Gratitude and Kindness

A driver gives way to you at a place where there is no clear priority; you don’t acknowledge him. A fellow pedestrian steps into the road for you, or holds a door; you breeze on by. On holiday, you give your smallest and most worthless coins to the woman who has carefully cleaned your room. The stroppy teenager rails at the parent who scraped and saved for her. Commuters swarming in a London street never once raise their eyes to notice the splendour of a winter dawn.

No blood is spilt in any of these cases. Nothing is stolen. No one’s life is ruined. The prick of pain passes soon enough. Yet a tiny seed of ice has been sown, formed of arrogance on one side and, on the other, a sense of worthlessness. That ice spreads, and creeps into the veins and crevices of life: so that on the next occasion the door is not held, the room is cleaned carelessly, the car does not give way and the e-mail is never sent. As the opportunity for kindness is ignored, so the chance of reciprocal kindness, in the form of thanks, never comes to be. What is never given can never be repaid.

Ingratitude is the frost that nips the flower even as it opens, that shrivels the generous apple on the branch, that freezes the fountain in mid-flow and numbs the hand, even in the very act of giving. It is a sin of silence, absence and omission, as winter’s sin is a lack of light; a sin against charity, which otherwise warms the heart and, in the truest sense, makes the world turn.

Ann Wroe, writing in Intelligent Life

Chocolate Cake Resistance

It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.

Imagine that you are asked to retain a list of seven digits for a minute or two. You are told that remembering the digits is your top priority. While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people. Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts.

The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

23 Articles about AI & Healthcare

Scientists to use AI to analyse 1.6m brain scans to develop tool predicting dementia risk – The Guardian

How AI Could Help Reduce Inequities in Health Care – Harvard Business Review

5 Challenges of AI in Healthcare – Unite AI 

California nurses protest ‘untested’ AI as it proliferates in health care – Health Care Journalism

What accelerates brain ageing? This AI ‘brain clock’ points to answers - Nature

How AI and accelerated computing are transforming drug discovery – Financial Times

How Often Do LLMs Hallucinate When Producing Medical Summaries? -Medcity News

The testing of AI in medicine is a mess. Here’s how it should be done - Nature

A.L.S. Stole His Voice. A.I. Retrieved It. – New York Times

AI tool outperforms existing x-ray structure methods - Chemistry World

A robot just performed fully autonomous surgery on a live patient for the first time – BRG 

Artificial intelligence in scientific medical writing: Legitimate and deceptive uses and ethical concerns – Science Direct  

University of Florida researchers say they have developed a machine learning tool that can track the progression of Parkinson’s disease – Decrypt

MIT Researchers say they have developed an AI model that can accurately identify the stages of some types of breast cancer – MIT  

In Constant Battle With Insurers, Doctors Reach for a Cudgel: A.I. - New York Times 

First ‘bilingual’ brain-reading device decodes Spanish and English words -

Google Is Using A.I. to Answer Your Health Questions. Should You Trust It? - New York Times

Reconciling privacy and accuracy in AI for medical imaging – Nature

How A.I. Is Revolutionizing Drug Development - New York Times

OpenAI and Arianna Huffington are working together on an ‘AI health coach’ – The Verge

End-of-life decisions are difficult and distressing. Could AI help? – MIT Tech Review

States are writing their own rules for AI in health care  - Axios

The testing of AI in medicine is a mess. Here’s how it should be done - Nature

Let go of those who are already gone

The sad truth is that there are some people who will only be there for you as long as you have something they need. When you no longer serve a purpose to them, they will leave. We rarely lose friends and lovers, we just gradually figure out who our real ones are. So when people walk away from you, let them go. Your destiny is never tied to anyone who leaves you. It doesn’t mean they are bad people; it just means that their part in your story is over.

