It Will Consume You
/If you do not oppose legalism, you will be consumed by it. Chuck Swindoll
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
A Different Drummer
/If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away. -Henry David Thoreau (born July 12, 1817)
14 Articles about How Companies are using AI
/Stanford report: How AI is actually transforming the business world – Big Think
AI Business Survey: Four Themes Emerging - Bain
How One Company Is Using AI To Transform Manufacturing – Forbes
Businesses are rushing to use generative AI. Now comes the messy part. – Business Insider
Get Ready for More AI Mania This Earnings Season - Wall Street Journal
Managing the risks around generative AI – McKinsey
How Businesses Can Figure Out The ROI On AI – Forbes
German Companies Bet on AI But Payoff Could Be Years Away – Wall Street Journal
4 Types of Gen AI Risk and How to Mitigate Them – Harvard Business Review
PayPal Mafia’s David Sacks on his new AI-powered work chat app rivaling Slack – Semafor
AI Is Driving ‘the Next Industrial Revolution.’ Wall Street Is Cashing In. - Wall Street Journal
Janet Yellen warns AI in finance poses ‘significant risks’ – KTVZ
How Generative AI is Changing the Global South’s IT Services Sector – Center for Data Innovation
Can A.I. Answer the Needs of Smaller Businesses? Some Push to Find Out. – New York Times
The End of Life
/Happiness is not the end of life: Character is. –Henry Ward Beech
11 Articles about the History of AI
/A brief history of AI: how we got here and where we are going – The Conversation
History of AI (video) – Voice of America
What is the history of artificial intelligence? – Tableau
The History of Artificial Intelligence – Harvard
A Short History of Artificial Intelligence – Every
History of Generative Artificial Intelligence projects and services – GitHub
A Brief History of Large Language Models – DataVersity
8 Key Moments in the Development of A.I. – New York Times
The Secret History of AI, and a Hint at What’s Next – Wall Street Journal
History and evolution of machine learning: A timeline – TechTarget
A Brief History of AI – Life Hacker
Fulfilling Our Purpose
/God creates each person as an individual and in effect says to each human being: “Become yourself, be the person I made you to be.” The person who is conscious that he lives “before God” thus gains the possibility of an identity that is not exhausted by human relations. Such a person is not forced simply to live like “the others,” but has the potential to say, “I need to live my life this way, since it is what God desires for me, even if it means that I have to break with my society’s accepted ways of doing things.”
C. Steven Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction
Go!
/Go be the next version of you. -Bob Goff
AI-created Video vs Human-made Video
/Researchers recently tested how audiences liked three types of video: human-made, partly automated and fully automated video. The human-made video did best with audiences, but only slightly better than the partly AI video. Both did much better than the fully AI-made video. The researchers think this supports the use of the hybrid form over fully automated since "audiences like their videos to have a human touch." A key part of making this work, I believe, will be identifying what the audience perceives as indicating a piece of media is AI or human-made. For instance, the researchers note that the audience associated nat sound with video that was (at least partly) human-created. This may translate to other forms of media creation as well. The study is published here and read more about it here.
Stephen Goforth
Learning Wisdom
/Taking our cue from the machinery and the data that dominate our world, we usually view knowledge as something that accumulates piecemeal over time. You start out with a little, and then you gradually pick up more and more. It’s like possessions: they pile up over time. But passive accumulation isn’t the way that you learn the most important things that you know about the world. First you are immersed in the knowledge, then you get distance from it (and even deny it) and then you return to a new relation with it.
