14 Recent Articles about Running an AI Company

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The Limits of Science

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There is this strain, especially among popular communicators of science, that if you don’t look at the world through a scientific lens, then what’s the point; you’re just fooling yourself; you’re living in a world of delusions.  

But my pushback to that is, I’m a professional scientist; the vast majority of decisions that I make in my everyday life are not based on the scientific method. When I’m trying to pick what to have for dinner tonight, or who to fall in love with, I’m not using the scientific method, I’m just following my gut —literally when it comes to dinner. I’m just using other tools than the scientific method to arrive at conclusions and decisions.

There are many, many questions that science does not have a solid answer on, and may not ever have a solid answer on. And it’s perfectly legitimate for people to turn to other modes of inquiry and investigation into this beautiful, messy world that we live in, to seek answers and comfort from that.

Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter quoted in Undark

23 Recent Articles about Teaching & AI

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Survey: How Are Profs, Staff Using AI? – Inside Higher Ed 

What teachers call AI cheating, leaders in the workforce might call progress – Hechinger Report

Teachers Use AI to Grade Student Work. It’s Harsher Than They Are. Teachers Use AI to Grade Student Work. It’s Harsher Than They Are. – Wall Street Journal

AI can't replace teaching but it can make it better – Wired

AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught – IEEE 

What's next with AI in higher education? – Phys.org

Morehouse College is Using AI assistants – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Can I Use A.I. to Grade My Students’ Papers? – New York Times

Academic Success Tip: Infusing AI into Curricular Offerings – Inside Higher Ed 

Google and MIT launch a free generative AI course for teachers – Zdnet  

This AI Tool Cut One Teacher's Grading Time in Half. How It Works – Ed Week  

California teachers are using AI to grade papers. Who’s grading the AI? – Cal Matters

Making Progress Against ChatGPT - Inside Higher Ed

A quarter of U.S. teachers say AI tools do more harm than good in K-12 education – Pew Research

How two professors harnessed generative AI to teach students to be better writers – Fast Company

AI, online courses divide students, faculty, administrators – Inside Higher Ed

Professors Ask: Are We Just Grading Robots? Some are riding the AI wave. Others feel like they’re drowning. –Chronicle of Higher Ed

How AI Is Changing The Teaching Profession Forever – Forbes

How a computer science professor is using AI in her classroom – UAB  

Are You Ready To Use AI In Your Teaching? – Forbes

Survey: How Are Profs, Staff Using AI? – Inside Higher Ed 

Why AI Won’t Replace Teachers As Motivators – Forbes

How to Teach Kids to Spot AI Manipulation – Ed Week

The Line

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“The line separating good and evil passes, not through states, nor between classes nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart." -Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 

Solzhenitsyn endured many years in a Russian Gulag (labor camp) and could write that statement with conviction. Many men did not survive the terrible weather and the harsh treatment in the Gulag.

Solzhenitsyn was dying while interned — until a fellow prisoner showed him unexpected kindness, changing his attitude and refreshing his spirit. He survived to become one of Russia's most well-read and revered writers

Stephen Goforth

Time Alone

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Find a regular time and place to be alone. People in transition are often still involved in activities and relationships that continue to bombard them with cues irrelevant to their emerging needs. Because a person is likely to feel lonely in such a situation, the temptation is to seek more and better contact with others; but the real need is for a genuine sort of aloneness in which inner signals can make themselves heard. Doing housework after the kids leave for school or paperwork with the office door shut are not being alone in the sense I am talking about.

The old passage rituals provide the person with this experience of deep aloneness, often in a wilderness setting. (Interestingly, the Hebrew word for the “wilderness” in which Jesus, Moses, and Buddha spent time during critical periods of their lives is the same word that means ‘sanctuary.” This unmappable “nowhere” was also, as several of these heroes were explicitly told, holy ground.) Traditionally, time spent in such “sanctuaries” was a continuous period; but you many have to plan your time to accommodate your own life situation. One person manages that getting up every morning forty-five minutes ahead of the rest of the family and sitting quietly in the living room with a cup of coffee. Another jogs regularly after work for a half an hour. Another plays ocean sounds and temple bells on his car stereo whenever he drives along. Still another has cleaned out a little storage room off the upstairs hall and sits quietly alone in there for an hour after supper.

William Bridges, Transitions

21 Recent Articles about AI & Legal Issues

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YouTube will use AI to snip copyrighted music and not silence your whole video – Tech Radar

Three senators introduce bill to protect artists and journalists from unauthorized AI use – Engadget

Chevron’s downfall highlights need for clear artificial intelligence laws - FedScoop 

The AI Shakeup: New Tech Innovations and the Future of Corporate Law – JD Supra

Decoding US Copyright Law and Fair Use for Generative AI Legal Cases – Medium

Two 80-something journalists tried ChatGPT. Then, they sued to protect the ‘written word’ – Associated Press  

Colorado’s Landmark AI Act: What Companies Need To Know – Skadden

Record labels sue two AI startups for copyright infringement – Axios

Deepfakes and the First Amendment: Are Deepfakes Illegal? – Freedom Forum

What Do You Do When A.I. Takes Your Voice? – New York Times

AI Legal Tools Could Be Too Pricey For Those Most In Need – Law360

Drake threatened with lawsuit over diss track featuring AI Tupac – The Verge

AI is creating fake legal cases and making its way into real courtrooms, with disastrous results – The Conversation

Generative AI For Legal Professionals: What To Know And What To Do Right Now – Above the Law 

Gen AI Shows Promise — And Peril — For Pro Se Litigants - Law360 

AI hustlers stole women’s faces to put in ads. The law can’t help them. – The Washington Post

 Generative AI Is Challenging a 234-Year-Old Law – The Atlantic

George Carlin’s estate settles lawsuit over AI comedy special – Washington Post

How GenAI can enhance your legal work without compromising ethics – Reuters Legal

Calif.'s Top Judge Launches Task Force To Probe AI Uses - Law360

How Dow Jones is building a framework to tackle AI copyright challenges – Journalism.co

The Law of Priorities

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The most remarkable aspect about John Wooden--and the most telling about his ability to focus on his priorities--is that he never scouted opposing teams. Instead, he focused on getting his players to reach their potential. And he addressed those things through practice and personal interaction with the players. It was never his goal to win championships or even to be the other team. His desire was to get each person to play to his potential and to put the best possible team on the floor. And, of course, Wooden’s results were incredible. In more than 40 years of coaching, he had only one losing season--his first. And he led his UCLA teams to four undefeated seasons and a record 10 in NCAA championships. No other college team is ever come close.

John Maxwell, The 21 irrefutable laws of leadership

14 Articles about How Companies are using AI

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11 Articles about the History of AI

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Fulfilling Our Purpose

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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

AI-created Video vs Human-made Video

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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

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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

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The experiment that got out of control

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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.”

The Week Magazine, August 7, 2015