Marc &  Angel Chernoff

8 Important Quotes About Ethical Issues Raised by AI

Two voice actors say an A.I. company created clones of their voices without their permission. Now they’re suing. The company denies it did anything wrong. -New York Times 

A former high school athletic director was arrested after allegedly using AI to impersonate the school principal in a recording that included racist and antisemitic comments. The principal was temporarily removed from the school, and waves of hate-filled messages circulated on social media, while the school received numerous phone calls. -CBS News 

A researcher in Japan wanted to check if chatbots could make the same moral decisions when driving as humans. His results showed that LLMs and humans have roughly the same priorities, but some showed clear deviations… -Ars Technica 

An investment firm “is designing a facial recognition system for classroom management. Multiple cameras spread throughout the room will take attendance, monitor whether students are paying attention and detect their emotional states, including whether they are bored, distracted or confused.” –Inside Higher Ed 

So-called obituary pirates are “scraping and copying funeral-home websites. They're using AI for a new and lucrative tactic of creating YouTube videos and spammy websites out of the obits, capturing search traffic for people looking for information about the recently deceased.” -Business Insider 

The latest recipient of one of Japan's most prestigious literary awards, the Akutagawa Prize, has admitted to using AI to write parts of her novel -The Byte

When I tested My AI earlier this year, I told the app that I was a teenager — but it still gave me advice on hiding alcohol and drugs from parents, as well tips for a highly age-inappropriate sexual encounter. -Washington Post 

A central question about gen AI is whether using unattributed content written entirely by a machine — rather than by a human — counts as plagiarism. -Nature

How We See Ourselves

You pay attention to the successes and failures of friends more than you do to those of strangers. You compare yourself to those who are close to you in order to judge your own worth. In other words, You know Barack Obama and Johnny Depp are successful, but you don’t use them to as a standard for your own life to the degree you do coworkers, fellow students, friends you’ve know since high school. 

(Researchers) had students list the number of people they considered friends and then asked if the subjects believed they had more friends than did their peers and more friends than the average student. Thirty-five percent of the students said they had more friends than the typical student, and 23 percent said they had fewer. This better-than-average feeling was enhanced when considering their peers- 41 percent said they had more friends ship than did the peers they considered to be their friends. Only 16 percent said they had fewer. On average, everyone things they are more popular than you, and you think you are more popular than them.

Sure, some of your faults are just too obvious, even to you but you compensate for those by inflating what you like most about you. When you compare your skills, accomplishments, and friendships with those of others, you tend to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. IF you win, you tell everyone. When it comes to being honest with yourself and those you love, you are not so smart. 

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

17 Recent Articles about AI Fakes

Microsoft Bing Copilot blames reporter for crimes he covered - The Register

AI researchers call for ‘personhood credentials’ as bots get smarter – Washington Post   

AI was responsible for the fake quotes in the Megalopolis trailer – The Verge 

Trump Promotes A.I. Images to Falsely Suggest Taylor Swift Endorsed Him – New York Times

How do AI checkers actually work? - ZDnet

Watermarking in Images Will Not Solve AI-Generated Content Abuse – Data Innovation

Trump's crowd-photo claims speed AI-driven truth decay – Axios

This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it? – The Verge

Secretaries of state urge Musk to fix AI chatbot spreading false election info – Washington Post   

AI is complicating plagiarism. How should scientists respond? – Nature

Research findings strongly argue against the use of free AI detectors to detect fake scientific images - Arxiv 

How universities spot AI cheats – and the one word that gives it away – Telegraph  

US agents shut down huge Russian AI bot farm as fears over misinformation grow – Semafor 

Hunting for AI bots? These four words could do the trick – NBC News

How to Teach Kids to Spot AI Manipulation – Ed Week

OpenAI says it’s taking a ‘deliberate approach’ to releasing tools that can detect writing from ChatGPT  - Tech Crunch 

Tom Hanks alerts fans about AI ads using his voice to sell ‘wonder drugs’: ‘Do not be fooled’ – LA Times 

How AI-generated memes are changing the 2024 election – NPR

Disorientation

The “reality’ that is left behind in all endings is not just a picture on the wall. It is a sense of which way is up and which way is down; it is a sense of which way is forward and which way is back. It is, in short, a way of orienting oneself and of moving forward into the future. In the old passage rituals, the one in transition would often be taken into unfamiliar territory, beyond the bounds of former experience, and left there for a time. All the customary signs of location would be gone, and the only remaining source of orientation would be the heavens. In such a setting and the state of mind it was meant to create, you would be (in the word’s of Robert Frost) “lost enough to find yourself.”