William Bridges, The Way of Transition
The Impact of AI on Creativity in a Dozen Recent Articles
/AI category debuts at Asia’s largest genre film festival – Semafor
Why video journalism is not ready to ditch its editors because of AI – Journalism.co
The deluge of bonkers AI art is literally surreal – Washington Post
OpenAI CTO: AI Could Kill Some Creative Jobs That Maybe Shouldn't Exist Anyway - PCMag
UMG Offers Voice-Clone Tech to Artists With SoundLabs Partnership – Rolling Stone
Humans VS AI: Who’s Better at Designing? – Medium
AI vs Designer: Who’s better at pairing fonts? - Better Web Type
Sentient design: AI and the next chapter of UX – Big Medium
Record labels sue two AI startups for copyright infringement – Axios
Facebook Is Already Mistakenly Tagging Real Photos as "Made With AI" – Futurism
All-AI Ad From Toys ‘R’ Us Inspires Debate Over the Future of Marketing – Wall Street Journal
Tool preventing AI mimicry cracked; artists wonder what’s next – Ars Technica
10 Webinars This Week: Journalism, AI, Fake News, & More
/Mon, July 8- Media Literacy Practices with Resilience
What: How various visual expression techniques can be used in media literacy education.
Who: Maria Leonida, film director and media tutor. She is also Co-founder and Director of Karpos, an NGO focusing on media literacy and running European projects.
When: 12 noon, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Media Education Lab
Tue, July 9 - Journalist safety covering the election: protests, policing and crowds
What: This training equips journalists with knowledge to safely cover election-related protests, civil unrest, and crowded events. The training will focus on physical safety and include information on situational awareness, assessing risk, dealing with aggression, police tactics, personal protective equipment, and protest management weaponry.
Who: Lucy Westcott, director of CPJ’s Emergencies Department; Colin Pereira, CPJ’s journalist safety specialist.
When: 12 noon, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Committee to Protect Journalists, Pen America, International Women's Media Foundation
Tue, July 9 - AI and Verification, Fact-checking, Copyright and Media Law
What: In this webinar, we will look at the types of content you need to be on the lookout for in your newsroom, including deepfake and AI-manipulated images, audio and video and methods and tools you can use to verify and fact-check multimedia. The session will also explore copyright and media law implications of using AI content.
Who: Sam Gregory is the Executive Director of WITNESS, a global organisation that helps people to use video and technology to defend and protect human rights; Grant McAvaney is the Head of Litigation at News Corp Australia; Antonia Rosen is currently legal counsel at News Corp Australia (NCA), one of Australia’s largest media organisations.
When: 8 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Walkley Foundation
Tue, July 9 - Video Production on a Shoestring Budget
What: Learn how to improve your audio and video quality by optimizing your recording workflow and making smart equipment purchases that won’t break your budget, whatever it may be. See exactly which pieces of equipment are critical for professional quality results and what settings you should focus on to get the most out of your equipment.
Who: William Everhart, Lead Developer, Artisan Learning
When: 12 noon, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Training Magazine Network
Tue, July 9 - How Latin America Connects to Your Story: Investigating the Region’s Global Reach of Illicit Money, Illegal Mining, Drug Trafficking, and Environmental Destruction
What: This session will delve into stories about deforestation, drugs, and mining, providing tips and tools to pursue groundbreaking investigations. From transnational criminal networks to financial maneuvers used to conceal illicit gains, the webinar will highlight recent investigations that have tracked illegally mined gold from the Amazon to India, cocaine from Colombia to European ports, and unmasked the hidden owners of offshore companies based in Panama and other Latin American countries.
Who: Bianca Padró Ocasio, an independent journalist working in both the US and Peru; Joseph Poliszuk, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Armando.info, a trailblazing news website dedicated to investigative journalism; Lilia Saúl is an investigative reporter with OCCRP, based in Mexico; Luiz Fernando Toledo is a Brazilian investigative and data journalist.
When: 11 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Global Investigative Journalism Network
Wed, July 10 - How GenAI Can Help News Media Companies Go Farther and Faster
What: How generative AI can help newsrooms deliver important, impactful work. Use cases will cover automated hyper-local, personalised newsletters, newsroom assistants, and chatbots.
Who: Nadia Kohler, Head of the AI Lab at Tamedia, Angélica (Momi) Peralta Ramos, Data Team Leader at La Nación,Sonali Verma, INMA's Generative AI Initiative lead.
When: 10 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: International News Media Association
Wed, July 10 - Why do we fall for misinformation?
