to use it and learn from it.” Washington Post
Also:
21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection
13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans
20 quotes worth reading about students using AI
27 quotes about AI & writing assignments
22 examples of teaching with AI
Painful and sobering
/Everything painful and sobering revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn one’s self-esteem. -Ernest Becker
26 articles about Data Science & AI published this month
/A tutorial on how to perform a deep learning task in R
Why North Korea's satellite launch attempt may be 'first of many'
A deep dive into GPT models: evolution & performance comparison
Data science is “about building, training and maintaining AI systems”
Is data science evolving into a branch of contemporary AI?
NRO hopes AI & machine learning will help it as it is “awash in satellites and their data”
New app aims to streamline ordering satellite images from more than a dozen companies
UC Berkeley researchers weigh in on neural networks
Israel aiming to become an “AI superpower" by streamlined combat decision-making
Five key components that contribute to the successful scaling of data science projects
BlackSky suggests China may be hacking Western satellites using laser directed-energy weapons
OpenAI uses its GPT-4 language model to write explanations for the behavior of neurons
Python Pandas is an open-source toolkit for data scientists using the Python—here’s what it can do
Never neglect to monitor your machine-learning models
China lands mysterious spaceplane after 276 days in orbit
Some essential statistical concepts applicable in data science and machine learning
Pentagon & intell agencies are making it clear they plan to use such tools as ChatGPT
A simple introduction to Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT)
What exactly is data science and how did it get its start?
The USGIF has set up a new working group focused on “Space Situational Awareness”
Can ChatGPT work as a personalized tutor for learning data science concepts?
Solving complex AI Tasks with HuggingGPT
Liquid neural networks could generalize to scenarios that they had never seen
The paradox of sad music
/This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way.
Maybe, because sadness is such an intense emotion, its presence can prompt a positive empathic reaction: Feeling someone’s sadness can move you in some prosocial way.
“You’re feeling just alone, you feel isolated,” Dr. Joshua Knobe (an experimental philosopher and psychologist at Yale University) said. “And then there’s this experience where you listen to some music, or you pick up a book, and you feel like you’re not so alone.”
Read more from Oliver Whang in the New York Times
Familiarity & Truth
/Familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. -Daniel Kahneman
7 Media Webinars in the next 10 days about news, AI, free speech, media law, career advice & Gen Z
/Tue, May 30 - Storytelling for Impact
What: Tips, techniques and tools to help the modern marketer tell better and more impactful stories to activate their audiences around ideas and actions.
Who: Kiersten Hill, director of nonprofit solutions
When: 2 pm, Central
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Firespring
Tue, May 30 - Free Speech, Hate Speech and Censorship
What: An online discussion about how digital technologies are reshaping people's ideas about the scope and limitations of freedom of expression. The rise of hate speech and other harms caused by social media has led some people to question the value of free speech, as media companies and governments use strategies such as content moderation and regulation. Does a wide open "marketplace of ideas" still make sense in an era when everyone has a public voice?
When: 1 pm & 8 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Media Education Lab
Wed, May 31 - Covering environmental News
What: Lessons from the Amazon: novel ways to report on the climate
Who: David Hidalgo is an award-winning journalist and co-founder of Ojo Público platform in Peru, a non-profit investigative journalism website covering issues including human rights, corruption, drug trafficking, environment, health and transparency.
When: 8 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Reuters Institute
Mon, June 5 - Media Law Office Hours
What: Journalists with legal questions to help find answers with an attorney who specializes in this area.
Who: Attorney Matthew Leish
When: 5 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: New York’s Deadline Club
Tue, June 6 - Behind the data: Welcoming AI into the newsroom
What: A comprehensive exploration of the latest trends and applications of AI in the newsroom. How to harness the power of AI to drive journalistic practices forward. Attendees will get easy, practical advice on how to follow the path of this AI revolution.
Who: Online Media Expert Milena Tihojević and Lead Data Scientist Goran S. Milovanovic.
