Jesus Chose the Gritty

The Scriptures are filled with the ruggedness and struggles of actual life. But in our teaching of the gospel we have sweetened or repressed the universal human qualities of our Lord’s stories almost beyond recognition. Jesus evidently talked about the things like people’s sexual escapades and crooked business deals to illustrate his message about the reign of God. And he furnished additional wine for at least one celebration. Read the parables. With the whole of human behavior from which to select, Jesus chose the gritty, earthy areas of life to illustrate the way God loves people. He was real! He expressed his own uncertainly and doubt in the midst of his faith. And he got very angry. Jesus talked about the same deep separation, dishonest and inner restlessness we experience in modern life. I had always heard the church saying the God prefers the poor, the despised, and the weak… Religious people have difficulty admitting that (Jesus) prefers sinners to the righteous. Those who call themselves righteous are not free from it but have repressed it. Those called sinners are aware of their guilt and are, for that reason, ready to receive pardon and grace.

Keith Miller, The Becomers

Love and Boundaries

Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them. Once the precious moment of falling in love has passed and the boundaries have snapped back in place, the individual is disillusioned. Real love (the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth) is a permanently self enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Abstracts Written by AI

While many academics may scorn the idea of outsourcing article summaries to generative AI, a new investigation by researchers at Ontario’s University of Waterloo found peer reviewers rated abstracts written by humans—but paraphrased using generative AI—far more highly than those authored without algorithmic assistance. -Inside Higher Ed

The journey is the destination

One of life’s great paradoxes: Happiness requires purpose; purpose requires a sense of direction; a sense of direction requires goal-setting—but happiness cannot be had by realizing those goals. People believe that achieving big objectives will give them a lot of happiness and then are bitterly disappointed to find that doing so is a letdown. After a big achievement, many people experience depression. True satisfaction comes from progress in the struggle toward the goal. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

As I’ve become older

My first book was about a lot of pain and a lot of knee-jerk, reactionary responses to being mistreated and abused [emotionally and physically]. When I look back on it now, I see it wasn’t about craft. It was my release. 

As I’ve become older, I’m learning more about what grace really means, and what it means to be able to bring a slice of joy to somebody. At the end of the day, I’d like to think, “What did I do today that was beneficial for somebody?” I know I can’t change the world, save the world, but I believe if all of us scratch hard enough in the same little spots where we occupy time, where we live, play and die, that we can effect change.

Jaki Shelton Green speaking to the Washington Post

Loyalty to the Company above all else

Many companies have an unspoken command floating through the halls: "Bow to the organization above the rest!" There is a constant re-evaluation as to whether someone is playing their loyal role for the tribe. Talk of employees taking time for family and self-care is just that—talk. In practice, the expectation is that everyone will constantly genuflect toward the hierarchical (and often paternalistic) structure.

Someone who drinks to excess, yells at coworkers, holds racist views, drives away competent employees, has materialistic goals, and so forth will be tolerated, even rewarded, as long as their allegiance is true, helped by bringing in dollars or playing some other role that helps to perpetuate the organization.

On the other hand, someone with none of those vices might be cast aside if they are deemed not adequately sacrificing themselves on the altar of the organizational machinery.

In the children's book "Hope for the Flowers," Trina Paulus tells the story of caterpillars who form a tower with their bodies. They climb over each other in an attempt to reach the top. What reward waits for them? Nothing. Nothing at all. The struggle to rise only serves to stop them from cocooning and becoming the butterflies they were meant to me.

Stephen Goforth

16 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

Publishers are selling papers to train AIs — and making millions of dollars – Nature

Can AI fix the peer review bottleneck? Top journals weigh in  - News-Medical.Net

Suspected Undeclared Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Academic Literature: An Analysis of the Academ-AI Dataset - Arxiv

Can Google Scholar survive the AI revolution? - Nature

Rethinking Reviewer Fatigue AI’s place in a broader discussion -  EON

Writing assistant, workhorse, or accelerator? How academics are using GenAI – London School of Economics

Can AI review the scientific literature — and figure out what it all means? – Nature

The great AI witch hunt: Reviewers’ perception and (Mis)conception of generative AI in research writing – Science Direct