As with other aspects of the ending process, most of us already know disorientation. We recognize the lost, confused, don’t-know-where-I-am felling that deepens as we become disengaged, disidentified and disenchanted. The old sense of life as “going somewhere” breaks down, and we feel like shipwrecked sailors.

William Bridges, Transitions

9 Webinars This Week about Journalism, AI, Social Media, & More

Tue, Sept 3 - Solutions Journalism 101

What: This Solutions Journalism Network webinar will explore the ins and outs of solutions journalism, talk about why it’s important, explain key steps in reporting a solutions story, and share tips and resources for journalists interested in investigating how people are responding to social problems. We will also explore additional resources we have on hand for your reporting, including the Solutions Story Tracker, a database of more than 16,000 stories tagged by beat, publication, author, location, and more, a virtual heat map of what’s working around the world.

When: 9 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: xxx

More Info

Tue, Sept 3 - Introduction to AI for Nonprofits

What: Discover how AI can improve your nonprofit's website experience, from user interaction to content personalization. Learn the fundamentals of using AI for effective, data-driven marketing strategies that resonate with your audience. Explore accessible AI tools that can be easily integrated into your current website and marketing efforts.  

Who: Jon Hill Tapp Network Web Project Manager; Tareq Monuar Web Developer

When: 12 pm

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: TechSoup

More Info

Wed, Sept 4 – Social Media 102

What: Join us to learn how to: Use social media to connect with constituents. Monitor conversations to stay ahead of the curve. Get people to advocate on your behalf. Navigate social media advertising and understand when to use it.

Who: Kiersten Hill, the driving force behind Firespring’s nonprofit solutions

When: 3 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Firespring

More Info

Wed, Sept 4 - The Promise and Perils of AI in Election Coverage 

What: Two journalists with expertise in different areas of generative AI will examine the double-edged sword AI technology presents in elections — to help journalists produce more nuanced reporting or to deceive the public with fake but hyper-realistic images, videos and audio.

Who: Zach Seward, editorial director of AI initiatives for The New York Times; Loreben Tuquero, a reporter covering misinformation and generative AI for PolitiFact.

When: 5 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Society of Professional Journalists

More Info

Wed, Sept 4 - The Secrets to Capturing Attention in a Non-Linear World 

What: Research from Infillion on consumers’ attitudes toward ads and media buyers’ attitudes toward measuring attention. You’ll find out:  How attention’s role in measuring advertising success has been upended by the collapse of the traditional purchase funnel Why ads that get the most attention often aren’t the most effective Where attention metrics fit in a holistic measurement strategy and how they can inform real-time changes in media strategy.

Who: Dasha Gorin, Director of Research, Infillion; Jen Soch, Executive Director, Channel Solutions, GroupM; Marc Guldimann, CEO & founder, Adelaide

When: 1 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Ad Tech Platform Infillion

More Info

Thu, Sept 5 - Children in the News: Journalism and the Rights of the Child

What: In this webinar, panelists will offer tips for quality journalism in reporting the rights of children, talk about their stories and the challenges they faced working with young and vulnerable people.

Who: Hannah Dreier, investigative reporter for The New York Times; Aidan White, President of the Ethical Journalism Network; Hadeel Arja, the founder of Tinyhand, the winner of the Google News Initiative 2021; Ankush Kumar, a freelance content writer, researcher, and conference producer who has previously worked at the Economic Times and the Financial Express; Bhavya Dore, a Mumbai-based freelance journalist. Her work has appeared in the BBC and The Guardian; Cherian George, the editor and publisher of What’s Up, a Singapore newspaper for schoolchildren mostly aged 10-12; Nadia Azhgikhina, Director of PEN Moscow; Aidan White  President of the Ethical Journalism Network.

