Obstacles

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The first thing to do about an obstacle is simply to stand up to it and not complain about it or whine under it but forthrightly attack it. Don't go crawling through life on your hands and knees half-defeated. Stand up to your obstacles and do something about them. You will find that they haven't half the strength you think they have.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

13 things journalists need to know about AI

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A good rule of thumb is to start from the assumption that any story you hear about using AI in real-world settings is, beneath everything else, a story about labor automation.  Max Read’s blog 

This new era requires that newsrooms develop new, clear standards for how journalists will — and won’t — use AI for reporting, writing and disseminating the news. Newsrooms need to act quickly but deliberatively to create these standards and to make them easily accessible to their audiences. Poynter

Any assistance provided to these (AI) companies (by news organizations) could ultimately help put journalists out of business, and the risk remains that, once the media’s utility to the world of AI has been exhausted, the funding tap will quickly be turned off. Media executives can argue that having a seat at the table is better than not having one, but it might just make it easier for big tech to eat their lunch. Columbia Journalism Review 

Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter. New York Times

“Reporters tend to just pick whatever the (AI) author or the model producer has said,” Abeba Birhane, an AI researcher and senior fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, said. “They just end up becoming a PR machine themselves for those tools.” Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI and former AP editor, said, “Find the people who are actually using it or trying to use it to do their work and cover that story, because there are real people trying to get real things done.” Columbia Journalism Review

Journalists’ greatest value will be in asking good questions and judging the quality of the answers, not writing up the results. Wall Street Journal 

There are 49 supposed news sites that NewsGuard, an organization tracking misinformation, has identified as “almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software.” The Guardian

Recently, AI developers have claimed their models perform well not only on a single task but in a variety of situations … In the absence of any real-world validation, journalists should not believe the company’s claims. Columbia Journalism Review

If media outlets truly wanted to learn about the power of AI in newsrooms, they could test tools internally with journalists before publishing. Instead, they’re skipping to the potential for profit. The Verge

One of the main ways to combat misinformation is to make it clearer where a piece of content was generated and what happened to it along the way. The Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative aims to help image creators do this. Microsoft announced earlier this year that it will add metadata to all content created with its generative AI tools. Google, meanwhile, plans to share more details on the images catalogued in its search engine. Axios 

In the newsroom, some media companies have already tried to implement generative AI to create content that is easily automated, such as newsletters and real estate reports. The tech news media CNET started quietly publishing articles explaining financial topics using “‘automated technology’ – a stylistic euphemism for AI,” CNET had to issue corrections on 41 of the 77 stories after uncovering errors despite the articles being reviewed by humans prior to publication. Some of the errors came down to basic math. It’s mistakes such as these that make many journalists wary of using AI tools beyond simple transcription or programming a script. Columbia Journalism Review

OpenAI and the Associated Press are announcing a landmark deal for ChatGPT to license the news organization's archives. Axios

AI in The Newsroom (video) International News Media Association International  

10 Specific Predictions about AI

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Attackers (will) use artificial intelligence to write software that can break into corporate networks in novel ways, change appearance and functionality to beat detection, and smuggle data back out through processes that appear normal. Washington Post

Actor Tom Hanks believes he will be starring in new film roles long after his death, as he speculated on the possibility that his likeness could be captured by AI. Forbes

Any site that depends on contributions from the public — text messages, product reviews, photo or video uploads — is preparing to be swamped with AI-generated input that will make finding signal in the noise even harder for human users. Axios

Robots presented at an AI forum said they expected to increase in number and help solve global problems, and would not steal humans' jobs or rebel against us. Reuters

While much of the media attention has been on large language models, the field of causal AI has gotten comparatively little. If causal reasoning is combined with large language models, it could have a major impact on humanity. Semafor 

In a way, I’m agnostic to that question of “do we need more breakthroughs or will existing systems just scale all the way?” My view is it’s an empirical question, and one should push both as hard as possible. And then the results will speak for themselves. (DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis) The Verge

