26 Articles about the Dangers of AI

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Justice Department Pushes Companies to Consider AI Risks - Wall Street Journal

Could AI Lead to the Escalation of Conflict? PRC Scholars Think So – Lawfare Media 

Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court? – Associated Press  

Will A.I. Ruin the Planet or Save the Planet? – New York Times 

How Experts in China and the United Kingdom View AI Risks and Collaboration – Data Innovation  

A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces - Washington Post

Why AI Risks Are Keeping Board Members Up at Night – Wall Street Journal  

Many safety evaluations for AI models have significant limitations – Tech Crunch 

There’s no way for humanity to win an AI arms race – Washington Post  

Using AI to write a fan letter – NPR

Can machine-learning algorithms distinguish truth from falsehood? – The Atlantic

A.I.’s Insatiable Appetite for Energy – New York Times  

Nicolas Cage Says He’s Terrified AI Will "Steal" His Body – Futurism 

Researcher Studying Married Men With AI Girlfriends – futurism  

A Hacker Stole OpenAI Secrets, Raising Fears That China Could, Too – New York Times

AI is not a magic wand – it has built-in problems that are difficult to fix and can be dangerous – The Conversation

First Came ‘Spam.’ Now, With A.I., We’ve Got ‘Slop’ - New York Times

AI start-up sees thousands of vulnerabilities in popular tools – Washington Post 

AI Is Helping Scammers Outsmart You—and Your Bank - Wall Street Journal

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution. - Washington Post 

AI boyfriends from Replika and Nomi are attracting more women – Axios

Opinion: A.I.’s Benefits Outweigh the Risks - New York Times

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

A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces - Washington Post  

AI's Trust Problem – Harvard Business Review  

U.S. Army soldier charged with using AI to create child sexual abuse images – Washington Post

A student built a fusion reactor at home in just 4 weeks using $2,000 and AI - BGR

AI Definitions: Perplexity AI

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Perplexity AI - A good research option among the generative AI tools, it acts like a search engine but includes results from the web (unlike ChatGPT). Automatically shows where the information came from, so it’s more reliable than ChatGPT. Users can specify where they want the information to be drawn from among a few categories such as academic sources or YouTube. Users can also upload documents as sources and ask it to rewrite prompts. It suggests follow-up questions you might not have considered. Less useful for creative writing. In tests, it was better at summarizing passages, providing information on current events and do coding better than other chatbots. Unmatched speed and accuracy in processing millions of data makes it very useful to data scientists for advanced predictive models. Free. Video tutorial here.

More AI definitions here.

18 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

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Do AI models produce more original ideas than researchers? - Nature

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats: A Comprehensive SWOT Analysis of AI and Human Expertise in Peer Review – Scholarly Kitchen

How Are AI Chatbots Changing Scientific Publishing? – Science Friday

New academic AI guidelines aim to curb research misconduct – Global Times

Generative AI-assisted Peer Review in Medical Publications: Opportunities Or Trap – JRIM Publications

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: preempting evidence manipulation – Harvard

AI Editing: Are We There Yet? - Science Editor – Science Editor  

AI tool claims 94% accuracy in telling apart fake from real research papers – Deccan Herald  

AI firms must play fair when they use academic data in training – Nature

AI Scientists Have a Problem: AI Bots Are Reviewing Their Work ChatGPT – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

A list of more than 500 papers with clear evidence of generative AI use - Academ-AI

Is AI my co-author? The ethics of using artificial intelligence in scientific publishing – Taylor & Francis Online 

Is ChatGPT a Reliable Ghostwriter? – The Journal of Nuclear Medicine

A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem – The Conversation

Could science be fully automated? A team of machine-learning researchers has now tried. - Nature

How AI tools help students—and their professors—in academic research – Fast Company  

AI-Generated Junk Science Research a Growing Problem, Experts Say – PYMNTS  

Did a criminal Russian academic paper mill use AI to plagiarize a BYU professor and his student? – Deseret News

Literature and Rigid Thinking

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Want someone to get past their rigid thinking and increase their openness? Put a novel in their hands. Canadian researchers say it will help them become more sophisticated thinkers and increase their creativity.  

University of Toronto students were asked to read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. Afterward, they each filled out a survey to measure the desire for certainty and stability. The short story readers had much lower scores on that test than those who read the essays. The fiction readers showed they needed less order and had more comfort with ambiguity. This was particularly true for participants who already read regularly.  

Writing in the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers say, “Exposure to literature may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.” 