When: 9 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: The Fetisov Journalism Awards

More Info

Thu, Sept 5 - Case Study: How local newspaper iTromsø built a custom AI tool for story research and discovery

What: An under-the-hood session with the team behind iTromsø's Djinn, an AI-powered tool designed to streamline research and news gathering.

Who: Lars Adrian Giske is the Head of AI at the local Norwegian newspaper iTromsø. Rune Ytreberg has worked with data-driven journalism for 30 years. Since 2020 he has headed iTromsø’s data journalism lab, which uses AI to develop new editorial tools for 70 local newspapers in the Polaris Media Group in Norway.

When: 11 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Online News Association

More Info

Thu, Sept 5 - Case Study: What we can learn about AI and elections from the world’s biggest election

What: India’s Deepfakes Analysis Unit, winner of the most innovative collaboration at GlobalFact 11, has been at the forefront of addressing AI-generated misinformation — audio and video content — since its launch in March. This one-of-a-kind project offers a solution to how misinformation at scale spread through generative AI can be addressed by pooling in resources and expertise from across the globe — especially during India’s recently concluded federal election when the scale and volume of misinformation was massive. Join us to learn about the project and how the lessons learned through this collaboration can be replicated by newsrooms around the world.

Who: Oren Etzioni, Founder, TrueMedia.org; Pamposh Raina, Head, Deepfakes Analysis Unit of the Misinformation Combat Alliance; Jency Jacob, Managing Editor, Boom Live; Gautham Koorma, Computer Vision and Machine Learning Engineer, GetReal Labs

When: 12, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Online News Association

More Info

Fri, Sept 6 - Innovation for Social Change - Entrepreneurial Thinking for Nonprofits

What: –How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Inspire and Deliver Results.

Who: Leah Kral Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

When: 11 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Challey Institute, North Dakota State University

More Info

Teaching with AI: Assignment Tips

Talk through various writing scenarios with the students. 

Invite your students to have an honest discussion about these and related questions.

Split assignments into two groups: Where using AI is encouraged, and assignments where using AI can’t possibly help.

Weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.  

Assign reflection to help students understand their own thought processes, motivations for using these tools, and the impact AI has on their learning and writing.

Give them the opportunity to rewrite an essay or retake a test if they don’t do well initially (students are less likely to cheat under those conditions). 

Teach students to contest it. Students in every major will need to know how to challenge or defend the appropriateness of a given model for a given question.

We should be telling our undergraduates that good writing isn’t just about subject-verb agreement or avoiding grammatical errors—not even good academic writing. Good writing reminds us of our humanity, the humanity of others and all the ugly, beautiful ways in which we exist in the world.

(from a variety of articles about teaching & AI)

Look for Three Qualities

Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don't have the first, the other two will kill you. -Warren Buffett (Born Aug. 30, 1930)

AI Definitions: Open Source AI

Open Source AI - This is when the source code of an AI is available to the public, it can be used, modified, and improved by anyone. Closed AI means access to the code is tightly controlled by the company that produced it. The closed model gives users greater certainty as to what they are getting, but open source allows for more innovation. Open-source AI would include Stable Diffusion, Hugging Face, and Llama (created by Meta). Closed Source AI would include ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. 

More AI definitions here.

The Web Almost Killed Me

For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.  If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.

I realized I had been engaging—like most addicts—in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world.