Artificial intelligences that are trained using text and images from other AIs, which have themselves been trained on AI outputs, could eventually become functionally useless. New Scientist

One need not even know how to program to construct attack software. “You will be able to say, ‘just tell me how to break into a system,’ and it will say, ‘here’s 10 paths in’,” said Robert Hansen, who has explored AI as deputy chief technology officer at security firm Tenable. “They are just going to get in. It’ll be a very different world.” Washington Post

Fifty-six percent of respondents (in a recent survey) think ‘people will develop emotional relationships with AI’ and 35 percent of people said they’d be open to doing so if they were lonely. The Verge 

In 2019, Christian Szegedy, a computer scientist formerly at Google and now at a start-up in the Bay Area, predicted that a computer system would match or exceed the problem-solving ability of the best human mathematicians within a decade. Last year he revised the target date to 2026. New York Times

The best strategy for persuading others to help you achieve something

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Let's say you're considering a wonderful business opportunity, but you also face challenges.

The average leader might gather the team and explain why it's such a great opportunity for the company. The emotionally intelligent leader, however, skips much of that, and frames everything from the point of view of his or her team:

1. First, what the opportunity means for everyone together,

2. Second, what it means for individual contributors, and

3. Finally, what's needed from each person to reach the goal.

The hard part is that it takes more time to think about all of these angles and to craft the right message. On top of all of that, you have the challenge of being brief. But, when done right, you also get the benefit of being far more likely to achieve your goals.

Bill Murphy, Jr. writing in his newsletter

Think About Your Death and Live Better 

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We banish death from our thoughts. But this leads us to make choices in life that actually curtail our happiness. People who express more regrets tend to be those who postponed profound activities that yield meaning, such as practicing religion, appreciating beauty, or spending more time with loved ones.

This is probably because they realized too late that they had implicitly assumed life would always go on and on, so there’s always time to do these meaning-filled things. When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in the Atlantic

Relational Diversity

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A 2022 study found that the more “relational diversity” a person has in their social repertoire, the higher their well-being. Using the analogy of a “social portfolio,” Harvard Business School doctoral candidate Hanne Collins and her colleagues found when people socialize with a range of conversation partners — family members, coworkers, friends, and strangers — on a given day, they report feeling happier than those who converse with fewer “categories” of people. 

Allie Volpe writing in Vox

Why should I love my neighbor?

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If anyone asks me why he should love his neighbor, I would not know how to answer him, and I could only ask in my turn why he should pose such a question...It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. 

Alfred Adler

9 Articles about AI & Design

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Hiring a disruptor

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Peripheral leaders who operate at the geographical and cultural margins of an organization, often see disruption coming much earlier than those at the center. The same leaders are also, research shows, most likely to come up with innovative ideas. But to the leaders at the core of the organization, the concerns of those at its periphery often seem premature and exaggerated, and their plans far too risky.

Hiring a disruptor can be a conservative move, an unconscious way to prove the power of traditions and blame someone else’s style for our irrational investment in them. Any aspiring disruptor who does not get a handle on this dynamic is at risk of being set up. Picking an outsider to deliver, or more precisely embody, that message makes it easier to dismiss the message.  

Gianpiero Petriglieri writing in the Harvard Business Review

7 articles worth reading about AI & legal issues (aside from copyright)

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17 great quotes about AI limitations

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Machine thinking is great for understanding the behavioral patterns across populations. It is not great for understanding the unique individual right in front of you. If you can understand another person’s perspective, you have a more valuable skill than the skill possessed by some machine vacuuming up vast masses of data about no one in particular. New York Times

Ian Bogost suggests that ChatGPT produces “an icon of the answer … rather than the answer itself.”  The Atlantic

A large language model is not capable of conducting independent research or gathering new information. It is only capable of generating text based on the input it is given, so it would not be able to provide original insights or perspectives on the topic at hand. Inside Higher Ed

