24 Recent Articles about AI & Writing

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Independent says readers ‘often prefer’ stories provided by new AI service to human-written versions of those articles– Press Gazette 

Why AI can’t take over creative writing – The Conversation  

NaNoWriMo shut down after AI, content moderation scandals – TechCrunch

The best AI email writing assistant: We tested 5, and only one beats a human - The Washington Post

Researchers surprised to find less-educated areas adopting AI writing tools faster - Ars Technica

ChatGPT firm reveals AI model that is ‘good at creative writing’ – The Guardian

OpenAI’s ‘creative writing’ AI evokes that annoying kid from high school fiction club - TechCrunch

AI Search Has A Citation Problem – Columbia Journalism Review

Break through writer’s block with an AI-powered creativity hack – Mashable

What is interesting writing and can LLMs create it? – Stat Modeling

AI Anxiety Can writing at Harvard coexist with new technologies? – Harvard Magazine

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

Is There A Place For AI In Creative Writing? – Caversham Writers

AI won't remove the need for human editing – Times Higher Ed

New AI tool could redefine book charts and bestseller lists – Jerusalem Post  

Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers – Harvard’s Nieman Lab  

Springer Nature reveals AI-driven tool to 'automate some editorial quality checks' – The Bookseller

Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries – 404 Media

Every doctor is a writer: On the end of note-writing and meaning-making in medicine – Stat News

University students describe how they adopt AI for writing and research in a general education course – Nature  

Meta Is Experimenting With AI-Generated Comments, for Some Reason – Life Hacker

Writers respond to the short story written by AI – The Guardian  

People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI-generated works, yet new study suggests that’s not quite true – The Conversation  

How Scottsdale police are using AI to help write crime reports – Arizona’s Family  

Effectively Remixing Other People’s Materials

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According to Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist, the so-called “original” thinkers and creators are simply people who effectively learned to remix other people’s materials.

Originality isn’t about doing what’s never been done in a strict sense, but it’s about the unique way in which each individual gives expression to his or her artistic influences. Quoting Jonathan Lethem, Kleon argues that “when people call something ‘original,’ nine out of ten times they just don’t know the references or the original sources involved.”

It’s a simple idea, but not as simple as “copy the people you like” and you’ll be an instant genius.

The kind of stealing Kleon refers to is not about pretending you came up with somebody else’s idea or just modifying a few details, but it’s about being strategic and selective with the process of choosing your influences, taking what resonates with you, making other people’s ideas your own, and being diverse enough to find unexplored points of intersection between your various influences.

TK Coleman, 5 Ways to Steal Like An Artist

AI Definitions: AI Agents

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AI Agents – These chatbots have the ability not only to answer questions and provide information, but to act on users' behalf in the background, autonomously. Users provide a goal (from researching competitors to virtual assistant functions like buying a car or planning a vacation), and the agent generates a task list and starting to work by breaking down the overall goal into smaller steps. The ability to understand complex instructions is crucial for agentic AI to be effective. Rather than passive processors of language, these proactive active agents can produce practical, real-world applications in uncertain but data-rich environments as it interacts with external tools and APIs. Agents are not the same as “AI copilots” which can collaborate with users but don’t make decisions on their own as agents can do. They are also not as powerful as Agentic AI, which can act more autonomously.

More AI definitions here.

Obsessed with Image

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As Americans, we're obsessed with images. Who we are isn't as important as how we appear. In fact, we spend so much time and effort on appearances, we lose the ability to recognize the true identity of another person, or even ourselves. We've become more familiar with the image than we are with the real thing.

Dating relationships are especially vulnerable to this problem. A person isn't evaluated on character or individuality, but on how close he or she measures up to the other's image of the ideal mate. Real people take second chair to the ideal; they measure up to the image or they don't.

Have you ever noticed the excitement at the beginning of a romance that later faded with growing familiarity? In the early stages of any new friendship, we're usually seeing more of the image than we are of the real person. We've seen enough of the surface to see similarities between the object of our affections and the ideal we seek, but not enough to show us that our ideal and the new friend are not the same person. In essence, we're falling in love with the image, with the idea that this one person might be "it." Sooner or later the real person is going to start breaking through that image, and disillusionment will set in.

The success of a marriage comes not in finding the "right" person, but in the ability of both partners to adjust to the real person they inevitably realize they married. Some people never make this adjustment, becoming trapped in an endless search for an image that does not exist.

John Fischer, Real Christians Don’t Dance!

29 Articles about the Impact of AI on Health Care

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Arguing the pros and cons of AI in healthcare - TechTarget

Randomized Trial of a Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment – New England Journal of Medicine

Apple Readies Its Biggest Push Into Health Yet With New AI Doctor – Bloomberg

Adaptive deep brain stimulation uses AI to reduce Parkinson’s symptoms - The Washington Post

Retracted articles on cancer imaging are not only continuously cited by publications but also used by ChatGPT to answer questions – Science Direct

Open-Source AI Matches Top Proprietary LLM in Solving Tough Medical Cases – Harvard Medical School 

Doctors Told Him He Was Going to Die. Then A.I. Saved His Life. – New York Times 

AI-Powered Test Reveals Biological Age from Small Blood Sample – Inside Precision Medicine

AI failed to detect critical health conditions: study - Axios 

Algorithm may reduce racial, ethnic inequalities in MS treatment: Study – Multiple Sclerosis News Today  

The Hologram Doctor Will See You Now – Wall Street Journal

Machine learning outperforms deep learning in audiometry in a new study – Dev Discourse

