Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
“By the end of the first two weeks of the semester, Smith had whittled down the 104 students enrolled in her classes, including those on the waitlist, to just 15. The rest, she’d concluded, were fake students, often referred to as bots. ‘It’s a surreal experience and it’s just heartbreaking,’ Smith said. ‘I’m not teaching, I’m playing a cop now.’” - Voice of San Diego
We analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that the presence of an AI Overview in the search results correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview. -Ryan Law
Multimodal AI – These AI models are trained on different types of data simultaneously—such as images, video, audio, and text. The result is that the AI can “act” more like a human, behaving in more personal ways and can multitask. For instance, when given a question through an image it might respond with a video or audio.
More AI definitions here.
When people are exposed to a more diverse group of people, their brains are forced to process complex and unexpected information. The more people do this, the better they become at producing complex and unexpected information themselves. This trains us to look more readily look beyond the obvious - precisely the hallmark of creative thinking.
Researchers have also found that creating and enjoying the arts can help us see things from a new perspective, by putting ourselves in a character's shoes. They can also create a feeling of connectedness and general kindness.
Opening ourselves to new experiences can seem hard to do, but it can help us cross divides and nurture new and inclusive friendships.
Julie Van de Vyver & Richard Crisp writing in BBC News
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little. -Sydney Smith
Teachers Worry About Students Using A.I. But They Love It for Themselves. – New York Times
Gen Z Wary of AI Effects, Wants More Guidance From School, Work – Inside Higher Ed
Students Found Out AI Will Help Read Their Names at Commencement. Protest Ensued. – Chronicle of Higher Ed
China makes AI education mandatory in schools starting Sept 1, 2025 – Asaase Radio
Why parents are teaching their gen Alpha kids to use AI – The Guardian
What Students Are Saying About A.I. and the Future of Work – New York Times
State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear "pro-Hamas" – Axios
ChatGPT for students: learners find creative new uses for chatbots – Nature
Assessing AI-Driven Approaches to Student Mental Health – Dartmouth
After offering AI detection, Turnitin offers new AI Product – Business Insider
How To Help College-Bound Students Build AI Literacy – Forbes
AI Anxiety Can writing at Harvard coexist with new technologies? – Harvard Magazine
Chegg bets big on the AI that nearly broke it – Semafor
Minnesota Grad Student Expelled for Allegedly Using AI Is Suing School - Gozmodo
Half of institution doesn’t grant students access to AI tools – Inside Higher Ed
Teachers warn AI is impacting students' critical thinking – Axios
Are Students Cheating When They Use A.I. for Their Schoolwork? – New York Times
Artists should engage in debates about AI, not about how to stop this – that's folly – but about how to figure out the right monetization mechanism for this new world. Just as Google created a new economy based around the notion of links and clicks, paid for by new forms of advertising, these AI tools are already creating a new economy around creation and information and delegation (and likely every other “ion”, eventually).
People are increasingly paying for such newfangled tools and services, which is great, as that probably wouldn’t have been the case 20 years ago, when the rails weren’t yet in place. Now to figure out the flip side: how to get people paid for helping to power such things. – MG Siegler writing in Spyglass
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. -ee cummings
Making AI-generated code more accurate in any language – MIT
10 No-Code AI Agents to Build Apps in 2025 – AI Agents
There is no Vibe Engineering - SerCe's blog
The Decline of Stack Overflow - Tomaž Weiss
Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding – Simon Willison
Not a Coder? With A.I., Just Having an Idea Can Be Enough. – New York Times
Google launches AI-powered coding for free – here’s how to try it – Tom’s Guide
The Career Ladder for Software Engineers Is Collapsing - Business Insider
How to keep AI hallucinations out of your code – InfoWorld
The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly
The future belongs to idea guys who can just do things – Geoffrey Huntley
AI Killed The Tech Interview. Now What? – Karen Arraway
Sam Altman says students should master AI tools the way his generation learned to code – Business Insider
You can now download the source code that sparked the AI boom – ArshTechnica
Transformers – A 2017 Google research paper first discussed the deep learning architecture known as transformers. The major AI models (including Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and GPT-4) are built using these neural networks. Previously, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) processed data sequentially—one word at a time, in the order in which the words appear. Then, an “attention mechanism” was added so the model could consider the relationships between words. When transformers came along, they advanced this process by analyzing all the words in a given body of text at the same time rather than in sequence. Transformers made it possible to create higher-quality language models that could be trained more efficiently and with more customizable features. A troubling downside to transformers is their need for ever increasing power demands. This is why some researchers are looking for alternatives like test-time training (TTT).
More AI definitions here.