The ability to create and give a good speech, connect with an audience, and organize fun and productive gatherings seem like a suite of skills that A.I. will not replicate. New York Times

The idea that “AI” can navigate contested terrain by flagging “disagreement” and synthesizing links to “both sides” is hardly sufficient. Such illusions of balance obscure the need to situate information and differentiate among sources: precisely the critical skills that college writing was designed to cultivate and empower. Public Books 

Something I noticed when I asked ChatGPT to write a short story: It makes everything sound like an unfunny parody. New York Magazine

I’ve learned that it is being used for such daily tasks as: translating code from one programming language to another, potentially saving hours spent searching web forums for a solution; generating plain-language summaries of published research, or identifying key arguments on a particular topic; and creating bullet points to pull into a presentation or lecture. Chronicle of Higher Ed

If AI-generated forensic sketches are ever released to the public, they can reinforce stereotypes and racial biases and can hamper an investigation by directing attention to people who look like the sketch instead of the actual perpetrator. Vice

AI feels mundane. It just feels like using any other technology. So we really need to reckon with our own expectations, turn down the hype, and close the gap between what we imagine and what the reality is. The Markup

The information produced by AI language models and chatbots is often incorrect. The tricky thing is that when it’s wrong, it’s wrong in ways that are difficult to spot. The Verge

Our tests found that it sometimes offers responses that potentially include plagiarism, contradict itself, are factually incorrect or have grammatical errors, to name a few — all of which could be problematic at work. Washington Post

When we discuss hallucinations and out-of-date databases, we should be careful about reaching summative judgments. These products are still very much in development; there will be new innovations, and there will be bigger and better pools of data that will stir the pot among ranking brands and products. Inside Higher Ed

CNET started quietly publishing articles explaining financial topics using “‘automated technology’ – a stylistic euphemism for AI,” CNET had to issue corrections on 41 of the 77 stories after uncovering errors despite the articles being reviewed by humans prior to publication. Some of the errors came down to basic math. Columbia Journalism Review

I think the questionable accuracy of responses provided by ChatGPT is its biggest downside. It means the user is responsible for verifying the information, which takes away the ease people are attributing to ChatGPT. Demand Sage

ChatGPT has proven inept at reproducing even the simplest ideas in rocketry. In addition to messing up the rocket equation, it bungled concepts such as the thrust-to-weight ratio, a basic measure of the rocket's ability to fly. NPR

ChatGPT can write poemlike streams of regurgitated text, but . . . they don’t satisfy the minimal criterion of a poem, which is a pattern of language that compresses the messy data of experience, emotion, truth, or knowledge and turns those, as W. H. Auden wrote in 1935, into “memorable speech.” The Atlantic

Even if researchers trained these systems solely on peer-reviewed scientific literature, they might still produce statements that were scientifically ridiculous. Even if they learned solely from text that was true, they might still produce untruths. Even if they learned only from text that was wholesome, they might still generate something creepy. New York Times

8 AI Predictions

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Humans will specialize in whatever AI does worst. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Many types of work will be taken over by machines, and jobs will vanish. This change is typically seen as a cause for gloom. I suggest we see it as an opportunity to revitalize education by replacing unsatisfying work with meaningful labor. Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI will certainly force us to concentrate on those talents and skills that will remain uniquely human. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Will writers start proclaiming they are “natural” writers, with no AI use in their work, akin to bodybuilders who choose not to use performance-enhancing drugs? Washington Post

It’s going to creep into our lives in ways we least expect it  Wall Street Journal

The role of software engineers will evolve into one of guiding and overseeing the AI's work, providing input and feedback, and ensuring that the generated code meets the project's requirements.  Prompt engineering will be critical in using automated code generators as prompts must be carefully crafted to accurately capture the intent of the desired code.  Forbes

While I think that A.I. tools help express our creativity, creativity will still be the driving force behind the future of art. New York Magazine

The new web is struggling to be born, and the decisions we make now will shape how it grows  The Verge