Fiction readers can more easily follow thinking styles that differ from their own—they can feel along with characters they may not even like—gaining a better understanding of the viewpoint. 

Read more about the study here. 

Stephen Goforth

AI Definitions: Supervised training

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Supervised training - In this type of AI training, the data is labeled by humans before giving it to the AI. For example, the AI might be given a database of messages labeled either “spam” or “not spam.”  This is the most common type of machine learning. Expensive and time-consuming, this type of training is used in voice recognition, language translation, and self-driving cars. Anything that takes only a second for a person to do is something that might be performed by AI through supervised training. This is why jobs that are a series of one-second tasks are at risk from it (such as security guard). Most of the present economic value of AI comes from this type of training.

More AI definitions here.

Regretting your Choices

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The choices we make are statements to the world about who we are. When all you could do was buy Lee’s or Levi’s, the jeans you bought were not a statement to the world about who you are because there wasn’t enough variety in the jeans you bought to capture the variety of human selves. When there are 2,000 kinds of jeans, or 20,000 kinds of jeans, well, now all of a sudden it is a statement to the world about who you are because there’s so much variety out there. This is true of jeans. It’s true of drinks. It’s true of music videos. It’s true of movies. That makes even trivial decisions seem important, and when that happens, people want the best. We’ve got a bunch of studies that show that large choice sets induce people to regard the choices they make as statements about the self, and that, in turn, induces them to raise their standards.If there are 200, and you buy a pair of jeans that don’t fit you as well as you hoped, now it’s hard to avoid blaming yourself. The only way to avoid regretting a decision is not making it, so I think a lot of the reason people don’t pull the trigger is that they’re so worried that when they do pull the trigger, they’ll regret a choice they made.

Barry Schwartz quoted in Vox

26 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses

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These short online courses will strengthen your journalism skills (and add a line to your resume). Most of these Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.

Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values - A five-hour, self-directed course that covers basics in five areas: newsgathering, interviewing, ethics, law and diversity.

Telling Stories with Sound - Learn the fundamentals of audio reporting and editing in this self-directed course.  

How to Spot Misinformation Online - Learn simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information.

Understanding Title IX - This course is designed to help journalists understand the applications of Title IX.

Clear, Strong Writing for Broadcast Journalism - One-hour video tutorial  

Powerful Writing: Leverage Your Video and Sound - In this one-hour video tutorial, early-career journalists will learn how to seamlessly combine audio, video and copy in captivating news packages.  

Writing for the Ear - In this five-part course, you’ll learn everything you need to write more effective audio narratives.  

Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online

News Sense: The Building Blocks of News - What makes an idea or event a news story?

Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More - Finding and fixing the most common style, grammar and punctuation errors.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Fabrication

The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use 

Ethics of Journalism Build or refine your process for making ethical decisions

Conducting Interviews that Matter   

Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals

Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Publishers - Three important areas of media law that specifically relate to gathering information and publishing online: defamation, privacy and copyright.

Freedom of Information and Your Right to Know - How to use the Freedom of Information Act, Public Records Laws and Open Meetings Laws to uphold your right to know the government’s actions.

Journalism and Trauma - How traumatic stress affects victims and how to interview trauma victims with compassion and respect. 

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust (International Edition)

What news audiences in various parts of the world don’t understand about how journalism works

Is This Legit? Digital Media Literacy 101

MediaWise’s Campus Correspondents explain the fact-checking tools and techniques that professionals use in their day-to-day work.

The On-Ramp to Media Literacy

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust 

Dignity and Precision in Language 

How to Avoid Being Sued: Defamation Law in the 21st Century

Conducting Interviews That Matter

Power of Diverse Voices: Writing Workshop for Journalists of Color

15 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators

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Real Beginnings

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When we are ready to make a new beginning, we will shortly find an opportunity. The same event could be a real new beginning in one situation and an interesting but unproductive by-way in another. The difference is whether the event is “keyed” or “coded” to that transition point, the way that electronic key cards are set to open a particular hotel room door. When the card code matches, the door opens and the whole thing happens as if it were scripted. When it doesn’t match, the event is just an event and you are still in the neutral zone. The neutral zone simply hasn’t finished with you yet.

What isn’t finished is the inner realignment and renewal of energy, both of which depend on your being immersed in the chaos of the neutral zone. It is as though the thing that you call “my life” had to return occasionally to a state of pure energy before it could take anew shape and gain new momentum.

