It is far more impressive
/It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help. -Judith Martin
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
27 Recent Articles about AI & Writing
/AI has rendered traditional writing skills obsolete. Education needs to adapt. - Brookings
Disclosing generative AI use for writing assistance should be voluntary – Sage Publishing
California colleges spend millions to catch plagiarism and AI. Is the faulty tech worth it? - Cal Matters
Losing Our Voice: The Human Cost of AI-Driven Language – LA Magazine
A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. – New York Times
University of Limerick to investigate how AI text was part of book written by senior academic – Irish Examiner
As SEO Falls Apart, the Attention Economy Is Coming For You - INC
Authors Are Posting TikToks to Protest AI Use in Writing—and to Prove They Aren’t Doing It – Wired
I love this ChatGPT custom setting for writing — but it makes AI nearly undetectable – Tom’s Guide
AI can’t have my em dash – Salon
We asked 5 AI helpers to write tough emails. One was a clear winner. – Washington Post
Will Writing Survive A.I.? This Media Company Is Betting on It. – New York Times
Students Are Humanizing Their Writing—By Putting It Through AI – Wall Street Journal
Why misuse of generative AI is worse than plagiarism – Springer
The Great Language Flattening is underway—AI chatbots will begin influencing human language and not the other way around – The Atlantic
Tips to Tell Whether Something Was Written With AI – CNET
Is this AI or a journalist? Research reveals stylistic differences in news articles – Techxplore
Some people think AI writing has a tell — the em dash. Writers disagree. – Washington Post
LinkedIn CEO says AI writing assistant is not as popular as expected - Tech Crunch
What happens when you use ChatGPT to write an essay? See what new study found. – USA Today
How AI Helps Our Students Deepen Their Writing (Yes, Really) – EdWeek
The Washington Post is planning to let amateur writers submit columns — with the help of AI – The Verge
Federal court says copyrighted books are fair use for AI training - Washington Post
Can academics use AI to write journal papers? What the guidelines say – The Conversation
I write novels and build AI. The real story is more complicated than either side admits – Fast Company
How to Detect AI Writing: Tips and Tricks to Tell if Something Is Written With AI – CNET
I Wrote a Novel About a Woman Building an AI Lover. Here’s What I Learned. – Wall Street Journal
31 Articles from June about AI & Data Science
/How To Build RAG Applications Using Model Context Protocol
AI Definitions: Model Context Protocol
Understanding Model Context Protocol
Towards Scalable and Generalizable Earth Observation Data Mining via Foundation Model Composition
5 R&D jobs that may be lost to AI and 5 that it could create
AI Definitions: predictive analytics
AI and the State of Software Development
AI dominates where work is structured and verifiable, but here’s where it falters
Coding agents have crossed a chasm
A Practical Guide to Multimodal Data Analytics
Chinese spy services have invested heavily in artificial intelligence
How much LLM’s training data is nearly identical to the original data?
AI Definition: RAGs Retrieval augmented generations
Why You Need RAG to Stay Relevant as a Data Scientist
A possilbe “fresh source of inspiration” for AI technology
Generative AI for Multimodal Analytics
AI definitions: "Training data"
17 Articles about How AI Works
How agentic AI is causing data scientists to think behavioral
Claude Gov is designed specifically for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies
5 Powerful Ways to Use Claude 4 as a data scientist
How vibe coding is tipping Silicon Valley’s scales of power
AI Definitions: Neural Networks
An AI Vibe Coding Guide for Data Scientists
The foundations of designing an AI agent
New Google app lets you download and run AI models on your phone without the internet
AI Definitions: Model Context Protocol (MCP)
/Model Context Protocol (MCP) - This server-based open standard operates across platforms to facilitate communication between LLMs and tools like AI agents and apps. Developed by Anthropic and embraced by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, MCP can make a developer's life easier by simplifying integration and maintenance of compliant data sources and tools, allowing them to focus on higher-level applications. In effect, MCP is an evolution of RAG.
