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

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

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

/

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

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

What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

20 Articles about how AI is Affecting Jobs

/

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

17 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators

/

Chief AI Officer: Higher Ed’s New Leadership Role - GovTech

Crafting Thoughtful AI Policy in Higher Education: A Guide for Institutional Leaders – Faculty Focus

The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting: Artificial intelligence is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it – The Atlantic 

How Higher Ed Institutions Are Using Built-In Generative AI Tools – EdTech Magazine

AI Agents Are Set To Transform Higher Education—Here’s How – Forbes

Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT. – New York Times

OpenAI, the firm that helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State. - New York Times

What I Learned Serving on My University’s AI Committee – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI and Threats to Academic Integrity: What to Do – Inside Higher Ed

How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future - New York Times

In Battle Against AI-Powered Fraudsters, Colleges Turn to New Weapon – AI – Voice of San Diego

Boston University Denies It Would Use AI to Replace Striking Teaching Assistants – Inside Higher Ed  

Are You Ready for the AI University? – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Students Found Out AI Will Help Read Their Names at Commencement. Protest Ensued. – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

How To Stay Ahead Of AI – The Human Skills Universities Must Teach - Forbes 

To ‘publish or perish’, do we need to add ‘AI or die’? – Times Higher Ed

As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond – Voice of San Diego