William Bridges, Transitions

12 interesting Quotes about AI Tools and Products

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Is AI the end of search? One CDO says no but look for search to be decentralized. “If I want to know the closest pizza shop, that’s what Google is for, but if I want to understand allergen info for the shop, I need to ask the shop itself” using the shop’s AI.  - VentureBeat

Toys “R” Us has released a video ad, one of the first from a major brand that was created almost entirely by generative artificial intelligence. Sora completed 80% to 85% of the work before the agency went in to make slight corrections to the imagery. - 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

We put five of the leading bots through a series of blind tests to determine their usefulness. ChatGPT, didn’t lead the pack. Instead, lesser-known Perplexity was our champ. - Wall Street Journal

There were more images created through AI last year than there were created through lens-based technologies. - Hollywood Reporter

Humane releases widely anticipated Ai Pin—a wearable badge that doubles as an AI-powered smart device. The voice-based, always-connected Ai Pin is the first of what will almost certainly be a long line of products riding the generative AI boon. - Tech Crunch

An innovative voice-cloning technology is making it possible to hear Chief Justice Earl Warren “read” the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision on school desegregation as he did on May 17, 1954, along with oral arguments by lawyers including a future Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. - Associated Press

A new study “recruited management consultants from Boston Consulting Group.” One of the tasks was to brainstorm about a new type of shoe, sketch a persuasive business plan for making it and write about it persuasively. Some researchers had believed only humans could perform such creative tasks.  They were wrong. The consultants who used ChatGPT produced work that independent evaluators rated about 40 percent better on average. In fact, people who simply cut and pasted ChatGPT’s output were rated more highly than colleagues who blended its work with their own thoughts. And the A.I.-assisted consultants were more than 20 percent faster. - The New York Times

AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once. - Eureka Alert

A pair of studies looked at how much a person's expectations about AI impacted their likelihood to trust it and take its advice. A strong placebo effect works to shape what people think of a particular AI tool. - Axios

AI can figure out where a photo was taken. This "may help people ID the locations of old snapshots or allow biologists to conduct rapid surveys for invasive plant species—but similar tech could be used for gov. surveillance, corp. tracking or even stalking.” - NPR

A start-up called Perplexity shows what’s possible for a search engine built from scratch with artificial intelligence. Perplexity doesn’t give you back a list of links. Instead, it scours the web for you and uses AI to write a summary of what it finds. One impressive Perplexity feature is ‘Copilot,’ which helps a user narrow down a query by asking clarifying questions. Perplexity also allows users to search within a specific set of sources, such as academic papers, YouTube videos or Reddit posts. - New York Times

5 Tips for a Healthy Use of AI

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The following strategies can help you maintain a healthy balance between your expertise and AI assistance:

  1. Generate rough drafts from notes, rather than from a blank page: It’s fine to generate drafts with AI, but do your thinking first, put together some structured notes, and treat AI-generated content as a first draft that requires critical review and substantial editing. This approach can help mitigate the risk of anchoring bias.

  2. Rotate between AI-assisted and non-assisted writing: To develop and maintain your own writing skills, interweave AI tools into your writing workflow, rather than relying on them for chunks of text. This will also help you maintain your own voice.

  3. Customize AI prompts: Learn to craft specific prompts that guide the AI to produce more relevant and useful outputs for your particular needs.

  4. Ethical considerations: Be transparent about AI use, especially in academic writing, and follow any guidelines or policies set by your institution or publication venues.

  5. Fact-check and verify: Always verify facts, citations and specific claims made by AI. These tools have a tendency to generate “hallucinations,” plausible-sounding but inaccurate chunks of information.

From The Transmitter

Emotional Blackmail

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When someone attempts to make you take responsible for their feelings, they are committing what psychologists call emotional blackmail. A parent uses this when telling a child, "You've hurt me so much," or when a spouse says, "You hurt my feelings.

It is placing responsibility for their emotional outcome on you—pretending you have control over something that you do not. The parent may choose to become angry or sulk or become bitter or irritable toward the child. Someone may claim your action justifies their emotion. But that person is still doing the choosing of their own emotions.

When you see a family tiptoe around the house because "we don't want to upset mother (or father)," then you have a family who has decided to make everyone responsible for a single person's feelings—taking on a burden they were never meant to carry. Each family member is responsible for his or her actions. It’s the wrong goal to aim at preventing someone from ever being upset.

Elizabeth Kenny once said, “Anyone who angers you conquers you.” To allow someone else to decide how you feel is abdicating your responsibility to define yourself. Don't allow someone else to sell you on the idea that you are responsible for what they feel. Don't blackmail those around you by threatening to unleash an emotional outburst for something you yourself created.

Stephen Goforth

15 Articles about AI & the Creative Arts

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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