Believing absurdities
/Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities - attributed to Voltaire
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Changing
/Everybody thinks of changing humanity. but nobody thinks of changing himself. - J Harold Smith
The Intersection of Science & AI in 10 Articles
/Protecting scientific integrity in an age of generative AI - PNAS
Generative A.I. Arrives in the Gene Editing World of CRISPR – New York Times
Researcher will use AI to test new materials so engineers don’t have to – Arizona State University
Democratizing the future of AI R&D: NSF to launch National AI Research Resource pilot - National Science Foundation
NASA accelerates science with gen AI-powered search - CIO
A physicists’ guide to the ethics of artificial intelligence – Symmetry Magazine
Interdisciplinary group suggests guidelines for the use of AI in science - TechExplore
Scientists use generative AI to answer complex questions in physics – MIT
AI Is Moving Biology From Science To Engineering, Advancing Medicine - Forbes
AI gets scientists one step closer to mapping the organized chaos in our cells – NPR
Bumper Sticker Catch Phrases
/We need to be careful about staking the important ethical decisions in our lives on bumper sticker catch phrases. The problem is that the ideas expressed in these bite-sized pronouncements have broader implications.
While the ethical aspect that is explicit in the bumper sticker may look good at first glance, other ideas that follow from it may not be so attractive. Most of us have heard or used the cliché “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and it can sound like worthwhile advice. But what if the standard practices of the “Romans” stand in direct conflict with your moral or religious convictions? The is why we need to get behind the cliché’ itself.
Before we commit ourselves to any bumper sticker, we want to make certain that we can accept all that is implied in the slogan.
Steve Wilkens, Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics
10 Webinars about AI, Media & Journalism
/Thu, May 30 - AI and Visual Journalism: Ethics, tech, copyright and more considerations for newsrooms and photojournalists
What: A high-level discussion about what newsroom leaders and visual journalists need to know about AI technologies. This virtual session will cover the considerations you need to take into account and how to be talking about AI and visuals in your newsroom.
Who: Tony Elkins, Faculty, Poynter; Alicia Wagner Calzada, Deputy General Counsel, National Press Photographers Association; Sandra M. Stevenson, Deputy Director of Photography, The Washington Post
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Online News Association
Thu, May 30 - Community engagement tools to inform election coverage
What: Research and strategies for engaged election coverage this year, including: New findings on how Americans view national and location election news. Simple structures and tools for authentic community engagement that can inform and build trust in your election reporting.
Who: Kevin Loker is a director of strategic partnerships and research at API.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsors: American Press Institute, Associated Press, New England Newspaper & Press Association
Thu, May 30 - Community Asset Mapping 101
What: By the end of the session, you will have a foundational starting point for your asset map and clear next steps for completing and refining it. This skill is invaluable for any journalist, regardless of their role in the newsroom.
Who: Letrell Deshan Crittenden, Director of Inclusion and Audience Growth, American Press Institute
When: 12 noon, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: New England Equity Reporting Fellowship
Tue, June 4 - Introduction to AI for Nonprofits
What: Learn how to enhance your nonprofit’s website and basic marketing strategies using AI.
Who: Tareq Monuar Web Developer; Jon Hill Tapp Network
When: 12 noon
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: TechSoup
Tue, June 4 - Ask Nikita Roy All your Newsroom AI Questions
What: Drawing from her conversations with over 50 industry leaders on the Newsroom Robots podcast, Nikita is here to help you with your questions on everything from selecting tools to training models to maintaining journalistic integrity. Come with your questions—no matter how big or small—and let’s dive into a lively discussion on making AI work for your newsroom.
Who: Nikita Roy is a data scientist, journalist, and Harvard-recognized AI futurist.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Online News Association
Tue, June 4 - Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
What: Looking at the shared pasts of literature and computer science, this will provide a context for recent developments in artificial intelligence. Yi Tenen draws on labor history, technology, and philosophy to examine why he views AI as a reflection of the long-standing cooperation between authors and engineers.
Who: Former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen
When: 6:45 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: $25 for nonmembers
Sponsor: Smithsonian
Wed, June 5 - How to Use AI Responsibly
What: Hear from government and industry leaders about the attributes associated with responsible AI and how to use it effectively at your organization.
Who: Beth Noveck, Chief AI Strategist, State of New Jersey; David Larrimore, Chief Technology Officer, Office of the Chief Information Officer, Department of Homeland Security
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: GovLoop
Wed, June 5 – Mini Lab: Prompt-Writing
What: Join us for a quick, facilitated session where you’ll get to experiment with various prompts for ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.ai. Participants will have a chance to show some of their work and discuss ways it can be used. series.