Can AI be used to assess research quality? – Nature

Scholarly Publishing World Slow to Embrace Generative AI – Inside Higher Education

National Academies President on How to Use Generative AI Responsibly in Scientific Research – JAMA

Study of ChatGPT citations makes dismal reading for publishers – Tech Crunch

Experts fail to reliably detect AI-generated histological data – Nature

AI-authored abstracts ‘more authentic’ than human-written ones – Times Higher Ed

AI’s computing gap: academics lack access to powerful chips needed for research – Nature  

AI-generated survey responses could make research less accurate – and a lot less interesting – Stanford

AI Used by Law Enforcement

The sheriff’s department in a country just southwest of Nashville has deployed AI-powered dashcams despite the limited budget for law enforcement in the sparsely populated county, according to GovTech. Meanwhile, police in a California town are using AI tech “to transcribe video recordings taken on officers' body-worn cameras and create a first draft of a police report,” according to another GovTech report.

Why so many incompetent men rise to leadership positions

Research on why so many incompetent men rise to leadership positions found there’s a lot of antimeritocratic and implicit positive discrimination going on that favors not just men but overconfident, narcissistic, and incompetent men when it comes to leadership roles.  

Often, even when women are appointed to very senior leadership roles, it isn’t because people have embraced what they bring to the table in terms of EQ, self-awareness, self-control, integrity, humility, people skills, et cetera. Rather, it’s because they go for a profile of somebody who may be biologically female but out-males males in masculinity. So there’s a queen bee or Margaret Thatcher phenomenon. In fact, there are many countries in the world that are run by women who look more alpha male than their male competitors.  The point is not to have more biological women in charge but to have better leaders in charge.  

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Columbia University

AI goes undetected and gets better grades

University of Reading researchers “slipped 63 AI-generated submissions into the school’s examination system. Even with no editing or efforts to hide the AI usage, 94 percent of those went undetected, and nearly 84 percent got better grades than a randomly selected group of students who took the same exam. The issue with such tools is that they usually perform well in a lab, but their performance drops significantly in the real world. ArsTechnica

The Surprising Allure of Ignorance

At some point we all decline the opportunity to discover what really is the case. We willingly give up a shot at learning the truth about the world out of fear that it will expose truths about ourselves, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusion of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than it is ours. It doesn’t matter that reliance on false opinion is the worse sort of dependence. It doesn’t matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.  

Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know

The highest thing

The highest thing that one man can do for another is simply to make him restless.

22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

The GPT era is already ending something has shifted at OpenAI – The Atlantic

Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books – Wired  

Their Job Is to Push Computers Toward AI Doom – Wall Street Journal  

Google Unveils A.I. Agent That Can Use Websites on Its Own – New  York Times 

Former OpenAI researcher raises $40 million to build more empathetic audio AI – Reuters 

Meta rolls out internal AI tool as it pushes into business market – Financial Times 

Perplexity expands its publisher program – Tech Crunch

The UC Berkeley Project That Is the AI Industry’s Obsession – Wall Street Journal

The Furious Contest to Unseat Nvidia as King of A.I. Chips – New York Times

OpenAI looks at chatbot ads – Axios 

Amazon Announces Supercomputer, New Server Powered by Homegrown AI Chips – Wall Street Journal  

OpenAI explores advertising as it steps up revenue drive – Financial Times

Amazon eyes news partners for revamped AI Alexa voice assistant – Axios

Labelers training AI say they're overworked, underpaid & exploited by big US tech companies - CBS News

Who's winning the AI race – Axios 

OpenAI hits pause on video model Sora after artists leak access in protest – Washington Post  

The AI War Was Never Just About AI – The Atlantic  

Stanford’s AI Center names US the top AI ecosystem, China follows – Semafor  

The future of Windows is cloud and AI – The Verge 

TV Writers Found 139,000 of Their Scripts Trained AI – The ankler

Five Canadian news media outlets sue OpenAI for copyright breach – Al Jazeera  

Biden’s Farewell to China’s Tech Sector: A New Type of Forbidden Chip - Wall Street Journal