Andrew Sullivan, I used to Be a Human Being

27 Articles from August about Data Science & AI

Experts warn U.S. falling behind in satellite imaging race: ‘We’ve gone backwards’ – Space News

Experts say the US military has to predictive tracking of orbital threats – Space News 

Chinese broadband satellites may be Beijing's flying spying censors, think tank warns – The Register

AI large language model (LLM) aboard the International Space Station – Satellite ProMe 

Sustained deep learning requires a random, non-gradient component to maintain variability and plasticity – Nature

AI Coding Assistants: 12 Do’s and Don’ts – The New Stack

AI and machine learning are among the highest research and development priorities for the DoD – Military Aerospace

A workaround for the scalability limitations of deep neural networks – Nature

SpaceX launches more than 100 satellites into orbit for both government and commercial outfits – SpaceWatch

Top Coding Skills for Data Science Professionals – Analytics Insight

Is the next frontier in generative AI transforming transformers? – VentureBeat

Using synthetic data to train foundational LLMs – Enterpriseai News 

AI Definitions: Neural Networks 

China is providing satellite intelligence for military purposes to Russia – Business Insider

Research team uses satellite data and machine learning to predict typhoon intensity - PhysOrg 

How diffusion and other tricks are making AI models smarter – The Economist

Speeding Up Your Python Code with NumPy, a Python package – KD Nuggets

10 top vector database options for similarity searches – Tech Target  

You don’t necessarily have to submit your paper to get an LLM review delivered to your inbox – Stat Modeling   

Developing Neural Network’s called KANs for greater flexibility when learning to represent data - Spectrum

AI Definitions: Machine Learning 

A ballooning number of spying technologies inside and outside Earth's atmosphere are making military maneuvers and materiel nearly impossible to hide – Axios

Comparing ChatGPT, Claude, & Gemini on various data science and analytics tasks – Toward Data Science

NTIA advocates open-source AI foundation model weights with sufficient risk mitigation frameworks in report to White House – Next Gov  

How Transformers Outperform RNNs in NLP and Why It Matters - Appinventiv

A tutorial on implementing a federated LLM approach, where an agent sends data to a cloud-based LLM, which then outputs functions and arguments – the New Stack

AI Overload: Navigating the US Intelligence Community’s Data Deluge – Global Security Review

13 Great Quotes about AI & Students

Understanding what AI can and cannot do well within the context of your course will be key as you contemplate revising your assignments and teaching.” -Hechinger Report

The University of Southern California rolled out its AI for Business major last year, a joint degree between the business and engineering schools. In its first year, the major received 713 applications from incoming freshmen for fewer than 50 spots. This year, over 1,000 students applied.  -Wall Street Journal

More than 1 in 6 bot conversations seemed to be students seeking help with their homework,” according to a review of nearly 200,000 English-language conversations by The Washington Post. “Some approached the bots like a tutor, hoping to get a better understanding of a subject area. Others just went all-in and copy-and-pasted multiple-choice questions from online courseware software and demanded the right answers. -Washington Post

Faculty will need to improve their own AI literacy. A good way to begin is to ask AI to perform assignments and projects that you typically ask your students to complete — and then try to improve the AI’s response. -Hechinger Report

Three in five college students say they are regular users of AI compared to 36 percent of instructors, according to research released in June by Tyton Partners -Inside Higher Ed

Magic School's Academic Content Generator: Enter your assignment description to receive suggestions on making it more challenging for AI chatbots, promoting higher-level thinking among students. -Magic School

Half of surveyed college students say they would be likely or extremely likely to use generative AI tools, even if they were banned by their instructor, according to research released in June by Tyton Partners. -Inside Higher Ed

What should a young person study in college? JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently said, “It almost doesn't matter because (we're) looking for smart, ethical, decent people. But I do think in business you should learn the language of business. So I think it would help to do accounting, finance, markets, something like that.” -Wall Street Journal

Nearly all college-bound high school seniors are familiar with generative artificial intelligence tools, and the vast majority of them have used those tools, according to a new survey. It found 19 out of 20 students are familiar with generative AI and 69% of college-bound students have used generative AI tools. -The National Desk

There are students who are leaning on AI too much. But it’s not pervasive. The number of students using AI to complete their schoolwork hasn’t skyrocketed in the past year. -Ed Week

