18 Recent Articles about AI & Journalism

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Copyright & AI Use in the Creative Process

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The US Copyright Office says “the use of artificial intelligence tools to assist in the creative process does not undermine the copyright of a work. The announcement clears the way for continued adoption of AI in post-production, such as in the enhancement of Hungarian-language dialogue in “The Brutalist.” https://variety.com/2025/biz/news/copyright-ai-tools-filmmaking-studios-office-1236288969/

Love and Death

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In the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a reporter who, confronted with living the same day over and over again, matures from an arrogant, self-serving professional climber to someone capable of loving and appreciating others and his world. Murray convincingly portrays the transformation from someone whose self-importance is difficult to abide into a person imbued with kindness.  

But there is another story line at work in the film, one we can see if we examine Murray’s character not in the early arrogant stage, nor in the post-epiphany stage, where the calendar is once again set in motion, but in the film’s middle, where he is knowingly stuck in the repetition of days. In this part of the narrative, Murray’s character has come to terms with his situation. He alone knows what is going to happen, over and over again.  He has no expectations for anything different.  In this period, his period of reconciliation, he becomes a model citizen of Punxsutawney. He radiates warmth and kindness, but also a certain distance.

The early and final moments of “Groundhog Day” offer something that is missing during this period of peace:  passion. Granted, Phil Connors’s early ambitious passion for advancement is a far less attractive thing than the later passion of his love for Rita (played by Andie MacDowell).  But there is passion in both cases. It seems that the eternal return of the same may bring peace and reconciliation, but at least in this case not intensity.

And here is where a lesson about love may lie. One would not want to deny that Connors comes to love Rita during the period of the eternal Groundhog Day. But his love lacks the passion, the abandon, of the love he feels when he is released into a real future with her. There is something different in those final moments of the film. A future has opened for their relationship, and with it new avenues for the intensity of his feelings for her. Without a future for growth and development, romantic love can extend only so far.  Its distinction from, say, a friendship with benefits begins to become effaced.

There is, of course, in all romantic love the initial infatuation, which rarely lasts. But if the love is to remain romantic, that infatuation must evolve into a longer-term intensity, even if a quiet one, that nourishes and is nourished by the common engagements and projects undertaken over time. 

The future is open. Unlike the future in “Groundhog Day,” it is not already decided.  We do not have our next days framed for us by the day just passed.  We can make something different of our relationships.  There is always more to do and more to create of ourselves with the ones with whom we are in love.

This is not true, however, and romantic love itself shows us why.  Love is between two particular people in their particularity. We cannot love just anyone, even others with much the same qualities.  If we did, then when we met someone like the beloved but who possessed a little more of a quality to which we were drawn, we would, in the phrase philosophers of love use, “trade up.” But we don’t trade up, or at least most of us don’t.  This is because we love that particular person in his or her specificity.  And what we create together, our common projects and shared emotions, are grounded in those specificities.  Romantic love is not capable of everything. It is capable only of what the unfolding of a future between two specific people can meaningfully allow.

Todd May writing in the New York Times

Lucky in Life

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According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just what you call the results of a human beings consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.

Over the course of 10 years, Wiseman followed the lives of 400 subjects of all ages and professions. He found them after he placed ads in newspapers asking for people who thought of themselves as very lucky or very unlucky. He had them keep diaries and perform tests in addition to checking in on their lives with interviews and observations. In one study, he asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.  

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life.  

Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by.  

Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

David McRaney

Getting Clarity

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We are too often motivated by a craving to put an end to the inevitable surprises in our lives. This is especially true of the biggest "negative" of all. Might we benefit from contemplating mortality more regularly than we do? As Steve Jobs famously declared, "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose."

Oliver Burkeman

Taking Beauty Seriously

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If all experience of beauty is merely subjective, we find ourselves in a position in which some people like rice pudding and other people do not like rice pudding, which is then the conclusion of the matter. In short, it would mean that no two people have ever differed or ever can differ on a question of beauty. When one person says the Philadelphia City Hall is more beautiful than the Parthenon and another person denies this, they are not, on the subjectivist theory, arguing at all.

One man is telling about his insides and the other is telling about his insides. If someone wishes to contend that the works of a contemporary leader of a dance band are aesthetically superior to the works of Beethoven, there is, subjectively speaking, no suitable rejoinder.

This situation, however, is too absurd to be accepted by thoughtful critics as the last word on the question. The fact is that people do argue about aesthetic judgments, and the subjectivists argue as much as anybody else.