Who: Mike Reilley, Senior Lecturer, University of Illinois-Chicago
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Online News Association
Wed, June 5 – Executive Directors Chat: Leveraging AI for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
What: Learn how to leverage AI to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion goals for your nonprofit's DEI initiatives.
When: 12 noon, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: TechSoup
Fri, June 7 - Media & The Law: What journalists need to know about copyright & defamation suits
What: Copyright and libel law essentials for today’s media environment with an opportunity for questions to help journalists and freelancers understand their rights and how to follow the law.
Who: Chad R. Bowman‘s practice focuses on working with new and legacy media organizations, such as The Associated Press, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.
When: 11:30 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The National Press Club’s Journalism Institute
Slowly
/Grow angry slowly. There’s plenty of time. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (born May 25, 1803)
The Impact of AI on Creativity in 9 Articles
/How Adobe manages AI ethics concerns while fostering creativity - ZDnet
Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers – Washington Post
Country Star Who Can't Sing After Stroke Releases New Song Using AI – Futurism
The rise of Generative AI-driven design patterns – UX Design
OpenAI says it’s building a tool to let content creators ‘opt out’ of AI training – Tech Crunch
What Do You Do When A.I. Takes Your Voice? - New York Times
New Federal Bill Could Require Disclosure of Songs Used in AI Training – Billboard
Getty Images CEO Calls for Industry Standards Around AI: “There were more images created through AI last year than there were created through lens-based technologies.” – Hollywood Reporter
In the Battle of Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar, A.I. Is Playing Spoiler – New York Times
Get in a creative mood by visiting large spaces
/If you’re in a cramped space, say your office is a little cubicle, your visual attention can’t spread out. It’s focused in this narrow space. Just as your visual attention is constricted, your conceptual attention becomes narrow and focused, and your thinking is more likely to be analytical.
But if you’re in a large space – a big office, with high ceilings, or outside — your visual attention expands to fill the space, and your conceptual attention expands.
That’s why a lot of creative figures like to be outdoors, to take long walks in nature, and they get their inspiration from being in the wide, open spaces. If you can see far and wide, then you can think far and wide.
Brigid Schulte writing in the Washington Post
This is What Hell is Like
/We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement and where everyone has a grievance. - C. S. Lewis
18 articles about AI Fakes
/These ISIS news anchors are AI fakes. Their propaganda is real. – Washington Post
Generative AI poses Threat to election security, intelligence agencies warn – CBS News
Bank of Italy warns against AI-powered fake videos – Reuters
Google's AI Watermarks Will Identify Deepfakes – Dark Reading
In novel case, U.S. charges man with making child sex abuse images with AI – Washington Post
Voice-cloning technology bringing a key Supreme Court moment to 'life' – Associated Press
Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures – Wall Street Journal
New UK law targets “despicable individuals” who create AI sex deepfakes - Ars Technica
She was accused of faking an incriminating video but nothing was fake after all - The Guardian
TikTok’s AI watermarks could help curb deepfakes, but it’s no panacea – Semafor
OpenAI Releases ‘Deepfake’ Detector to Disinformation Researchers – New York Times
Microsoft and OpenAI launch $2M fund to counter election deepfakes – Tech Crunch
OpenAI Says It Can Now Detect Images Spawned by Its Software—Most of the Time – Wall Street Journal
How AI-generated disinformation might impact this year’s elections and how journalists should report on it – Reuters Institute
How Generative AI Is Helping Fact-Checkers Flag Election Disinformation, But Is Less Useful in the Global South – Global Investigative Journalism Network
In Arizona, election workers trained with deepfakes to prepare for 2024 – Washington Post
Excessive use of words like ‘commendable’ and ‘meticulous’ suggests ChatGPT has been used in thousands of scientific studies - EL PAÍS English
Fooled by AI? These firms sell deepfake detection - Washington Post
Tech created a global village — and puts us at each other’s throats
/As we get additional information about others, we place greater stress on the ways those people differ from us than on the ways they resemble us, and this inclination to emphasize dissimilarities over similarities strengthens as the amount of information accumulates. On average, we like strangers best when we know the least about them.
The effect intensifies in the virtual world, where everyone is in everyone else’s business. Social networks like Facebook and messaging apps like Snapchat encourage constant self-disclosure. Because status is measured quantitatively online, in numbers of followers, friends, and likes, people are rewarded for broadcasting endless details about their lives and thoughts through messages and photographs. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. One study found that people share four times as much information about themselves when they converse through computers as when they talk in person.