If students don’t learn about how AI works, they won’t understand its limitations – and therefore how it is useful and appropriate to use and how it’s not. -The Conversation

The teachers will say, ‘Don’t use AI because it is very inaccurate and it will make up things. But then they use AI to detect AI.’ - a Houston high school senior quoted in EdWeek

A survey of students in grades 6-12, released by the nonpartisan think tank Center for Democracy & Technology, found that students with special needs are more likely than their peers to use generative AI and be disciplined for doing so. -Center for Democracy & Technology

AI discussion questions at the start of the semester

Suggested questions for teachers and professors to bring up with their classes at the start of the school year:

• What AI policies have you had in other classes?

• Are you using it and how? (talk about how you are using it)

• How could AI be ethically used in education? 

• What counts as AI-enabled plagiarism?

• How could AI be ethically used in the production of media?  

• When should students rely on AI assistance? 

• When should students not rely on AI assistance? 

Talk about transparency (perhaps show some examples of transparency statements)

Be sure to tell them about your expectations regarding the use of generative AI and when it can be used in the class.

In Pursuit of Failure

When you consider failure, it is important to distinguish between two kinds. There is the failure of giving up, turning around, and walking away. Although this failure holds a certain seductive appeal, you must not let it divert you from the true heart of failure: the triumphant defeat of all your hopes, stratagems, and efforts. This is the ultimate failure that tells you who you are. This is the failure you have had to work hard for, the failure you put everything into—failure so rich with loss and pain that, even years later, it gives you the basis from which to make yourself anew, the scar tissue that deeply confirms your aliveness. Real failure requires real effort and is its own reward.

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions

20 Articles about the business of running an AI

AI Scientists Have a Problem: AI Bots Are Reviewing Their Work ChatGPT is wreaking chaos in the field that birthed it.– Chronicle of Higher Ed 

How the Sparkles Emoji Became the Symbol of Our AI Future – Wall Street Journal

Google’s AI Search Gives Sites Dire Choice: Share Data or Die – Bloomberg  

The AI bubble has burst. Here's how we know. - Mashable 

The New A.I. Deal: Buy Everything but the Company – New York Times 

Inside the company that gathers ‘human data’ for every major AI company – Semafor

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) – 404 Media  

A CIO canceled a Microsoft AI deal. The reason should worry the entire tech industry – Business Insider  

Perplexity will soon start selling ads within AI search – Fast Company 

Meet Stability AI's Stable Video 4D, a nuanced take on AI video generation - ZDnet 

Bing’s AI redesign shoves the usual list of search results to the side – The Verge  

OpenAI starts testing prototype of new AI search tool – Axios  

Oops GPT OpenAI just announced a new search tool. Its demo already got something wrong. – The Atlantic  

Big Tech says AI is booming. Wall Street is starting to see a bubble. – Washington Post

Crisis Looms as AI Companies Rapidly Losing Access to Training Data – Futurism   

AI’s Real Hallucination Problem – The Atlantic   

Alphabet Reports 29% Jump in Profit as A.I. Efforts Begin to Pay Off – New York Times  

Google Fails to ‘Wow’ as AI Bills Mount - Wall Street Journal 

Meta Is Offering Hollywood Stars Millions for AI Voice Projects – Bloomberg

San Francisco’s AI startup boom is so big, even international founders who don’t run AI startups are relocating there to help their companies grow – Tech Crunch

Clear Writing vs Legalize

MIT cognitive scientists set out to determine why laws are written in an incomprehensible style. Lawyers don’t like it. Your average person doesn’t like it, so why does it persist? The researchers theorized that legal writers start by coming up with a main idea but then they keep finding reasons to qualify the rules, and soon the writing is overly complicated. It turns out that wasn’t it at all. When they had people try to write laws, they immediately adopted a convoluted style of legal language. It’s called the "magic spell hypothesis." The researchers say, “Just as magic spells are written with a distinctive style that sets them apart from everyday language, using legal language appears to signal a special kind of authority.” Academic writing is similar. When students are asked to write something for a class, they immediately adopt the overly-formal writing style of academics.  