When: 9 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Smartocto which builds editorial analytics system for newsrooms
Wed, June 7 - The Power of Gen Z
What: Gain valuable insights into the immense power of Gen Z and their influence on the future of the communications industry. Discover how Gen Z's belief-driven buying behavior, social activism, and expectations for brand action are reshaping the marketing landscape, providing essential knowledge for brands and businesses to thrive in this evolving social-first world.
Who: Margot Edelman of Edelman, Tamarra Thal of IBM, Dylan Gambarella of NextGenHQ, Kim Hera Parafina of Microsoft, and Amanda Edelman of Edelman
When: 11 am, Central
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Institute for Public Relations
Thu, June 8 - Breaking Barriers & Forging Careers: An interactive online event for Journalist from ethnic minority backgrounds
What: Insights into becoming a resilient and respected leader, mastering job applications, and developing your networking skills. You'll also have the opportunity to connect with media professionals and industry leaders.
Who: Annika Allen, Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at All3Media Group; Marcus Ryder, MBE, and Ronke Phillips, Senior Correspondent at ITV News, London & ITN Editorial Diversity Partner; Mark Hudson, Head of Creative Diversity at News UK; Darren Lewis, Assistant Editor at the Daily Mirror
When: 6 pm, Central
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: NBAJ (Network for Black and Asian Journalists)
Do something
/Don’t be something, do something. -William Bridges
New ways of being alive
/(At the age of 35) cancer has kicked down the walls of my life. I cannot be certain I will walk my son to his elementary school someday or subject his love interests to cheerful scrutiny. I struggle to buy books for academic projects I fear I can’t finish for a perfect job I may be unable to keep. I have surrendered my favorite manifestoes about having it all, managing work-life balance and maximizing my potential. I cannot help but remind my best friend that if my husband remarries everyone will need to simmer down on talking about how special I was in front of her. (And then I go on and on about how this is an impossible task given my many delightful qualities. Let’s list them. …) Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.
But cancer has also ushered in new ways of being alive. Even when I am this distant from Canadian family and friends, everything feels as if it is painted in bright colors. In my vulnerability, I am seeing my world without the Instagrammed filter of breezy certainties and perfectible moments. I can’t help noticing the brittleness of the walls that keep most people fed, sheltered and whole. I find myself returning to the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.
Kate Bowler writing in the New York Times
An Apology
/A German wholesaler decided to offer a brief apology and rebate to customers who had posted more than 600 complaints about the firm on eBay. Defective products and late deliveries pledged the firm. Half were sent an apology and half were offered a small cash rebate. The result? Nearly half of those who received the apology removed their poor rating of the company. Only one-out-of-five of the customers given the money did so.
Stephen Goforth
History
/Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. -Karl Marx
What History can Teach us
/The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events. -Gerda Lerner
5 Free Media Webinars this Week about AI, ethics, reporting on religion & social media
/Tue, May 23 - When Ethics and Technology Collide: Chat GPT What Every Media Educator Needs to Know
What: While it’s only been in existence for a short time, Chat GPT is challenging educators and reportedly threatening some jobs. The artificial intelligence chatbot capable of writing letters, essays and responding to test questions raises numerous ethical questions both for the workplace and the classroom. We’ve gathered four scholars on ethics and media technology to help you make sense of it.
Who: Terra Tailleur, University of King’s College; Thomas Bivins, The University of Oregon; Adrienne Wallace, Grand Valley State University; Sabine Baumann, Berlin School of Economics and Law; Moderator: Joshua Fisher, Ball State University
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free to members
Sponsor: Assoc for Education in Journalism & Mass Comm
Wed, May 24 - Get AI Literate: Know What it Can Do and What it Can’t
What: Learn from government and industry experts about AI basics and real-world use cases to make sure that you can ace any AI quiz.
