Years that Ask
/There are years that ask questions and years that answer. -Zora Neale Hurston
Humans v Machines
/Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, both small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before. -Cade Metz writing in the New York Times
Measuring Intelligence
/People have been measuring what they believe is intelligence without having a really firm understanding of what it is that they are measuring. Many theorists in psychology believe that conventional tests of intelligence measures only a relatively narrow aspect of intelligence. The result is that what we may take as a difference between two people in their levels of intelligence may reflect only a difference in a fairly small portions of their levels of intelligence.
Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles
The Best AI Bot to Use
/"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
Encouraging Critical Thinking in Children
/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"
/"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
/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
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
To Live Totally
/In order to live totally, we must face death totally. -Eugene Peterson
Identifying AGI
/Scientists cannot even agree on a way of defining human intelligence, arguing endlessly over the merits and flaws of I.Q. tests and other benchmarks. Comparing our own brains to machines is even more subjective. This means that identifying A.G.I. is essentially a matter of opinion. -Cade Metz writing in the New York Times
What if the AI prompts You?
/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
Two Kinds of Prisoners
/In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addictions and the prisoners of envy. - Ivan Illich
To be Human
/To be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. - D. Graham Burnett writing in The New Yorker
Is Artificial General Intelligence Around the Corner?
/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
/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
Making a Life
/We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give. –Winston Churchill
Research: What Happens when Workers Use AI
/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
The irrational ideas that motivate anger
/According to Albert Ellis, the most common irrational ideas behind anger are the following:
1. Others must treat me considerately and kindly and in precisely the way I want them to treat me.
2. I must do well and win the approval of others or else I will rate as a rotten person.
3. The world and the people in it must arrange conditions under which I live, so that I get everything I want when I want it.
As their anger slows down, people should challenge irrational thoughts with statements such as:
What evidence exists for this? Why can't I stand this noise or this unfairness?
Gary Collins, Counseling and Anger
Permission
/Impending death gives permission to feel, to let go, to recognize what’s important.
"Current AI Detectors are Not Ready"
/"A new study of a dozen A.I.-detection services by researchers at the University of Maryland found that they had erroneously flagged human-written text as A.I.-generated about 6.8 percent of the time, on average. 'At least from our analysis, current detectors are not ready to be used in practice in schools to detect A.I. plagiarism,' said Soheil Feizi, an author of the paper and an associate professor of computer science at Maryland." -New York Times
Academic Leaders Disagree on Students using AI
/“What constitutes legitimate use of AI and what is out of bounds? Academic leaders don’t always agree whether hypothetical scenarios described appropriate uses of AI or not: For one example—in which a student used AI to generate a detailed outline for a paper and then used the outline to write the paper—the verdict (in a recent survey) was completely split.” -Inside Higher Ed