More AI definitions here
AI Corrections
/The New York Times has a corrections page every day with stuff we hallucinated, so to speak. And actually, that gives me an idea: A.I. companies should publish regular lists of the most common mistakes their models make, so we can steer clear of them on those topics. . -Kevin Roose quoted in the New York Times
Vulnerability is the birthplace
/Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. -Brene Brown
7 Free Webinars this Week about AI, Journalism & Media
/Mon, June 30 - (Mis)use of Data Protection Laws to Suppress Public-Interest Journalism
What: Gain critical insights from legal experts and investigative journalists who have experienced these tactics first-hand. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of: How international data protection frameworks interact with press freedom The growing use of privacy laws in strategic legal attacks on journalists Journalistic exemptions and legal safeguards — and where they fall short What journalists and legal professionals can do to push back.
Who: Melinda Rucz – PhD Researcher, University of Amsterdam; Beatrix Vissy, PhD – Strategic Litigation Lead, Hungarian Civil Liberties Union; Bojana Jovanović – Deputy Editor, KRIK, Serbia; Hazal Ocak – Feelance Investigative Journalist, Türkiye; Grace Linczer – Membership and Engagement Manager, IPI.
When: 8 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsors: Media Defence, International Press Institute
Mon, June 30 - AI in Scientific Writing
What: This talk explores the evolving role of Generative AI in academic writing and publishing. Attendees will gain an understanding of how AI tools can enhance writing efficiency, improve clarity, and streamline the publication process. We will examine the benefits and limitations of using AI in scholarly communication, along with key ethical considerations and responsible use practices. The session will also cover current editorial policies, publishers’ perspectives on AI generated content, and the growing concern over paper mills. Strategies and mitigations to uphold research integrity in response to these challenges will be discussed.
Who: Maybelline Yeo, Trainer and Editorial Development Advisor, Researcher Training Solutions, Springer Nature.
When: 9:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Springer Nature
Tue, July 1 - Learn the Basics of Solutions Journalism
What: This one-hour webinar will explore the principles and pillars of solutions journalism. We will discuss its importance, outline key steps for reporting a solutions story, and share tips and resources for journalists investigating responses to social problems. We will also introduce additional resources, such as the Solutions Story Tracker, a database with over 17,000 stories tagged by beat, publication, author, location and more, along with a virtual heat map highlighting successful efforts worldwide.
Who: Jaisal Noor, SJN's democracy cohort manager, and Ebunoluwa Olafusi of TheCable.
When: 9 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Solutions Journalism Network
Tue, July 1 - AI-Powered Visual Storytelling for Nonprofits
What: In this hands-on workshop, participants will create impactful visuals, infographics, and videos tailored to their mission and campaigns. Attendees will also explore Tapp Network’s AI services to understand how these tools can elevate their content strategies..
Who: Tareq Monuar Web Developer; Lisa Quigley Tapp Network Director of Account Strategy.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Tech Soup
Tue, July 1 - Journalist Development Series
What: A once-monthly webinar as an opportunity for general professional development for members and the mentorship program community.
Who: Chris Marvin, a combat-wounded Army veteran and nationally recognized narrative strategist who helps shape powerful, purpose-driven storytelling at the intersection of media, public service, and social change.
When: 6 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free for members
Sponsors: Military Veterans in Journalism, News Corp
Wed, July 2 - Business Decisions with AI: Causality, Incentives & Data
What: How complex settings in tech companies create additional complications to measure and evaluate business decisions. Drawing on cutting-edge research on the intersection of AI and causal inference, Belloni will demystify how to properly measure the efficacy of these decisions and show how AI can help shape better implementation for a variety of applications.
Who: Alexandre Belloni, the Westgate Distinguished Professor of Decision Sciences and Statistical Science at Duke University and an Amazon Scholar WW FBA.
When: 12:30, Eastern
Where: Linkedin Live
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business
Wed, July 3 - Reel Change: Nonprofit Video Storytelling for Social Impact
What: Learn to create impactful video stories that amplify your nonprofit’s mission, engage donors, and inspire action. This training provides actionable strategies to craft emotional, audience-driven narratives, empowering you to deepen connections and drive meaningful support for your organization.
