The new web struggles to be born

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The changes AI is currently causing are just the latest in a long struggle in the web’s history. Essentially, this is a battle over information — over who makes it, how you access it, and who gets paid. But just because the fight is familiar doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, nor does it guarantee the system that follows will be better than what we have now. The new web is struggling to be born, and the decisions we make now will shape how it grows.

James Vincent writing in The Verge

Don’t make waves

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Thomas Moriarty arranged an experiment in which innocent persons would be practically accused of stealing. The experimental aide would stand behind an adult businessman making a call in a phone booth in Grand Central Station; when the call was completed the aid would play out the following script: “Excuse me, I was here a few minutes ago I left my ring on the counter under the phone. Did you find it?” Of course, all subjects replied, “No.”

The aide would then say, “I've got to find it. Are you sure you didn't see it? Sometimes people pick things up without thinking about it. Again, subjects would deny having seen the ring. Then the aid would ask, “Would you empty your pockets?”

The Investigators wondered how many people would comply with such an overbearing request, one which amounts to an allegation of petty thievery. The compliance rate was 80 percent: four of every five adult males essentially submitted to a search by emptying their pockets. The percentages were even higher in laboratory experiments. And even when a “disinterested bystander” said to the aide. “You’ve got no right to ask him to empty his pockets,” the subjects still complied.

Such studies show how prevalent passivity is. It is alarming that so few people are willing to stand up for their rights when they are being put upon and clearly annoyed. Apparently, most of us would rather not get into a hassle about anything, especially with a stranger. The slogan is: Don’t make waves.

Sharon and Gordon Bower, Asserting Yourself

Making exterior changes to avoid internal changes

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Some people make changes so they won’t have to make transitions. They walk out on their marriages, but take along the attitudes toward partners that destroyed their marriages. Or they continue to search for “someone to take care of me” after they quit their jobs because their bosses are not interested in playing that role. Or they move because their town doesn’t have any “interesting people” in it—only to find that their new town doesn’t either. Such people may claim that they are “always in transition,” but in fact they are probably never in transition. They are addicted to change, and like any addiction, it is an escape from the real issues raised by their lives.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Manufacturing unhappiness

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While riding a train, a minister observed a handsome elderly couple. The wife was dressed in furs and diamonds and was the envy of all the other women on the train, but her disposition did not match her appearance. She constantly complained about everything. She criticized the food, the service, and the railway car.

Her husband, who was striking in appearance, was a calm, considerate man. As his wife raved about the abominable service, he sat calmly, occasionally showing embarrassment at his wife’s attitude. In an attempt to change the tone of the conversation, the husband engaged the minister in a conversation in which they discussed their occupations. Finally the husband said with a grin on his face, “My wife is in the manufacturing business.”

This surprised the minister because the wife certainly did not seem to be the executive type. The minster asked, “What does your wife manufacture?”

“Unhappiness,” her husband replied. “She manufactures her own unhappiness.”

Larry Kennedy, Down With Anxiety

10 questions about AI and medicine

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Can AI diagnose illnesses?

The AI Will See You Now - Wall Street Journal

Can AI spot lung cancer years in advance?

AI tool could help spot lung cancer years in advance – Washington Post

Can AI answer your medical questions?

ChatGPT Will See You Now: Doctors Using AI to Answer Patient Questions - Wall Street Journal

ChatGPT improves their ability to communicate empathetically with patients – New York Times

Can AI write medical papers?

A Doctor Published Several Research Papers With Breakneck Speed. ChatGPT Wrote Them All - Digg

Can AI save someone’s voice?

Patients were told their voices could disappear. They turned to AI to save them - Washington Post  

Can AI predict medical outcomes?

The algorithm has been trained to make medical predictions based on reading genomes - Washington Post  

Can AI find new medicines?

Scientists have used AI to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug - BBC

Can AI spot cancer?

AI Tool Assists in Predicting the Likelihood of Pancreatic Cancer - Healthy Analytics

What role will AI play in medicine?

For now, the new AI in health care is going to be less a genius partner than a tireless scribe - New York Times

What limitations are we seeing for AI operating in the medical space?

