AI Definition: RAGs

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Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) – RAGs (retrieval augmented generation) combine a retriever (used to collect relevant information from a document) and a generator (which compares the query vector to other known vectors, selecting the most similar ones), and then generates an answer to the user’s query. Rather than generating answers from a set of parameters, the RAG collects relevant information from the document. In effect, this coding technique instructs the bot to cross-check its answer with what is published elsewhere, essentially helping the AI to self-fact-check. RAG lets companies “ground” AI models in their own data, ensuring that results come from documents within the company, minimizing hallucinations.

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The Best AI Bot to Use

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"In a head-to-head test of AI bots, 'An AI tool’s capability in one field didn’t necessarily translate to another. ChatGPT, for example, might have been tops in politics and literature but ranked near the bottom in law. I’d also recommend running your document through at least two AI tools, so you can compare the results. And for anything that’s actually important in your life, it’s definitely worth taking the time to read it yourself.” - Geoffrey A. Fowler writing in the Washington Post 

AI Definitions: Agentic AI

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Agentic AI – Able to operate more independently than AI Agents, agentic AI adjusts its strategy and continuously “learns” as it encounters different situations. Agentic AI systems aren't passive tools waiting for input or mere automation. They can update plans based on intermediate findings without needing continuous human supervision. It’s not just following the rules as agents do, agentic AI is supposed to be a colleague that can analyze a problem, propose a plan, and take action. It might call out to additional models or external systems, such as a search engine or querying a database to complete a task. This can be particularly effective in data-heavy fields such as biology, chemistry, and drug discovery. On a personal level, instead of simply helping you find a hotel room to book, agentic AI can plan the trip if it is given access to programs with your schedule and preferences. Despite its capabilities, AI agents struggle in open-ended or unpredictable environments, especially when tasks lack clear structure or context. It will likely take years to for most agentic AI systems to be tailored to specific industries or problems.

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Encouraging Critical Thinking in Children

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If we want our children or students or employees to express themselves creatively, then we have to give them the opportunity to do so. It doesn’t matter much if we tell them that we value their creative thinking, and then criticize or forestall every idea they propose.

From time to time, I do workshops for teachers, parents, and businesses that are eager to encourage open-ended, exploratory, creative thinking. One unfavorable sign is when someone asks me exactly what they should do to encourage creativity. They want me to tell them step by step, blow by blow. Their desire is an unfavorable sign because if they want a recipe for creativity, the won’t find it. Moreover, someone who wants to be told exactly what to do is not likely to model a creative style, no matter how much they may wish to do so.

Ultimately, you must encourage creative thinking by modeling it. It is hard to encourage creative thinking if you do not model it.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

"I use ChatGPT for Comedy"

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"I use ChatGPT for comedy. It's not going to give me a finished joke, but it's going to start the conversation. I find it useful when I'm writing the setup for a joke. With a parody, it's not one-to-one. You're taking things that are different and exaggerating them. I was writing a roast speech for a guy at a coding conference. I asked ChatGPT to delve into the inside jokes of coding communities. What's amazing to me is I do not have writer's block anymore — like truly. I think writer's block is the feeling of solipsism and it is the feeling of being totally alone. And I don't feel alone anymore because of this tool." - Sarah Rose Siskind, comedian

21 Articles about AI & Legal Issues

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 Trouble with AI 'hallucinations' spreads to big law firms – Reuters

Alabama paid a law firm millions to defend its prisons. It used AI and turned in fake citations – The Guardian  

New Arizona law prevents AI from making health insurance denials – AZ Family 

Australian authors say no to AI using their work – even if money is on the table – The Conversation  

AI firms say they can’t respect copyright. These researchers tried. – Washington Post

Artificial Intelligence is now an A+ law student, study finds - Reuters

Arizona Supreme Court unveils AI avatars to announce rulings - Arizona PBS

In lawsuit over teen’s death, judge rejects arguments that AI chatbots have free speech rights – Associated Press  