Duke Health develops AI model that predicts mental health illness risks for adolescents – CBS17

Pre-trained convolutional neural networks identify Parkinson’s disease from spectrogram images of voice samples – Nature

Can AI predict the next pandemic? A new study says yes – News Medical

Train clinical AI to reason like a team of doctors – Nature

An AI-powered model that accurately predicts blood sugar levels in diabetes patients – Deccan Herald

An AI clinical assistant that automates pre-surgery assessments for cataract patients – BBC

How health insurers are using AI today – StatNews

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

A Versatile AI System for Analyzing Series of Medical Images - Cornell Medicine

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

AI-based pregnancy analysis discovers previously unknown warning signs for stillbirth and newborn complications – University of Utah

Reid Hoffman Raises $24.6 Million for AI Cancer-Research Startup - Wall Street Journal

From Prediction To Practice: AI’s Role In Healthcare 2025 – Forbes

Assessing AI-Driven Approaches to Student Mental Health – Dartmouth

6 ways AI is transforming healthcare – World Economic Forum

Trump’s early actions imperil efforts to improve AI’s performance in medicine – Stat News

Medical students use AI to practice communication skills - Cornell Chronicle

Wearable AI to enhance patient safety and clinical decision-making – Nature

AI Definitions: Quantum Computers

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Quantum Computers – The computers we use today operate on a traditional binary code, which represents information with 0s and 1s. Quantum machines, on the other hand, use quantum bits, or qubits. The unusual properties of qubits make quantum computers far more powerful for some kinds of calculations, including the mathematical problems that underpin much of modern encryption.

More AI definitions here.

Wonder and humility

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It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

Rachel Carson acceptance speech for the John Burroughs Medal, April 7, 1952

23 Recent Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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ChatGPT users have generated over 700M images since last week, OpenAI says - TechCrunch

Are LLM firewalls the future of AI security? – Computer Weekly

Google Gemini is shaking up its AI leadership ranks – Semafor  

More pre-training data may not always lead to better large language models - VentureBeat

A Big Coal Plant Was Just Imploded to Make Way for an AI Data Center – Wall Street Journal

Open source devs are fighting AI crawlers with cleverness and vengeance – TechCrunch

The AI Data-Center Boom Is Coming to America’s Heartland - Wall Street Journal 

We were promised “Star Trek,” so why did we settle for these lousy chatbots? – BigThink

Nvidia CEO Says AI Computing Needs to Surge 100-Fold - Wall Street Journal 

The Quest for A.I. ‘Scientific Superintelligence’ – New York Times  

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, acquires a generative AI video startup – TechCrunch 

OpenAI urges U.S. to allow AI models to train on copyrighted material – NBC  

Delays cast a cloud over Apple Intelligence - Axios

The tiny chips behind Amazon’s big AI investment – Semafor

China tells its AI leaders to avoid US travel over security concerns, WSJ reports – Reuters

ChatGPT firm reveals AI model that is ‘good at creative writing’ – The Guardian

Google looks to give AI its arms and legs - Axios 

New Chinese AI agent draws DeepSeek comparison - Axios 

A.I. Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Start-Ups - New York Times  

What the Dot-Com Bust Can Tell Us About Today’s AI Boom - Wall Street Journal 

GenAI synthetic data create ethical challenges for scientists – PNAS  

Turing Award Goes to 2 Pioneers of Artificial Intelligence – New York Times  

Just how badly OpenAI and Perplexity are screwing over publishers - Forbes

The Designer as Conductor

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The emergence and impact of AI isn’t about replacing designers. It’s about repositioning them. The future designer won’t be the one who can code every micro-animation by hand. They’ll be the one who can see the big picture, communicate it crisply, and orchestrate a system toward that vision. They’ll be less like a craftsman and more like a director or editor.  -Francesco Bertelli

18 Articles about How AI is Affecting Jobs

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Is AI eroding our critical thinking?

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As AI has grown more commonplace in everyday life, psychologists theorize that it reduces users’ engagement in deep, reflective thinking, causing their critical thinking skills to atrophy over time. If individuals use the cognitive resources freed up by AI for innovative tasks, the promise holds. However, studies suggest that many users channel these resources into passive consumption, driven by AI-enhanced content curation. This trend aligns with findings on digital dependence, where the convenience of AI fosters a feedback loop that prioritizes entertainment over critical engagement. While it enhances efficiency and convenience, it inadvertently fosters dependence, which can compromise critical thinking skills over time. -Ross Pomeroy writing in BigThink

Going in Circles

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When people get lost, they really do tend to walk in circles. German researchers discovered that volunteers who could not see the sun or moon often walked for hours in circles, sometimes in circles as small as 20 yards across. Some participants didn’t believe the researchers until they were shown proof.

What makes the difference are external signposts. Landmarks like the sun or moon completely changed the result.

One of the researchers offers this advice: “Don’t trust your senses. You might think you are walking in a straight line when you’re not.”

Isn’t that how life is? We know people who trust their senses and have no external guideposts to keep their lives on track. They believe they are marching forward, but all the while, they are going nowhere. They repeat the same mistakes. The people who get somewhere in life carefully choose their landmarks and trust these life-anchors.

Stephen Goforth

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

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No one is completely immune

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Psychological research shows that misinformation is cleverly designed to bypass careful analytical reasoning, meaning that it can easily slip under the radar of even the most intelligent and educated people. No one is completely immune. Indeed, there is now evidence that smarter people may sometimes be even more vulnerable to certain ideas, since their greater brainpower simply allows them to rationalise their (incorrect) beliefs. 

David Robson writing in The Guardian