An AI Diagnosed Her with Breast Cancer. Then She Ran an Experiment to See How Accurate It Was - The Markup

From “Dunce” to Genius

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When Victor Serebriakoff was fifteen, his teacher told him he would never finish school and that he should drop out and learn a trade. Victor took the advice and for the next seventeen years he was an itinerant doing a variety of odd jobs. He had been told he was a "dunce" and for seventeen years he acted like one. When he was 32 years old, an amazing transformation took place. An evaluation revealed that he was a genius with an I.Q. of 161. Guess what? That's right, he started acting like a genius. Since that time he has written books, secured a number of patents and has become a successful businessman. Perhaps the most significant event for the former dropout was his election as chairman of the International Mensa Society. The Mensa Society has only one membership qualification, an I.Q. of 140.

The story of Victor Serebriakoff makes you wonder how many geniuses we have wandering around acting like dunces because someone told them they weren't too bright. Obviously, Victor did not suddenly acquire a tremendous amount of additional knowledge. He did suddenly acquire tremendous added confidence. The result was, he instantly became more effective and more productive. When he saw himself differently, he started acting differently. He started expecting, and getting different results. Ah yes, as a man thinketh…

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

7 things AI can do now

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Attitude

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The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company . . . a church . . . a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past . . . we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude . . . I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you...we are in charge of our attitudes.

Charles R. Swindoll

Can AI write a song? A sermon? Fanfiction?

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Close a few doors

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We can spend a lot of energy keeping doors open. Time is wasted when we refuse to let go because of the pain of watching a door close and seeing an option disappear. We pay a price to avoid feeling a particular emotion such as losing an opportunity. Find ways to avoid overbooking our lives by letting a few things fall off our plates. Cancel projects. Give away ideas to colleagues. Resign from committees. Rethink hobbies. Let a few doors close.

Stephen Goforth

8 articles about what AI might do for you—from therapy to mind reading

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A way to spot genuine love

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We don’t keep pets around very long when they protest or fight back against us. The only school to which we send our pets for the development of their minds or spirits is obedience school. Yet it is possible for us to desire that other humans develop a “will of their own;” indeed, it is this desire for the differentiation for the other that is one of the characteristics of genuine love.

In our relationship with pets we seek to foster their dependency. We do not want them to grow up and leave home. We want them to stay put, to lie dependably near the hearth. It is their attachment to us rather than their independence from us that we value in our pets.

This matter of the “love” of pets is of immense import because many, many people are capable of “loving” only pets and incapable of genuinely loving other human beings.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

24 articles worth reading about the dangers of AI (beyond security issues)

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Assessing the existential risk of AI - MIT Tech Review  

Intelligence analysts confront the reality of deepfakes: AI-generated image of fake Pentagon explosion just an inkling of what’s to come - Space News

The potential dangers of using artificial intelligence as a weapon of war - NPR  

India’s religious AI chatbots are speaking in the voice of god - Rest of World

AI-generated child sex images spawn new nightmare for the web - Washington Post 

Princeton computer science professor says don't panic over 'bullshit generator' ChatGPT - Business Insider  

Developers Created AI to Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified - Vice

Calm Down. There is No Conscious A.I. - Gizmodo

AI can be racist, sexist and creepy. What should we do about it? - CNN

The case for slowing down AI - Vox 

More than 1,000 tech leaders & researchers call for a six-month moratorium on AI development over “risks to society and humanity.” - New York Times

Claudia offers nude photos for pay but is a fake AI creation - Washington Post

If Wikipedia content is AI-generated, (it could create) a feedback loop of potentially biased information, if left unchecked - Vice   

2024 promises to be the first AI election cycle with artificial intelligence potentially playing a pivotal role at the ballot box - USA TODAY 

Why Hollywood Really Fears Generative AI - Wired

How AI is already changing the 2024 election - Axios

Chatbots have faced criticism for messing up key historical facts, fabricating sources, and citing misinformation about each other - Columbia Journalism Review

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says Government Intervention Is 'Crucial' - Entrepreneur