Regardless of their philosophical position, those who take beauty most seriously tend to hold that those who fail to see what they see really ought to see it, and with sufficient clarification of sight would see it.

Kant goes beyond the mere rejection of the familiar maxim and points out the imperative note which is essential to aesthetic judgment, a note similar to that which we found in moral judgment. To assert that a thing is beautiful is to blame those who do not agree. If I am right, they are wrong.

It would be laughable of a man to justify himself by saying, "This object is beautiful for me."

Elton Trueblood, Philosophy of Religion

22 Articles about Amazing Things AI can do now

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Using AI & computer vision to diagnose greenhouse crops with diseases or pests – Tech Crunch  

OpenAI introduced a new tool, called Operator, that can autonomously perform tasks on the internet – New York Times 

AI brings better odds and betting concerns to sports gambling – Semafor

A new tool uses AI to transcribe video recordings from police officers’ body-worn cameras to create initial drafts of police reports - Gov Tech 

AI model that can distinguish between Scotch and American whiskeys with 100 percent accuracy (better than humans)– New Scientist

Engineers Develop AI Tool to Automate Finding Defects in Sewer Lines – CU Denver

Google’s new AI tool uses image prompts instead of text - CNN 

This new AI technology enhances video analysis by detecting human actions in real time – Tech Radar 

Tennessee Sheriff’s Department implements AI-enabled dashcams to detect up to 15 different driving behaviors – Gov Tech

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

New methane monitoring AI tool unveiled – Axios  

AI helps uncover hundreds of unknown ancient symbols hidden in Peru’s Nazca Desert – CNN  

Google's DeepMind unveils an AI model capable of predicting the weather more accurately than existing forecasting systems – MIT Tech Review

How Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture – NBC News   

Explore the World’s First 3D Replica of St. Peter’s Basilica, Made with AI – Open Culture

New Microsoft Teams AI promises to translate speech in real time – Semafor   

Can a fluffy robot really replace a cat or dog? My weird, emotional week with an AI pet – The Guardian  

Want to speak Italian? Microsoft AI can make it sound like you do. – Washington Post 

Google's AI Tool Big Sleep Finds Zero-Day Vulnerability in SQLite Database Engine – The Hacker News

AI’s Impact on Insurance Innovation – Expert AI

Anyone Can Turn You Into an AI Chatbot. There’s Little You Can Do to Stop Them – Wired  

AI robot helps recover and recycle beverage cans – Axios

The Halo Effect

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If you like the president’s politics, you probably like his voice and his appearance as well. The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person–including things you have not observed–is known as the halo effect. The term has been in use in psychology for a century, but it has not come into wide use in everyday language. This is a pity, because the halo effect is a good name for a common bias that plays a large role in shaping our view of people and situations. It is one of the ways the representation of the world that system one generates is simpler and more coherent than the real thing.

You meet a woman named Joan at a party and find her personable and easy to talk to. Now her name comes up as someone who could be asked to contribute to a charity. What do you know about Joan's generosity? The correct answer is that you know virtually nothing, because there is little reason to believe that people who are agreeable in social situations are also generous contributors to charities. But you like Joan and you will retrieve the feeling of liking her when you think of her. You also like generosity and generous people. By association, you are now predisposed to believe that Joan is generous. And that you believe she is generous you probably like Joan eve better than you did earlier, because you have added generosity to her pleasant attributes.

The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increase the weight of the first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

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

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Dealing with False Guilt

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Here are 4 options when dealing with false guilt.

1. Remove the Source of Guilt (the conscience)
This may only desensitize us to actual wrongs and could lead to a denial of real evil in our lives.

2. Emphasize Self-Potential
This fails to address the underlying problems and ignores any real wrongs.

3. Emphasize Punishment
This can lead to feeling guilt when caught, ignoring legitimate conviction.

4. Emphasize Forgiveness
If the guilt is false, there lacks a basis for forgiveness and the person may feel they haven’t suffered enough.

When AIs are Bribed or Threatened

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What’s bizarre about LLMs is that they act more like humans than we think they should. For example, some researchers have tested the hypothesis that LLMs perform better when offered a cash reward or threatened with death. It also turns out that some of the best ways to “jailbreak” LLMs (getting them to disobey their creators’ explicit instructions) look a lot like the kinds of social engineering tricks that humans use on each other: for example, pretending to be someone else or saying that the request is just a joke. But other effective jailbreaking techniques are things no human would ever fall for. One group found that if they used ASCII art (constructions of symbols that look like words or pictures) to pose dangerous questions, like how to build a bomb, the LLM would answer them willingly. - IEEE Spectrum