Law&Crime Recreates Scenes From Diddy Trial With AI and Official Transcripts – Mediaite 

ChatGPT Turned Into a Studio Ghibli Machine. How Is That Legal? – The Atlantic

Deepfakes on trial: How judges are navigating AI evidence authentication -Reuters

Former school athletic director gets 4 months in jail in racist AI deepfake case – Associated Press

AI copyright report sparks new fight - Axios

White House fires head of Copyright Office amid Library of Congress shakeup – Washington Post

An AI-created video of a murdered man is used to deliver a victim's statement at a killer's sentencing – BBC

This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops – 404 Media

AI Can Assist Human Judges, But It Can’t Replace Them (Yet) – David Lat Blog

Lawyers face sanctions for citing fake cases with AI, warns UK judge – Reuters

White House fires Copyright Office leaders as controversial AI report surfaces – Mashable

Anthropic's lawyers take blame for AI 'hallucination' in music publishers' lawsuit – Reuters

Disney and Universal Sue A.I. Firm for Copyright Infringement – New York Times

What if the AI prompts You?

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You can prompt these tools to ask you questions, to get you thinking, to prompt you to start writing. The instinct is to say, 'Oh, this thing just writes for us.' But it can also ask me questions. It can also get me thinking and shape my ideas. What if instead of you being a prompt engineer, you see what it can prompt out of you? The Al can be a nonjudgmental collaborator that helps pull out these great, unique insights from you. -Stew Fortier, founder of Type.ai

AI Definitions: Training Data

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Training data – This is the data initially provided to an AI model so it can create a map of relationships, which it then uses to make predictions. Giving the AI a wide data means more options and may lead to more creative results. However, this can also make it more vulnerable to the insertion of poisoned data by hackers and make the model more susceptible to hallucinations. Using more curated, locked-down data sets makes AI models less vulnerable and more predictable but also less creative.  

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17 Articles about How AI Works

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Is Artificial General Intelligence Around the Corner?

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In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today’s technology were unlikely to lead to A.G.I. Scientists have no hard evidence that today’s technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Claims of A.G.I.’s imminent arrival are based on statistical extrapolations — and wishful thinking. -New York Times

Tough & Tender

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In some parts of American society, it is considered inappropriate for men to express any emotion save one—anger. When a man learns to express other feelings and not be so concerned about whether others think he is strong or “manly,” he takes a major step forward.

Sure, there’s a time and place to "come on strong and take no prisoners." But it's a denial of your humanity to oversimplify, hiding behind a narrow definition of manhood. Men are more complete when they are both tough and tender. Maturity comes with the understanding of which one is appropriate at what time. 

Stephen Goforth

24 Recent Articles about AI & Journalism

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Three newsrooms on generating AI summaries for news - Harvard’s Nieman Lab

More than 2 years after ChatGPT, newsrooms still struggle with AI’s shortcomings – CNN

Think AI is bad for journalism? This story might change your mind: Letter from the Editor -  Cleveland.com 

The New York Times has reached an AI licensing deal with Amazon – New York Times  

How this year’s Pulitzer awardees used AI in their reporting – Harvard’s Nieman Lab 

ChatGPT referral traffic to publishers’ sites has nearly doubled this year – Digiday

Politico’s Newsroom Is Starting a Legal Battle With Management Over AI – Wired  

Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist – 404 Media

A New Report Takes On the Future of News and Search: AI’s impact on platforms and publishers - Columbia Journalism Review   

Gannett Is Using AI to Pump Brainrot Gambling Content Into Newspapers Across the Country – Futurism

Americans largely foresee AI having negative effects on news, journalists – Pew Research Center  

A startup is using AI to summarize local city council meetings – Columbia Journalism Review   

Have journalists skipped the ethics conversation when it comes to using AI? – The Conversation

