23 Recent Articles about AI & The Arts

Flora is building an AI-powered ‘infinite canvas’ for creative professionals – Tech Crunch 

UK ministers consider changing AI plans to protect creative industries – The Guardian

The New Leverage: AI and the Power of Small Teams - Jarango 

Not all creativity is worth saving – Fast Company

Christie’s AI Art Sale Defies Controversy, Surpasses Expectations - ArtNews 

A lab at the University of Chicago is protecting artists from theft by a new adversary: the machines – Chicago Mag 

Musicians releases a “silent record” in outrage at a proposed change to British copyright law – New York Times 

How AI can help in the creative design process – The Conversation

Dow Jones has quietly built an AI marketplace for publishers to license their content to corporations – Axios

A ‘True Crime’ Documentary Series Has Millions of Views. The Murders Are All AI-Generated – 404 Media

Hollywood writers say AI is ripping off their work. They want studios to sue – LA Times  

First Christie’s Auction Devoted Exclusively To AI Art Sparks Backlash – Forbes  

Oscars Consider Requiring Films to Disclose AI Use – Variety  

AI is turning the arts into a Waste Land – Washington Post

AI transparency framework in Design – UX Design  

Copyright Office Offers Assurances on AI Filmmaking Tools – Variety

Top 6 Examples of AI Guidelines in Design Systems – SuperNova

Denying Copyright for AI-Assisted Art Threatens Innovation – Data Innovation  

This play is a flawed look at AI – Washington Post 

Sotheby's to auction its first artwork made by a humanoid robot – CBS News

More than 10,500 actors, musicians and authors protest tech’s AI data grab - Washington Post

Exploring a digital music teaching model integrated with recurrent neural networks under AI – Nature  

AI and the Arts: What does this mean for future artists? – WUFT  

AI Definitions: Synthetic Data

Synthetic Data – This type of data is produced by a GenAI mathematical model. It can be created from scratch or derived from data that come from real-world systems. Some experts say we are running out of original human data to feed to LLMs for training and can use synthetic data in place of the real thing. If synthetic data can be made to work, it could negate the problem of using copyrighted material for training. Sceptics say using synthetic produced data will lead to a degradation of model’s performance. There is also the danger of misrepresenting synthetic GenAI data as real data, providing fertile ground for misconduct. Previously effective methods of spotting fraudulent data through statistical techniques, such as detection of nonrandom digits, are being made obsolete by the emergence of synthetic data. This possibility is why some scientists consider its use to be unethical.

More AI definitions here.

If I'd made that $30 million

If I'd made that $30 million a year, maybe I'd just have bought that huge, finished vineyard and let others do it all. I'd have missed out on the pleasure of being in the vineyards every day.  -Baseball Hall of Famer Tom Seaver

If-Then

If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. – Fyodor Dostoevsky

New AI Conversational Voice Model

Sesame's new AI conversational voice model features uncanny imperfections like stumbling over words and correcting itself. These imperfections are intentional. Some users feel emotionally attached to the voice assistant. In one case, a parent recounted how their 4-year-old daughter developed an emotional connection with the AI model, crying after not being allowed to talk to it again. -More at ArsTechnica

AI-assisted Reviews of Student Visa Accounts Begin

AI is being used by the US State department to find foreign students who it perceives to be Hamas supporters. Their visas will be revoked. News reports of anti-Israel demonstrations and Jewish students' lawsuits are being checked for evidence that "foreign nationals allegedly engaged in antisemitic activity." Read more from Axios

22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

OpenAI Announces 'NextGenAI' Higher-Ed Consortium – GovTech 

Dow Jones has quietly built an AI marketplace for publishers to license their content to corporations - Axios 

This Scientist Left OpenAI Last Year. His Startup Is Already Worth $30 Billion. – Wall Street Journal

Google AI Overviews Are Secretly Killing Top Pages While Boosting Hidden Ones – Digital Information World

The ‘Spy Sheikh’ Taking the AI World by Storm – Wall Street Journal

Amazon has a ‘slew of AI devices’ coming, hardware chief says - CNN 

Microsoft identifies developers it says evaded AI guardrails – Axios

Apple Vows to Build A.I. Servers in Houston and Spend $500 Billion in U.S. – New York Times 

X Rolls Out AI-Generated Ads in Push to Win Advertisers Back – AdWeek

Anthropic adds advanced reasoning to latest model - Axios

Why AI Spending Isn’t Slowing Down - Wall Street Journal

Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP – The Verge

AI race's winner might not yet be born – Axios

How DeepSeek’s Lower-Power, Less-Data Model Stacks Up - Wall Street Journal

Guardian signs licensing deal with ChatGPT owner OpenAI – Press Gazette

Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget - http://ewintr.nl

An ambitious effort to track the impact of AI adoption by looking at the data on Claude – Anthropic

Deep Research and Knowledge Value - Stratechery

The hottest new idea in AI? Chatbots that look like they think. – Washington Post

AI designed computer chips so complex that humans can’t understand them – BGR

Ultra-efficient AI won’t solve data centers’ climate problem. This might. - Washington Post

Researchers claim to have created an open rival to OpenAI’s o1 ‘reasoning’ model for under $50 – Tech Crunch

The Art of Listening

Effective listening takes practice; it’s actually a discipline. It doesn’t come easily or naturally. Listening means more than just hearing what a person says.