What: Learn about several research-based strategies that can supplement and expand on your existing information literacy approaches with patrons. Researchers from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) will unpack how online information environments influence what we see and believe online. Come explore opportunities to increase capacity for public library staff and community members to address and navigate problematic information.
Who: Jevin West, Co-Founder, Center for an Informed Public and Associate Professor, University of Washington Information School; Chris Coward, Co-Founder, Center for an Informed Public and Senior Principal Research Scientist, University of Washington Information School; Kate Lapinski, Director of Adult Services, Chicago Public Library.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsors: Institute of Museum and Library Services, Center for an Informed Public
Thu, July 11 - Digital Trends for Newsrooms in 2024
What: 2024 is almost halfway over—do you feel like you're still getting caught up on what's new and changing in digital news? In this session, we'll cover a variety of topics—from AI and ChatGPT to Twitter/X and SEO—to help you get up to speed on the latest trends in digital journalism.
Who: Tyson Bird is the Digital Product Manager for Texas Highways magazine.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: $35
Sponsor: Online Media Campus
Thu, July 11 - Artificial Intelligence for Journalists with AI expert and digital guru Sree Sreenivasan
Who: Sree Sreenivasan has been teaching generative AI workshops worldwide for the past year. He was a full-time journalism professor at Columbia University for 20+ years and served as the chief digital officer at Columbia. He is the 2024 president of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), which he co-founded in 1994.
When: 7 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Society of Professional Journalists
Thu, July 11 - FUNdamentals of Ethical Marketing: Strategies for Reaching Older Adults
What: Senior staff from the ANA Center for Ethical Marketing will highlight relevant guidelines from the soon to be released ANA Ethical Code of Best Practices. They will also share insights on prevalent frauds targeting older adults and provide tips to identify, prevent, and report scams.
Who: Senny Boone SVP, ANA Center for Ethical Marketing; Lisa Brown Shosteck Consulting Director, ANA Center for Ethical Marketing ANA; Jessica Prell, AARP Fraud Watch Network
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Association of National Advertisers
The experiment that got out of control
/Philip Zimbardo is one of the most controversial figures in psychology, said Katie Kilkenny in Pacific Standard. In 1971, the Stanford professor conducted a now notorious psychological experiment that placed 24 student volunteers as prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. The experiment quickly spun out of control, as the student guards became increasingly sadistic toward their prisoners and Zimbardo—who acted as prison superintendent—was accused of subjecting his volunteers to psychological torture. Four decades on, Zimbardo stands by his study—if only because it taught the world that anyone can be seduced by evil under the right circumstances. “[We like to think] our personality is relatively fixed, we are who we are, that we are not influenced by things around us,” says Zimbardo, 82. “This study says no, that might be true sometimes, but other times when you’re put in an unfamiliar situation where you don’t have any guidelines or rules that contain who you are, you could be anything.” He insists we’ve all witnessed this phenomenon: “Somebody you know suddenly begins to change because they’ve been given a certain role or authority.” Zimbardo admits that he, too, was corrupted by his prison role. “I lost my sense of compassion,” he says. “I totally lost that.”
Exhaustion
/Exhaustion is treated as a status symbol.