The internet is filled with videos promising AI can make you rich. But there is little evidence to prove it can - Washington Post

What happens when AI becomes so integrated into our daily decision-making that we become dependent on it? - Inside Higher Ed

ChatGPT Is Cutting Non-English Languages Out of the AI Revolution—threatening to amplify existing bias in global commerce and innovation - Wired

Will AI replace coders? - The Guardian

U.S. Grapples With Potential Threats From Chinese AI - Wall Street Journal

Researchers failed to identify one-third of medical journal abstracts as written by AI - Bioxiv

Why AI Will Make Our Children More Lonely - Wall Street Journal 

Love hurts—really!

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Heartache can have the same effect as someone spilling hot coffee on us.

Imaging scans show the same parts of the brain light up for physical pain as when you are separated from a loved one or have a broken heart, say researchers at the University of Michigan. They asked 40 people who had a recent unwanted romantic breakup that gave them feelings of rejection to look at a photo of their former partner to think about the relationship. The brain scans taken during this and other similar situations were compared to scans when subjects were given slight pain. The similarities in the brain scans suggest a close connection between our minds and our bodies. The painful emotions that come with feeling socially rejected can scar us in more than one way. The sting of heartbreak and rejection can make us physically ill. Our social well-being is a critical part of maintaining a healthy life.

Is there someone you’ve cast aside with a harsh word or a loved one who has had to endure a negative attitude from you? Those actions are not that far removed from physically hurting that person.

Details of the study are in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Stephen Goforth

9 articles worth reading about the security dangers of AI

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16 Journalism & AI quotes & tools

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Beginner’s prompt handbook: ChatGPT for local news publishers - Joe Amditis

How to cover AI – a guide for journalists - The Fix 

Good journalism, in my view, is original and reveals previously unknown or hidden truths. Language models work by predicting the most likely next word in a sequence, based on existing text they’ve been trained on. So they cannot ultimately produce or uncover anything truly new or unexpected in their current form. Harvard’s Nieman Lab 

Machine learning can be deployed to help newsrooms identify and address biases that crop up in their own reporting, across text, photo, video, audio, and social media. The Fix 

A close examination of the work produced by CNET's AI makes it seem less like a sophisticated text generator and more like an automated plagiarism machine, casually pumping out pilfered work that would get a human journalist fired. Futurism 

It matters that the technology can fool regular people into believing there is intelligence or sentience behind it, and we should be writing about the risks and guardrails being built in that context. Harvard’s Nieman Lab 

Non-writing AI tools every journalist should know about. International Center for Journalists 

The "world's first" entirely AI-generated news site is here. It's called NewsGPT, and it seems like an absolutely horrible idea. Futurism

Artificial intelligence tools are now being used to populate so-called content farms, referring to low-quality websites around the world that churn out vast amounts of clickbait articles to optimize advertising revenue, NewsGuard found. NewsGuard

The Artifact news app lets AI rewrite a headline for you if you come across (a clickbait) article. TechCrunch

One area where MidJourney is helpful is food journalism. Need an image of a breakfast bowl with whole grain and blueberries? Just write a prompt. MidJourney is also excellent building basic templates for object cutaway diagrams. Mike Reilley’s Journalism Toolbox

With tools like ChatGPT in the hands of practically anybody with an internet connection, we're likely to see a lot more journalists having their names attached to completely made-up sources, a troubling side-effect of tech that has an unnerving tendency to falsify sourcing. Futurism

What if an AI could attend, take notes and write short, hallucination-free stories about public meetings? Harvard’s Nieman Lab

Can you design an AI system that attends a city meeting and generates a story? Yeah, I did it. This tech could soon — very soon — be a viable tool to save reporters time by covering hours-long public meetings. The technology could also lead to layoffs in some newsrooms. Harvard’s Nieman Lab

The publisher of Sports Illustrated and other outlets is using artificial intelligence to help produce articles and pitch journalists potential topics to follow. Wall Street Journal 

The owners of Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal promised to be virtuous with AI. Then they bungled their very first ai story — and issued huge corrections when we caught them. Futurism