A counselor once told me, "Hearing captures the words a person speaks; listening captures the meaning and the feeling beneath those words."

Listening is the mental step by which we become more aware of the other person than we are of ourselves.

The best definition of listening I have ever come across is that given by Norman H. Wright” “Listening is not thinking about what you are going to say when the other person has stopped talking." 

Stephen Goforth

Interview Coder

A Columbia University student is facing a disciplinary hearing at the college after he used an AI program to help him land internships at Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. He said these interviews often cover topics no one will ever see on the job. So, he wrote a program called Interview Coder to help him and others bypass the process. Read more at Gizmodo

A Self-fertilizing Garden

Psychologist Joyce Shaffer tells the story of a man unable to talk or walk following a stroke. Two years later, he was hiking and teaching thanks to intense physical therapy. When the man died a few years later, an autopsy showed a large area of his brain had been destroyed by the stroke. Even so, he had regained the ability to be active and productive. 

Schaffer’s explanation: “Moment by moment you create your brain. It is plastic. It can change for better or worse depending on lifestyle choices … Without challenge, your brain retires. With lifestyle choices a person can turn their brain into a "self-fertilizing garden.”

Stephen Goforth

An AI-powered “wellbeing companion”

An AI-powered “wellbeing companion” named Sonny is now available to more than 4,500 public middle and high school students in nine districts across the country, many of which are in low-income and rural areas where mental-health services are lacking. - Wall Street Journal

Overcoming an Aversion to Loss

Most of us don’t like losing. In fact, it’s what the academics call loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss more acutely than we feel the pleasure of gain. In other words, we may like to win, but we hate to lose.

The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that even something as simple as a coin toss demonstrates our aversion to loss. In a recent interviews, Mr. Kahneman shared the usual response he gets to his offer of a coin toss:

“In my classes, I say: ‘I’m going to toss a coin, and if it’s tails, you lose $10. How much would you have to gain on winning in order for this gamble to be acceptable to you?’

“People want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I’ve been doing the same thing with executives or very rich people, asking about tossing a coin and losing $10,000 if it’s tails. And they want $20,000 before they’ll take the gamble.”

In other words, we’re willing to leave a lot of money on the table to avoid the possibility of losing.

We see this aversion to loss play out in the lives of real people when we try to make smart money decisions, especially when it’s time to make a change to our investments. It almost doesn’t matter what change we need to make. We hesitate to change from the current situation because it means having an opinion and making a decision. And with a decision comes the very real possibility that we’ll make the wrong one. Sticking with the status quo feels much better even if we know it’s costing us money.

To get past our aversion to loss, I recommend taking the Overnight Test.

Imagine you went to bed, and overnight someone sold your losing stock and replaced it with cash. The next morning, you have a choice: You can buy back the stock for the same price, or you can take that cash and (do something else with it). What would you do?

Most people wouldn’t buy the stock back.

Just by changing your perspective (investing cash versus getting rid of the stock), you can gain clarity and have the emotional space to make the decision you know you need to make.

Sometimes, that’s all it takes. While we’ll probably never embrace loss, it’s good to know that we can find ways to work around our aversion to it when it makes sense.

Carl Richards writing in the New York Times

AI Definitions: Symbolic Artificial Intelligence

Symbolic Artificial Intelligence – The dominant area of research for most of AI’s history until artificial neural networks became the center of most of the recent developments in artificial intelligence. Symbolic AI requires programmers to meticulously define the rules that specify the behavior they want from an intelligent system. It works well when the environment is predictable, and the rules are clear-cut. Researchers believed if they  programmed enough rules and logic into computers, they could create machines capable of human-like reasoning.  Despite the fact that symbolic AI has lost its luster in the last few years, most of the applications we use today are rule-based systems. An alternative approach to AI is machine learning. Some believe the future of AI lies in a hybrid combination of these approaches.

More AI definitions here.

17 Articles about Amazing Things AI can do now

A diagnostic tool that uses DNA sequencing & machine learning to detect multiple diseases from a single blood sample – Inside Precision Medicine

In a showdown of psychotherapists vs. ChatGPT, the latter wins, new study finds – Fortune  

Matchmakers in India Now Have Competition: AI – The Walrus 

AI invented a new miracle material that's as strong as steel but light as foam – BGR 

How regular people are cashing in on AI - ZDnet

A new AI tool allowed me to talk to my 80-year-old self. It’s going to be quite a life. – Wall Street Journal

AI Comes to the Apple Orchard—From Pollinating to Picking - Wall Street Journal

From zero to millions? How regular people are cashing in on AI - ZDnet 

Meta’s AI-Powered Ray-Bans Are Life-Enhancing for the Blind - Wall Street Journal 