14 Recent Articles about AI Deepfakes
/Why the Pentagon is looking to speedily buy deepfake-detection technology – Defense Scoop
Forget deepfake videos. Text and voice are this election’s true AI threat. – The Hill
Deepfakes Are Evolving. This Company Wants to Catch Them All – Wired
Fake AI-generated video of Justin Timberlake drinking beer shocks fans: ‘Where do we go from here?’ – NY Post
Political deepfakes top list of malicious AI use, DeepMind finds – Financial Times
A.I. Is Getting Better Fast. Can You Tell What’s Real Now? – New York Times
The Near Future of Deepfakes Just Got Way Clearer – The Atlantic
Deepfakes and the First Amendment: Are Deepfakes Illegal? – Freedom Forum
AI Fake Nudes Are Wreaking Havoc at Schools Across the Country – Wall Street Journal
‘I Felt Shameful and Fearful’: Teen Who Saw AI Fake Nudes of Herself Speaks Out - Wall Street Journal
How to spot generative AI ‘hallucinations’ and prevent them – ReadWrite
Few AI deepfakes identified in EU elections, Microsoft president says – Reuters
The danger of deepfakes is not what you think – Financial Times
17 Articles about Running an AI Company
/Google falling short of important climate target, cites electricity needs of AI – Associated Press
Tech Industry Wants to Lock Up Nuclear Power for AI – Wall Street Journal
OpenAI and Microsoft face a new lawsuit from CIR – MSN
Amazon, Built by Retail, Invests in Its AI Future - Wall Street Journal
Is 2026 The Year AI Runs Out of Training Data? - Techopedia
A year in the life of San Francisco’s AI start-ups fueling the boom - Washington Post
The Big AI Question: Are You Ready to Pay for It? -
Raspberry Pi—creator of tiny computers used for robotics goes public - Tech Crunch
Big Tech keeps spending billions on AI. There’s no end in sight. - The Washington Post
Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames "AI Wave" – Futurism
Inside Google DeepMind’s effort to understand its own creations – Semafor
OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance – New York Times
Stanford University team apologises over claims they copied Chinese project for AI model - South China Morning Post
OpenAI, Google DeepMind's current and former employees warn about AI risks – Reuters
Google’s DeepMind leads European scoreboard in AI citations – Science Business
Researchers made an algorithm that can tell when AI is hallucinating – BGR
France is an AI hub, but a wrinkle in tax policy is holding it back - Semafor
The Residue of the Relationship
/When individual members leave a family, whether through death, marriage, relocation, or a cutoff, the system will generally be quick to replace the person who is lost. Whoever the replacement is, new child or new spouse, new in-law or new boarder, clergyman or clergy woman, in the same generation or the next, he or she will replace in all the family triangles the person who has left. They will have grafted onto them all the expectations associated with the predecessor, and the un-worked-out problems that may have contributed to the predecessor’s leaving (or becoming symptomatic) are likely to resurface in the new relationships. Replacement is a function of grief, and grief is always proportional to the un-worked-out residue of the relationship that was lost.
Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation
What to let go of
/What it is time to let go of is not so much the relationship or the job itself, but rather the hopes, fears, dreams, and beliefs that we have attached to them. If you let go only of the job or the relationship, you’ll just find another one and attach the same hopes, fears, dreams and beliefs to it. A loss is best seen as the cue that it is time to let go of the inner thing.
William Bridges, The Way of Transition
Where AI Might Take Journalism
/Imagine having a written news story converted into a video by AI. The AI would not be taking away from the journalism but providing more options to access the information. Perhaps the story can be adjusted based on preferences. For instance, perhaps the reader doesn’t know much about economics and wants the material delivered in simple economic terms. Or the reader might want more detail in a story related to their field. AI would be used to adjust the complexity of the delivery. This may be the kind of journalism we are headed toward.
27 Articles about AI & Data Science from June 2024
/The best Large Language Models (LLMs) for coding in 2024
Air Force leaders appear to be having second thoughts on the “Next-Generation Air Dominance
Has the era of Graph Foundation Models already begun?
Neural Algorithmic Reasoning for Transformers: The TransNAR Framework
A short and simple definition of “big data”
NGA launches new training to help personnel adopt AI responsibly
China’s Geespace deploys a satellite constellation in the Middle East
Recurrent quantum embedding neural network and its application in vulnerability detection
Could data science soon face a reproducibility crisis?
Meta on training its large language models at scale
AI Definitions: Synthetic Data
5 Free University Courses to Learn Coding for Data Science
New technique can automate data curation for self-supervised pre-training of AI datasets
AI company launches coding assistant trained on over 80 programming languages
How data scientists can leverage ChatGPT
8 new data science roles created by AI
As long as you can
/Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can. -John Wesley (born June 28, 1703)