Progress toward a more amicable world will require not technological magic but concrete, painstaking, and altogether human measures: negotiation and compromise, a renewed emphasis on civics and reasoned debate, a citizenry able to appreciate contrary perspectives. At a personal level, we may need less self-expression and more self-examination.
Technology is an amplifier. It magnifies our best traits, and it magnifies our worst.
Nicholas Carr writing in the Boston Globe
Technology that makes us less human
/Like an episode out of Black Mirror, the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” AI expert Leif Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships.” What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. - Tyler Austin Harper writing in The Atlantic
The Journey
/Look for ways that the outer journey can mirror an inner journey. - Adam Hochschild
14 Articles about AI & Health Care
/AI Chatbots Are Promising but Limited in Promoting Healthy Behavior Change – UniteAI
Can Mental-Health Chatbots Help With Anxiety and Depression? – Wall Street Journal
Machine learning enables cheaper and safer low-power MRI - News-Medical.Net
Tetris-inspired radiation detector uses machine learning – Physics World
Doctors are using AI to talk to patients and record appointments. Don’t worry, your data is allegedly safe – Fast Company
Speaking without vocal cords, thanks to a new AI-assisted wearable device – UCLA
A.I. Could Spot Breast Cancer Earlier. Should You Pay for It? – New York Times
AI-enhanced integration of genetic and medical imaging data for risk assessment of Type 2 diabetes – Nature
How Does AI Fit Into Clinical Practice? – MedScape
Using AI for public impact of healthcare – Fast Company
Less burnout for doctors, better clinical trials, among the benefits of AI in health care – CNBC
Growing Evidence Shows Importance of AI for Healthcare – Center For Data Innovation
Nurses gather at Kaiser SF to protest AI in health care – NBC Bay Area
A health tech leader’s plea: Regulate AI – Politico
Emotional distance
/Emotional distance is perplexing. If there is too much, it is not possible to have a relationship; if there is not enough separation, it is also not possible to have a relationship. -Edwin Friedman
Wasting Time
/We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. -Tom Robbins
Performance Ratings Don’t Tell Us What You Think They Do
/A significant body of research has demonstrated that each of us is a disturbingly unreliable rater of other people’s performance. The effect that ruins our ability to rate others has a name: the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect, which tells us that my rating of you on a quality such as “potential” is driven not by who you are, but instead by my own idiosyncrasies—how I define “potential,” how much of it I think I have, how tough a rater I usually am. This effect is resilient — no amount of training seems able to lessen it. And it is large — on average, 61% of my rating of you is a reflection of me. In other words, when I rate you, on anything, my rating reveals to the world far more about me than it does about you.
16 Articles about AI & Ethics
/How to Implement AI — Responsibly – Harvard Business Review
AI Can Re-Create Your Loved Ones After They Die. Is That Good or Bad? – Wall Street Journal
Should AI Join Medical Ethics Committees? Ethicist Says Not Yet – Medscape
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ VFX lead argues that the movie uses AI ethically – Polygon
When AI Gets It Wrong, Will It Be Held Accountable? – Rand.org
Yale Freshman Creates AI Chatbot With Answers on AI Ethics – Inside Higher Ed
The Quest for Clarity: Are Interpretable Neural Networks the Future of Ethical AI? – Toward Data Science
AI can see clearly now: Why transparency leads to ethical and fair AI systems – Silicon Angle
Whose future is it anyway? Exploring the ethical battlegrounds of AI – Kem Laurin
AI’s Most Pressing Ethics Problem – Columbia Journalism Institute
Your newsroom needs an AI ethics policy. Start here. – Poynter
Google finds AI agents pose fresh ethical challenges - Axios
How GenAI can enhance your legal work without compromising ethics – Reuters Legal
A physicists’ guide to the ethics of artificial intelligence – Symmetry Magazine
Newsrooms Are Already Using AI, But Ethical Considerations Are Uneven, AP Finds – Forbes
How Adobe manages AI ethics concerns while fostering creativity - ZDnet
Spice in the recipe
/Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. -Dr. Seuss
People prefer the Illusion
/People do not want truth; they prefer to believe what makes them happy. People prefer to live in illusions, even though the illusion masks the truth that their condition is one of despair, and they regard anyone who wishes to give them the truth about the condition as their enemy. -C. Stephen Evans