More: Study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

16 Great Quotes about the Impact of AI on Jobs

On Handshake, a job-search platform for college students, the share of job descriptions that mention ChatGPT and other generative-AI tools has tripled in the past year. While about one-quarter of those roles are tech-related, 16% are in marketing and 12% are in art and media. - Wall Street Journal

LinkedIn data shows that 59% of hiring managers wouldn’t hire someone without AI literacy skills. Professionals can no longer afford to ignore AI. -Fast Company

Valerie Capers Workman, chief talent engagement officer at Handshake, said generative AI is the new Microsoft Office. “The skill set will be ubiquitous 10 years from now, but in the next two to five years, it’s going to be a major asset in getting recruited,” she said. -Wall Street Journal

A Japanese mega-conglomerate says it's using AI to build what one of its designers called a "mental shield" that manipulates angry customers' voices so that call center employees don't have to deal with drama. Softbank insists it won't change customers' words, but instead will do things like make a shrill, angry voice lower, to become less grating, or else, raise the pitch. -ArsTechnica

Some employers have started administering prompt-engineering assessments, which evaluate how well you can instruct generative-AI models to complete a task, during the hiring process. -Wall Street Journal

The Stanford AI Index Report talks about how AI is associated with more productive workers, with work of higher quality, and with workers that are able to get work done in less time. There’s also data that suggests companies that integrate AI see tangible revenue increases and tangible cost decreases. -Big Think

AI has become such an inherent part of the copywriting process that many writers now add personal ‘AI policies’ to their professional websites to explain how they use the technology. They will forgo AI for those who prefer it – but you can expect to pay more. The extra time and mental energy required means AI-free projects come with a higher price tag. -BBC

Freelance jobs that require basic writing, coding or translation are disappearing across postings on job board Upwork. The number of freelance jobs posted on platforms, in the areas in which generative AI excels, have dropped by as much as 21%. -Wall Street Journal

Certain sectors are expected to experience growth due to AI advancements, particularly in healthcare and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. However, the majority of job impacts will be concentrated in four main categories… -India Today

Job seekers are using AI to craft cover letters and résumés in seconds, and deploying new automated bots to robo-apply for hundreds of jobs in just a few clicks. In response, companies are deploying more bots of their own to sort through the oceans of applications. The result: a bot versus bot war -Wall Street Journal

Microsoft released its annual Work Trend Index in partnership with LinkedIn, surveying 31,000 people. The report suggests 66% of business leaders wouldn't hire someone without AI skills, and 71% of leaders would prefer to hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without them. -ZD Net

You're not going to be replaced by AI; you're going to be replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI. -Abran Maldonado, community liaison for OpenAI

Which types of positions are being replaced by AI the fastest? In the past two years, “the number of writing jobs declined 33%.” Meanwhile, “Video editing/production jobs are up 39%, graphic design jobs are up 8% & Web design jobs are up 10 percent." -Inc. Magazine

For years, people working in warehouses or fast food restaurants worried that automation could eliminate their jobs. But new research suggests that generative A.I. will have its biggest impact on white-collar workers with high-paying jobs in industries like banking and tech. -New York Times

A recent survey found 4 out of 10 employers are actively looking for people with AI development qualifications—and they would be willing to “hike pay levels for AI-skilled workers across business functions” with salaries potentially rising by an average of 35-43%. -Higher Ed Dive

When it comes to using ChatGPT at work, some business leaders believe that soft skills will be crucial in the age of AI. Earlier this month, Aneesh Raman, a vice president at LinkedIn, said that communication, creativity, and flexibility are skills that will set employees apart in the workforce as opposed to technical skills like coding. Perhaps doubling down on what makes you human may be what saves you from being replaced by AI. -Business Insider