26 Articles about Amazing Things AI can do now

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How Google Used AI to Re-Create ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for the Las Vegas Sphere – Wall Street Journal  

New AI chips transfer data using light instead of electricity for greater speed – Reuters

New AI algorithm to predict risk of cardiovascular events, heart-related death – AP 7am

AI is shaking up the hidden world of earthquake forecasting – The Star

This new AI tool changes a speaker's accent to American English in real-time - hear for yourself – Zdet  

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

Arizona Supreme Court taps AI avatars to make the judicial system more publicly accessible – Associated Press 

Agibot unveils AI model that allows humanoid robots to perform real-world tasks – SCMP  

How A.I. Is Changing the Way the World Builds Computers - New York Times

Artificial intelligence finds 5,000-year-old civilization beneath Dubai desert – Jerusalem Post

AI made its way to vineyards. Here’s how the technology is helping make your wine – Associated Press 

Google Cloud unveils AI-powered weather predictions - Axios 

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

Duke Health develops AI model that predicts mental health illness risks for adolescents – CBS 17  

AI can outperform humans in predicting correlations between personality items – Nature

McDonald’s Gives Its Restaurants an AI Makeover - Wall Street Journal

These AI powered earbuds pack a secret — you can record and translate speech – Tom’s Guide  

Earth AI is using AI algorithms to identify overlooked deposits of critical minerals – Tech Crunch   

Surveillance software uses machine learning and motion analysis to help retailers catch shoplifters – Financial Times

A weather model that offers a faster and more efficient alternative to traditional forecasting methods – The Register 

A small robot can be used to detect and potentially treat cancers found in the large intestine – Medical Express  

A new AI tool helps recruitment agencies automate outreach and follow-ups - Financial Times

Krisp is using AI to change user accents during phone calls in real-time. - Tech Crunch  

Scientists in the UK have developed an AI model that speeds up the diagnosis of coeliac disease – The Guardian

AI and satellites help aid workers respond to Myanmar earthquake damage – Associated Press

Meta Unveils Mind-Reading AI That Types Your Thoughts with Shocking Precision – The Brighter Side

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

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

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

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

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 

Why Humans are Better Storytellers Than AI

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Literary agent Jamie Carr of the Book Group describes great storytelling as something that makes “connections between things and ideas that are totally nonsensical — which is something only humans can do.” Can ChatGPT bring together disparate parts of your life and use a summer job to illuminate a fraught friendship? Can it link a favorite song to an identity crisis? So far, nope. Crucially, ChatGPT can’t do one major thing that all my clients can: have a random thought. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this” is something I love to hear from students, because it means I’m about to go on a wild ride that only the teenage brain can offer. It’s frequently in these tangents about collecting cologne or not paying it forward at the Starbucks drive-thru that we discover the key to the essay. I often describe my main task as helping students turn over stones they didn’t know existed, or stones they assumed were off-limits. ChatGPT can’t tap into the unpredictable because it can only turn over the precise stones you tell it to — and if you’re issuing these orders, chances are you already know what’s under the stone. 

Sanibel Chai writing in New York Magazine

Do I have Value?

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To say a person has worth or value formulates only half a sentence. It begs two questions and raises a third: Worth what? To whom? Who says? These questions reveal a search for a source, a valuer, an authority behind the action of attaching worth. This quest implies our awareness of a person larger than us, who initiates relationships with us. Our parents stood as the original superhumans in whose eyes we wanted much worth. Now as adults, when we feel worthless, we ache with the dangling half-question. Do I have any value?  We used to seek evidence from Mom and Dad of our importance to them. Though we no longer look to them as our source, we have not yet identified a new one. We spin our wheels with the unanswered questions of our half-sentences. We wistfully yearn for some authority to come along and fill those gaps that our parents left.

Dennis Gibson, The Strong-Willed Adult