Tomorrow’s Publisher, a site about the future of news, is “powered by” an AI startup - Harvard’s Nieman Lab  

Why some journalists are embracing AI after all - IBM

Musk's xAI "will pay Telegram $300 million to deploy its Grok chatbot on the messaging app. – Reuters

AI learns how vision and sound are connected, without human intervention – MIT  

Teaching journalism students generative AI: why I switched to an “AI diary” this semester – Online Journalism Blog  

Patch’s big AI newsletter experiment - Harvard’s Nieman Lab 

Study Guide Supremacy Getting my news from ChatGPT - Columbia Journalism Review   

Journalism is facing its crisis moment with AI. It might not be a bad thing. – Poynter

AI-Generated Content in Journalism: The Rise of Automated Reporting - TRENDS Research & Advisory

AI-Generated Fake Book List Seems Funny, but Reflects the Technology’s Danger to Journalism – Pen America

Politico’s Newsroom Is Starting a Legal Battle With Management Over AI – Wired  

Journalists are using AI. They should be talking to their audience about it. – Poynter

AI Definitions: Abstractive Summarization

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Abstractive summarization (ABS) – A natural language processing summary technique generating new sentences not found in the source material. In contrast, extractive summarization sticks to the original text, identifying the important sections to produce a subset of sentences taken from the original text. Abstractive summarization is better when the meaning of the text is more important than exactness while extractive summarization is better when sticking to the original language is critical.

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25 Articles about AI & Ethics

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A Culture War is Brewing Over Moral Concern for AI – Undark  

And Plato met ChatGPT: an ethical reflection on the use of chatbots in scientific research writing, with a particular focus on the social sciences – Nature  

In lawsuit over teen’s death, judge rejects arguments that AI chatbots have free speech rights – Associated Press

Take Nature’s AI research test: find out how your ethics compare – Nature

‘We can’t tell if we’re being persuaded by a person or a program’ – University of Melbourne

AI poses new moral questions. Pope Leo says the Catholic Church has answers. – Washington Post 

NBC will use Jim Fagan’s AI-generated voice for NBA coverage –The Verge

Why misuse of generative AI is worse than plagiarism – Springer

Israel’s A.I. Experiments in Gaza War Raise Ethical Concerns – New York Times 

Anthropic just analyzed 700,000 Claude conversations — and found its AI has a moral code of its own – Venture Beat

I asked ChatGPT to invent 6 philosophical thought experiments – and now my brain hurts – Tech Radar 

Anthropic study reveals LLM reasoning isn’t always what it seems – TechTalks

As they push ahead with AI, health leaders must set rules on use – American Medical Association

AI: Uses, Ethics and Limitations – KUAF

What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works – The Atlantic

Have journalists skipped the ethics conversation when it comes to using AI? – The Conversation

The moral dimension of AI for work and workers – Brookings

My students think it’s fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they’re onto something. – Vox

AI poses new moral questions. Pope Leo says the Catholic Church has answers. – Washington Post

AI faces skepticism in end-of-life decisions, with people favoring human judgment – Medical Xpress

AI language model rivals expert ethicist in perceived moral expertise – Nature

Artificial Intelligence in courtrooms raises legal and ethical concerns – Associated Press          

Bridging philosophy and AI to explore computing ethics - MIT

AI is Making Medical Decisions — But For Whom? – Harvard Magazine

The Solution to the AI Alignment Problem Is in the Mirror – Psychology Today

Research: What Happens when Workers Use AI

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Our AI research findings carry important implications for the future of work. If employees consistently rely on AI for creative or cognitively challenging tasks, they risk losing the very aspects of work that drive engagement, growth, and satisfaction. Increased boredom, which our research showed following AI use, can also be a warning sign that these negative consequences might be on their way. The solution isn’t to abandon gen AI. Rather, it’s to redesign tasks and workflows to preserve humans’ intrinsic motivation while leveraging AI’s strengths. -Harvard Business Review