Who: Manuel Xavier Lugo, CAPT, SC, USN Head of Engagement and Innovation, Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (OSD CDAO); Wayne Burke, Deputy Division Manager, Artificial Intelligence, Analytics and Innovative Development Organization, NASA
When: 2pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: GovLoop
Wed, May 24 - Meet Religion Reporters Peter Smith of the AP and Michelle Boorstein of The Washington Post
What: Learn what they expect from religious communications officials – including some of their pet peeves and how you can pitch secular media more effectively. Additionally, the webinar will also include background on The Associated Press new, expanded religion reporting team.
Who: Veteran religion reporters Peter Smith of The Associated Press and Michelle Boorstein of The Washington Post
When: 1 pm, Central
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Catholic Media Association
Wed, May 24 - How media businesses in Asia are using AI
What:
Who: Rishad Patel, co-founder, creative director and head of product, Splice Media
When: 7 am, Central
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Reuters Institute, University of Oxford
Wed, May 24 – Social Media Affordances & Constraints
What: Are students getting the most out of social media? Do they know when to use one platform over another? Can they tell when offline engagement might be a more viable option? To answer these questions, students might consider the role of social media affordances. How they perceive social media affordances, such as visibility, persistence, editability and association, can both enable or constrain what they do on a given platform.
Who: Sean Gabaree, doctoral student at Georgetown University.
When: 4 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Media Education Lab
Possibility and Despair
/Possibility … is to human existence what vowels are to speech. To live in pure possibility is like an infants utterance of vowel sounds, which fail to express something that is definite and clear. Vowels alone do not make for articulate speech, although without them nothing can be said at all. Similarly, “if a human existence is brought to the point where it lacks possibility, then it is in despair and is in deeper every moment it lacks possibility.” One cannot breathe without oxygen, but it is also impossible to breathe pure oxygen. Possibility is a kind of spiritual oxygen that a person cannot live without, but one cannot live on pure possibility either.
C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction
What forgiveness Does
/Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future. -Paul Boese
Think of AI as a tool
/The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature.
Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams.
If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.
A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures.
Jaron Lanier writing in The New Yorker
My Life with One Arm
/Two months to the day after my accident, I went to see a therapist for the first time in my life. I didn’t know where to begin. We discussed loss and resilience and the will to live and adapt. But when I started talking about the outpouring of love and support that I had received since my accident, I began weeping uncontrollably. I realized that for the first time in my life, I was truly letting love into my heart. Losing an arm has connected me to others in a way I have never felt. Yes, I have suffered a tremendous loss, but in a way, I feel as if I have gained much more.
Miles O’Brian, Writing in New York Magazine
The Vacuum Cleaner Method
/I know a man who is a tremendous asset to his organization, not because of any extraordinary ability, but because he invariably demonstrates a triumphant thought pattern. Perhaps his associates view a proposition pessimistically, so he employs what he calls the “vacuum cleaner method.” That is, by a series of questions he “sucks the dust” out of his associates’ minds; he draws out their negative attitudes. Then quietly he suggests positive ideas concerning the proposition until a new set of attitudes gives them a new concept of the facts.
They often comment upon how different facts appear when this man “goes to work on them.” It’s the confidence attitude that makes the difference. This doesn’t rule out objectively appraising of facts. The inferiority complex victim sees all facts through discolored attitudes. The secret of correction is simply to gain a normal view, and that is always slanted on the positive side.
Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking
The Power of Lonely
/The nice thing about medicine is it comes with instructions. Not so with solitude, which may be tremendously good for one’s health when taken in the right doses, but is about as user-friendly as an unmarked white pill. Too much solitude is unequivocally harmful and broadly debilitating, decades of research show. But one person’s “too much” might be someone else’s “just enough,” and eyeballing the difference with any precision is next to impossible.
People should be mindfully setting aside chunks of every day when they are not engaged in so-called social snacking activities like texting, g-chatting, and talking on the phone. For teenagers, it may help to understand that feeling a little lonely at times may simply be the price of forging a clearer identity.
“People make this error, thinking that being alone means being lonely, and not being alone means being with other people,” John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, said. “You need to be able to recharge on your own sometimes. Part of being able to connect is being available to other people, and no one can do that without a break.”
Leon Neyfakh, writing in the Boston Globe