Using AI missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that disappeared in 2014 – Economic Times

Google’s X spins out Heritable Agriculture, a startup using AI to improve crop yield – Tech Crunch

A German startup specializing in geospatial data, is using sensing technology in autonomous vehicles to map the seafloor to strengthen underwater military defense – Wall Street Journal

AI designed computer chips so complex that humans can’t understand them – BGR

DeepMind AI crushes tough maths problems on par with top human solvers – Nature

Using A.I., Researchers Peer Inside a 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Charred by Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption – Smithsonian Magazine  

Generative AI meets Venn diagrams in a quite unique interface. – SuperRandom

Cancer could be spotted early on thanks to new 'human-defying' AI-powered body scan – Daily Record  

AI Hype or reality?

"I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before. And we’re not prepared in part because it’s not clear what it would mean to prepare. I do think there’s a good chance that, when we look back on this era in human history, A.I. will have been the thing that matters." -Ben Buchanan in The New York Times

Throwing Good Money after Bad

Imagine a company that has already spent $50 million on a project. The project is now behind schedule and the forecasts of its ultimate returns are less favorable than at the initial planning stage. An additional investment of $60 million is required to give the project a chance. An alternative proposal is to invest the same amount in a new project that currently looks likely to bring higher returns. What will the company do? All too often a company afflicted by sunk costs drives into the blizzard, throwing good money after bad rather than accepting the humiliation of closing the account of a costly failure.

(This) fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects. I have often observed young scientists struggling to salvage a doomed project when they would be better advised to drop it and start a new one. Fortunately, research suggests that at least in some contexts the fallacy can be overcome. (It) is taught as a mistake in both economics and business courses, apparently to good effect: there is evidence that graduate students in these fields are more willing than others to walk away from a failing project.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

27 Articles about AI & Politics

The truth about DOGE’s AI plans: The tech can’t do that – Washington Post 

UK ministers consider changing AI plans to protect creative industries -The Guardian

Trump is already trying to put his stamp on AI  - CNN 

AI unleashes a weird new genre of political communication – The Economist

Fake Video of Trump and Musk Appears on TVs at Housing Agency – New York Times

What an AI-generated video of Gaza reveals about Trump tactics US President - BBC

AI policy must be based on ‘science, not science fiction’ – Tech Crunch

LA Times to display AI-generated political rating on opinion pieces - The Guardian

Wave of state-level AI bills raise First Amendment problems – The FIRE

AI Slop of Musk and Trump on TikTok Racks Up 700 Million Views – 404 Media

US, UK refuse to sign AI safety declaration at international summit – Semafor

Lawmakers Push to Ban DeepSeek App From U.S. Government Devices – Wall Street Journal

Vance pushes ‘America First’ AI agenda, accuses allies of overregulation – Washington Post

China has more trust in AI than the United States – Axios

DOGE's "AI-first" strategy courts disaster - Axios 

A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture: We need a Clean Internet Act – New York Times

AI is Uncle Sam’s new secret weapon to fight fraud - CNN

The Department of Homeland Security Is Embracing A.I. - The New York Times

AI Is Moving Faster Than Attempts to Regulate It. Here’s How Companies Are Coping. - Wall Street Journal

State Legislatures Consider New Wave of 2025 AI Legislation – Inside Privacy 

US, UK and EU sign on to the Council of Europe’s high-level AI safety treaty – Tech Crunch 

How AI can be used in healthcare debated at Texas Legislature – NBC Dallas 

How Will International Politics Complicate US Access to AI? – Information Week

Washington lawmakers weigh new artificial intelligence regulations – PBS

An experimental study on the political value shift in large language models – Nature  

Three strategies to improve AI performance within government agencies – Washington Technology

AI Watch: Global regulatory tracker - European Union – JD Supra

AI-generated Ratings for Opinion Pieces

Some Los Angeles Times opinion pieces will now be published with an AI-generated rating of their political content, and an AI-generated list of alternative political views on that issue. The AI-generated tool “operates independently” from the paper’s human journalists, and “the AI content is not reviewed by journalists before it is published.” - The Guardian

Self-Awareness and Critical Thinking

At the root of our effectiveness is our ability to grasp the world around us and to take the measure of our own performance. We are constantly making judgments about what we know and don't know whether we're capable of handling a task or solving a problem. As we work at something, we keep an eye on ourselves, adjusting our thinking or actions as we progress.

Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition (meta is Greek for "about".) Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might do better next time. An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don't know when we've got it. Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.

To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don't know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Spiritual Friendship

Spiritual friends aren’t looking to get ahead. This friend weeps with you in anxiety, rejoices with you in prosperity, seeks with you in doubts. Nothing is faked; everything is in the open. A relationship that grows into something holy, voluntary, and true is one of life’s greatest pleasures and a reward in itself. It’s a “wondrous consolation” to have someone in whom your spirit can rest, to whom you can simply pour out your soul. 

Karen Wright Marsh, Vintage Saints and Sinners