An AI-powered tool for identifying and monitoring the critically endangered species – Data Innovation
Testing smart heat pumps that use AI to run more efficiently – Energy Live News
Thanks to Nvidia, AI Will Soon Take Your Order at Taco Bell and Pizza Hut - Wall Street Journal
The 2025 AI Index Report - Stanford
What's behind the push for AI in home appliances? – NPR
AI is coming to skin cancer detection – Washington Post
AI Agents Are a Moment of Truth for Tech – Wall Street Journal
The Quest for A.I. ‘Scientific Superintelligence’ – New York Times
AI ‘wingmen’ bots to write profiles and flirt on dating apps – The Guardian
How AI Can Protect Vital Pipelines and Cables Deep in the Ocean - Wall Street Journal
Amazon testing an AI dubbing system to translate content into other languages – Engadget
Having AI Mock Up An Old Game Is Not The Same As Preserving It – Tech Dirt
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (April 23 is World Book Day)
“The em dash is such a powerful writing tool that also carries great subtlety to it,” said Aileen Gallagher, a journalism professor at Syracuse University. “The idea that it is an indicator of soulless, dead AI-generated writing is really upsetting to me. Moniza Hossain, a children’s author based in Britain, called the em dash her “emotional support punctuation mark.” -Washington Post
Last year, I sat in a faculty meeting while a guest lecturer gleefully explained how they had used AI to design their class, craft PowerPoint presentations, and develop exams. At the end of the presentation, a colleague leaned over and asked, “Then what’s our job?” I have thought long and hard about that question. If faculty hope to survive, much less prosper, in the age of AI, they need to come up with a compelling answer to that question: “What’s our job?” -Scott Latham writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Two avid sports fans plan to travel 40 miles to see a basketball game. One of them paid for his ticket: the other was on his way to purchase a ticket when he got one free from a friend. A blizzard is announced for the night of the game. Which of the two ticket holders is more likely to brave the blizzard to see the game?
The answer is immediate: we know that the fan who paid for his ticket is more likely to drive. Mental accounting provides the explanation. We assume that both fans set up an account for the game they hoped to see. Missing the game will close the accounts with a negative balance. Regardless of how they came by their ticket, both will be disappointed – but the closing balance is distinctly more negative for the one who bought a ticket and is now out of pocket as well as deprived of the game. Because staying home is worse for this individual, he is more motivated to see the game and therefore more likely to make the attempt to drive into a blizzard.
The emotions that people attach to the state of their mental accounts are not acknowledged in standard economic theory. An Econ would realize that the ticket has already been paid for and cannot be returned. Its cost is “sunk” and the Econ would not care whether he had bought the ticket to the game or got it from a friend (if Econs have friends). To implement this rational behavior, (the fan) would have to be aware of the counterfactual possibility. “Would I still drive into this snowstorm if I had gotten the ticket free from a friend?” It takes an active disciplined mind to raise such a difficult question.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
AI bots are overwhelming some journals – C&EN
AI research summaries ‘exaggerate findings’, study warns – Times Higher Ed
A Scanning Error Created a Fake Science Term—Now AI Won’t Let It Die - Gizmodo
AI is transforming peer review — and many scientists are worried – Nature
A Shortcut or a Level Up? Harvard Faculty Debate Generative AI in Academia – The Crimson
Publishers Embrace AI as Research Integrity Tool – Inside Higher Ed
AI tools are spotting errors in research papers: inside a growing movement – Nature
AI search summaries cannibalise academic publishers’ web traffic – Times Higher Ed
An academic paper written by AI passed peer review — but it’s a bit more nuanced than that – Tech Crunch
Trying to Write an Academic Paper with LLM Assistance – Scholarly Kitchen
Academic publishers warn against AI copyright plans - Research Professional News – Research Professional News
AI detectors are poor western blot classifiers: a study of accuracy and predictive values – PeerJ
Will AI jeopardize science photography? – Nature
Can AI Solve the Peer Review Crisis? - IZA Institute of Labor Economics
Publishers need to provide guidelines on use of AI in research, says Wiley – Chemistry World
ChatGPT to help peer review scientific studies in UK Government trial – Telegraph
Generative artificial intelligence usage guidelines for scholarly publishing: a cross-sectional study of medical journals – BMC Medicine
Retractions Increase 10-Fold in 20 Years - and Now AI is Involved – AAPS News
A viral video reveals how an AI-generated mistake led to nearly two dozen flawed research papers – Economic Times
Is AI the new research scientist? Not so, according to a human-led study. – University of Florida
The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Academic Writing and Publishing Papers – Research Gate
Generative engine optimization (GEO) – This is the process of optimizing your website’s content to boost its visibility in AI-driven search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI). As SEO helps brands increase visibility on search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing) while GEO is all about how brands appear on AI-driven platforms. There is overlap between the goals of GEO and traditional SEO. Both SEO and GEO use keywords and prioritize engaging content as well as conversational queries and contextual phrasing. Both consider how fast a website loads, mobile friendliness, and prefer technically sound website. However, while SEO is concerned with metatags and links in response to user queries, GEO is about quick, direct responses from synthesizes content out of multiple sources.
More AI definitions here.
Create a life for yourself that leaves room to do the things that you love.
Christ did not, like a moralist, love a theory of good, but he loved the real man. He was not, like a philosopher, interested in the universally valid, but rather in that which is of help to the real and concrete human being. What worried him was not, like Kant, whether the "maxim of an action can become a principle of general legislation," but whether my action is at this moment helping my neighbor to become a man before God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
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