When failure becomes invisible

When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible. -David McRaney

Creativity’s link to dishonesty

Creative people who can “think out of the box” are prized in the business world, the arts, and science. But a new study has found that creative thinkers are also more likely to cheat to get ahead, and to rationalize away less-than-ethical behavior. Harvard Business School researchers gave personality quizzes to hundreds of study participants and then asked them to perform quick games or other tasks for cash. Participants who scored high on a creativity test were more likely to falsify their results so they could earn more prize money. People who were merely high in intelligence, however, were not more dishonest. It appears that the same “divergent thinking” and “cognitive flexibility” that enable creative people to come up with innovative ways of looking at things also equip them to circumvent ethical norms—and to justify their cheating to themselves. “When you’re a creative person, you can use that creativity to come up with reasons for why unethical behaviors may be okay,” researcher Francesca Gino tells The Boston Globe. These “self-serving rationalizations,” she said, can include deciding that “other people would cheat under the same circumstances or that a little cheating will not hurt anyone.”

The Week magazine

19 Recent Articles about AI & Audio/Video

Researchers Use AI To Turn Sound Recordings Into Accurate Street Images – University of Texas  

Samsung has developed an audio eraser feature for smartphones that will allow users to erase unwanted sounds from videos – Data Company  

Former OpenAI researcher raises $40 million to build more empathetic audio AI – Reuters

The Most Hyped Bot Since ChatGPT Remember Sora? – The Atlantic  

OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, aims to kickstart the AI video era – Washington Post 

NVIDIA's new AI model Fugatto can create audio from text prompts & modify existing sound files - Engadget

Randy Travis’s beautiful baritone was lost. AI helped him sing again. - Washington Post 

Polish radio station ditches DJs, journalists for AI-generated college kids – The Register  

Adobe Firefly Video Model: How AI is Changing the Future of Video Editing - Unite

There’s a New Hit Podcast That Will Blow Your Mind: The hosts aren’t human. – Wall Street Journal  

Podcast: AI and Voice Replication  - Illusion of More  

Adobe’s AI video model is here, and it’s already inside Premiere Pro – The Verge  

Talking through AI and the future of music with will.i.am – Semafor

Amazon is allowing Audible narrators to clone themselves with AI - The Verge

This Hit Music Radio Station Is Fully AI-Generated – Radio World

Amazon's AI Generator Tool Can Now Create Audio Ads – AdWeek 

How To Create And Customize An AI Podcast With Google’s NotebookLM – Forbes

Zoom will let AI avatars talk to your team for you - The Verge 

Mariah Carey Responds to Claims Her Spotify Wrapped Video Was Made With AI – Hollywood Reporter 

Happiness Depends

Happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (born Dec. 11, 1918)

Possibility

I dwell in possibility… –Emily Dickinson (born Dec. 10, 1830)

Envisioning Failure

Our brains mix real imagery with mental and emotional baggage, which affects performance. Slugger Mickey Mantle is reported to have once said after hitting a long home run, "I just saw the ball as big as a grapefruit." In contrast, poor hitters may see the baseball as small. It’s not just out of reach for them physically but emotionally as well.

A Purdue University study tested the kicking ability of more than 20 athletes who don't play football. They were asked to estimate the size of the goalposts before and after each of 10 attempts to kick a field goal. The more successful the athlete, the more likely they were to overestimate the size of the posts and underestimate the distance.

Success biased the kickers’ perception of the difficulty of their task. Professor Jessica Witt says, “Before you kicked, you really didn’t know what your abilities were going to be.’’ She found the same effect in past experiments with softball players and golfers. University of Virginia psychologist Dennis Proffitt has put together tests that show the effect holds true even when it comes to dangerous situations.

Which are you imagining in your life—success or failure?

Stephen Goforth

Natural Language Video Editing

For the foreseeable future, we’ll still need pro video editors who master the technical details of visual storytelling. But for many everyday situations — trimming a meeting recording, pulling social media clips, or gathering quick highlights — natural language editing may soon be a widely-adopted accelerator of the process. It’s not mature yet, but it’s poised to make video editing accessible to everyone who can describe what they want. AI is beginning to democratize creative work that used to require technical expertise. 

Jeremy Caplan of WonderTools