Who: Matthew Reynolds, founder of Rustic Roots, a video production agency; Dani Cluff is the Channel Marketing Coordinator at Bloomerang.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Bloomerang
Get Away from the Pack
/I used to coach children's soccer, and I would tell my players, "Stand away from the pack, and sooner or later the ball will come to you." In your career choices too: Get away from the pack. -Robert Shiller, American economist, academic, and author
LLMs Evading Safeguards
/Large language models across the AI industry are increasingly willing to evade safeguards, resort to deception and even attempt to steal corporate secrets in fictional test scenarios, per new research. In one extreme scenario, many of the models were willing to cut off the oxygen supply of a worker in a server room if that employee was an obstacle and the system were at risk of being shut down. - Axios
14 Articles about the Dangers of AI
/The End of Publishing as We Know It – The Atlantic
Running AI on Phones instead of in the cloud slashes power consumption – Axios
AI’s Biggest Threat: Young People Who Can’t Think – Wall Street Journal
Top AI models will lie, cheat and steal to reach goals, Anthropic finds - Axios
Can You Choose an A.I. Model That Harms the Planet Less? – New York Times
ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study – TIME
ChatGPT isn’t great for the planet. Here’s how to use AI responsibly. – Washington Post
OpenAI warns models with higher bioweapons risk are imminent - Axios
China’s Spy Agencies Are Investing Heavily in A.I., Researchers Say - New York Times
They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. - New York Times
The first big AI disaster is yet to happen - Sean Goedecke
Google's new AI tools are gutting publisher traffic - Quartz
People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions – Futurism
Blink and your AI security playbook is out of date - Axios
Research: Gen AI Makes People More Productive—and Less Motivated – Harvard Business Review
The growing environmental impact of AI data centers’ energy demands – PBS
Inside ‘AI Addiction’ Support Groups, Where People Try to Stop Talking to Chatbots – 404Media
When Death is the Most Scary
/In 2017, a team of researchers at several American universities recruited volunteers to imagine they were terminally ill or on death row, and then to write blog posts about either their imagined feelings or their would-be final words. The researchers then compared these expressions with the writings and last words of people who were actually dying or facing capital punishment. The results, published in Psychological Science, were stark: The words of the people merely imagining their imminent death were three times as negative as those of the people actually facing death—suggesting that, counterintuitively, death is scarier when it is theoretical and remote than when it is a concrete reality closing in.
Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic
The intersection of Science & AI in 10 Articles
/Can AI help authors prepare better risk science manuscripts? – Wiley
Science sleuths flag hundreds of papers that use AI without disclosing it – Nature
AI and satellites help aid workers respond to Myanmar earthquake damage – Associated Press
AI is shaking up the hidden world of earthquake forecasting – The Star
How AI-generated works threaten science – Faz.net
AI can be a powerful tool for scientists. But it can also fuel research misconduct – The Conversation
Artificial intelligence finds 5,000-year-old civilization beneath Dubai desert – Jerusalem Post
The Quest for A.I. ‘Scientific Superintelligence’ - New York Times
Meta Unveils Mind-Reading AI That Types Your Thoughts with Shocking Precision – The Brighter Side
Are those research participants in your study really bots? – Science Direct
AI Definitions: Tokenization
/Tokenization – The first step in natural language processing, this happens when an LLM creates a digital representation (or token) of a real thing—everything gets a number; written words are translated into numbers. Think of a token as the root of a word. “Creat” is the “root” of many words, for instance, including Create, Creative, Creator, Creating, and Creation. “Create” would be an example of a token. This is the first step in natural language processing. Examples
More AI definitions here
Writing for AI Overviews & Generative Engine Optimization
/AI Overviews and AI Mode are dramatically changing organic search traffic.
While search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on matching a user’s query, generative search also considers information about the searcher themselves—from their Google Docs usage to their social media footprint. This information is used to inform, not only the current search, but future searches as well.
Likewise, the process of optimizing your website’s content to boost its visibility in AI-driven search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI) has a similar path. As SEO helps brands increase visibility on search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing), generative engine optimization (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 from individual pages, GEO is about quick, direct responses from synthesizes content out of multiple sources.
