Creating Candidates for Cults

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Cults do not destroy families as much as stuck-togetherness attitudes in families create candidates for cults. When parents focus on societal influence it actually serves to increase their anxiety even though it helps them avoid personal responsibility. On the other hand, parents who accept the fact that their children are less likely to be influenced by other systems to the extent that they are comfortable in their own, while they might find the idea more painful at first, are given an a means of approaching the problem that is quite within their power, and it can, in turn, contribute to their own self-respect.

Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation

8 Great Quotes about AI & Humanity

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Generative AI is currently very good at replicating parts of software programs that have been written many times before. But what if you want to create something new? This is where smart human coders will still be needed. - BusinessInsider

I think the rise of AI is going to result more in-person sales. If everyone can do it, people will not listen or read any emails or anything like that they just stop because it’s all generated. It means every email they got is amazing. They won’t believe any of it unless somebody looks them in the eye and says, ‘I’m a real person and here’s why this is true.’ - Ronan Perceval CEO of Phorest

Given that we don’t know what the lay of the land is going to be in five, ten years there are two crucial things for publishers to focus on: what do we do that’s irreplaceable? What do we do that a machine can’t do? - Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker 

Studies this year of ChatGPT in legal analysis and white-collar writing chores have found that the bot helps lower-performing people more than it does the most skilled. On a task that required reasoning based on evidence, however, ChatGPT was not helpful at all. Here, ChatGPT lulled employees into trusting it too much. Unaided humans had the correct answer 85 percent of the time. People who used ChatGPT without training scored just over 70 percent. Those who had been trained did even worse, getting the answer only 60 percent of the time. In interviews conducted after the experiment, “people told us they neglected to check because it’s so polished, it looks so right.’ - David Berreby writing in the New York Times

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

As machines like A.I. eliminate routine tasks what gets left behind are the human skills we deem soft. - Jane Thier writing in Fortune

While AI is very powerful at human level or even superhuman level for many tasks, there are many other things where humans continue to have a big advantage, and that's going to continue to be true for quite some time. - Kate Whiting writing in WeForum

“Prompting AI systems is no different than being an effective communicator with other humans. The same principles apply in both cases. This makes me bullish on reading, writing, and speaking as the 3 underlying skills that really matter in 2024.”  - An Open AI employee Tweet

Gratitude and Kindness

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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

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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

Let go of those who are already gone

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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

How We See Ourselves

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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

Disorientation

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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

Teaching with AI: Assignment Tips

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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)

The Web Almost Killed Me

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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

13 Great Quotes about AI & Students

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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