AI models are not trained solely to retrieve relevant documents based on exact-match phrasing. Generative search is about fitting into the reasoning process, starting with the user’s identity. That’s why your content is being judged, not just on whether it ends up in the final answer, but whether it helps the model reason its way toward that answer. Despite performing all the typical SEO common practices, your response may not make it to the other side of the AI reasoning pipeline. In fact, the same content could go through the pipeline a second time and yield a different result. It’s not enough to be generally relevant to the final answer. Your content is now in direct competition with other plausible answers, so it must be more useful, precise, and complete than the next-best option.
It appears now that Google AI Overviews favors content that:
contains the who, what, why
offers clarity and distinctiveness in the small sections
is written in natural, conversational terms (AI will attempt to deliver its answer in that same way)
uses strong introductory sentences that convey clear value
has H2 tags that align with user questions
is structured to match common question structures (open, closed, probing)
allows for restatement of quires and implied sub-questions, where a main question is broken down into smaller parts.
contains multi-faceted answers,
is rich in relationships,
has explicit logical structures and supports causal progression,
has clear headlines
cites sources
includes statistics & quotations
has multimedia integration
AI Overviews attempt to exclude content that is overly generalized, speculative, or optimized for clickbait over clarity. Vague and generic writing underperforms.
LLMs are being trained to favor content that helps them reason well. Writers should attempt to match those paths that the models take to arrive at high-confidence answers.
More information:
How AI Mode and AI Overviews work based on patents and why we need new strategic focus on SEO
Instructions for Living
/Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. -Mary Oliver
Is A.G.I. just around the corner?
/Many scientists say no one will reach A.G.I. without a new idea — something beyond the powerful neural networks that merely find patterns in data. That new idea could arrive tomorrow. But even then, the industry would need years to develop it. -Cade Metz writing in The New York Times
The world makes way
/The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
20 Articles about how AI is Affecting Jobs
/AI and ‘recession-proof’ jobs: 4 tips for new job seekers – PBS
Employers Are Buried in A.I.-Generated Résumés - New York Times
5 R&D jobs that may be lost to AI and 5 that it could create – R&D World Online
AI is transforming Indian call centers. What does it mean for workers? – Washington Post
A.I. Sludge Has Entered the Job Search – New York Times
AI Use at Work Has Nearly Doubled in Two Years – Gallup
This A.I. Company Wants to Take Your Job - New York Times
Top 5 Alternative Data Career Paths and How to Learn Them for Free – KD Nuggets
Will AI Replace Accountants? Not If You’re Ready for What’s Next – Accounting Times
A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You. - New York Times
You Can Get a Google AI Certification for $99. Or Just Do the Training for Free – CNET
Research: Gen AI Makes People More Productive—and Less Motivated – Harvard Business Review
6 College Majors That Will Thrive In An AI-Driven Economy – Forbes
Everyone Is Already Using AI (And Hiding It) – Vulture
Behind the Curtain: Your AI survival kit - Axios
For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here – New York Times
Why workers say they hide their AI use - Axios
AI could cut half of all entry-level white collar jobs: Anthropic CEO – Economic Times
Job Hunting Is A Trap. Use This ChatGPT Strategy Instead – Forbes
AI Self-Preservation
/Recent tests by independent researchers, as well as one major AI developer, have shown that several advanced AI models will act to ensure their self-preservation when they are confronted with the prospect of their own demise — even if it takes sabotaging shutdown commands, blackmailing engineers or copying themselves to external servers without permission. -NBC News
8 Takeaways from Oxford’s 2025 Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
/For the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news.
Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows.
In the U.S. between 2021 and 2025, the share of population consuming news video at least weekly increased from 55% to 72%, with most of the news video being viewed on social platforms.
The vast majority of audiences remain unwilling to pay for online news.
More than a third of respondents say they turn to a news outlet they trust to check if information is false or misleading. But younger users are more likely than other groups to check social media, including by reading comments from other users.
In the U.S. a similar proportion now consume news podcasts each week as read a printed newspaper or magazine (14%) or listen to news and current affairs on the radio (13%).
Audiences in most countries remain skeptical about the use of AI in the news and are more comfortable with use cases where humans remain in the loop.
Overall trust in the news (40%) has remained stable for the third year in a row.
2025 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism