Using AI to Flesh Out Half-Baked Ideas

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I’ve always found it easier to work out my ideas through dialogue, but not many people are interested in hearing my half-baked ideas. That is why I’ve found that talking through ideas is one of the best uses of AI for writers. NotebookLM takes the idea of talking to the archive to the next level: The archive you chat with is one you assemble yourself with sources for a particular project, which the AI can also help you collect to get started. -Jonathan D. Fitzgerald on Mashable 

AI Citing News Outlets

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"AI responses to fact-based queries and prompts are more likely to cite news outlets. The outlets most cited include Reuters, the Financial Times, Time, Axios, Forbes and the Associated Press. In this new GEO [generative engine optimization] world, recent content or news stories are what's driving the answers. LinkedIn, Reddit and Glassdoor — places where user-generated content and reviews can be found — can also influence an LLM's response." -Axios

20 Recent Articles about the Impact of AI on Health Care

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An AI-Generated Protein Helps T Cells Kill Cancer – The-Scientist

AI is helping patients fight insurance company denials – NBC News

ChatGPT Tells Pregnant Woman To 'Call an Ambulance'—Saves Their Lives - Newsweek

An Artificial Intelligence Code of Conduct for Health and Medicine –  National Academy of Medicine

Mayo Clinic develops AI tool that can identify 9 dementia types with a single scan – R & D World Online 

Abridge, Whose AI App Takes Notes for Doctors, Valued at $5.3 Billion at Funding – Wall Street Journal  

AI tool diagnoses nine types of dementia with 88% accuracy using a single PET scan – Technology Networks 

Finding viable sperm in infertile men can take days. AI did it in hours. – Washington Post  

AlphaGenome is an AI-powered platform aiming to predict how genetic code variants lead to different diseases – Stat News  

Doctors Report the First Pregnancy Using a New AI Procedure – TIME  

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

WVU researchers test AI’s limits in emergency room diagnoses – West Virginia University 

The expanding role of AI in dentistry: beyond image analysis – Nature

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

Explainability in the age of large language models for healthcare - Nature 

It’s too easy to make AI chatbots lie about health information, study finds – Reuters

AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors – MIT Tech Review 

Doctors at Cedars-Sinai develop AI-powered mental health ‘robot’ therapist – LA Times

Microsoft Says Its New AI System Diagnosed Patients 4 Times More Accurately Than Human Doctors – Wired

A GPT-powered medical device certified in Europe raises questions about generative AI in health care – Stat News

The fear that AI will Flatten Everything

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I understand the fear that AI will flatten everything — our voices, our culture, even our humanity. It’s a genuine concern. When algorithms prioritize patterns over personality, the result can be unnervingly uniform. Language becomes smooth but soulless. Distinctiveness gets edited out. And yet — I don’t believe the story ends there. History tells us something else: that when more people can express themselves, culture expands. The spectrum widens. And over time, we find new ways to value voice, not just polish. Yes, we’ll have to work harder to preserve individuality. To notice when we’re defaulting to the safe or generic. -Youjin Nam writing in Medium

AI & Liberal Arts

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In a liberal arts education, the student herself is the product. 

Instead of creating a product, humanities education is different. The students themselves are what’s getting created and recreated through the learning process.

A liberal arts education is to be personally transformative by cultivating virtues. 

Aristotle saw education as a pursuit that’s personally transformative. He believed the most fundamental goal was not just imparting knowledge, but cultivating virtues that make for a flourishing life. 

A product-based, utilitarian vision of college is inadequate. 

A college must be a place where the goal of flourishing lies underneath the assignments, the tests, the discussions, the feedback, the clubs, and the social structure. Using generative AI in the classroom threatens to leave out of the process something vital: friction. Cognitive automation threatens to minimize cognitive friction.

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Game Theory & Pascal’s Wager

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Pascal’s argument (written in the 1600’s) went like this: Suppose you concede that you don’t know whether or not God exists and therefore assign a 50 percent chance to either proposition How should you weight these odds when decided whether to lead a pious life? If you act piously and God exists, Pascal argued, your gain – eternal happiness - is infinite. If, on the other hand, God does not exist, your loss, or negative return, is small – the sacrifices of piety. To weigh these possible gains and losses, Pascal proposed, you multiply the probability of each possible outcomes by its payoff and add them all up, forming a kind of average or expected payoff. 

In other words, the mathematical expectation of your return on piety is one-half infinity (your gain if God exists) minus one-half a small number (your loss if he does not exist). Pascal knew enough about infinity to know that the answer to this calculation is infinite, and thus the expected return on piety is infinitely positive. Every reasonable person, Pascal concluded, should therefore follow the laws of God. Today this argument is know as Pascal’s wager. 

Pascal’s wager is often considered the founding of the mathematical discipline of game theory, the quantitative study of optimal decision strategies in games.

Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

17 Recent Articles about the Dangers of AI

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Teens & AI Companionship

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“In interviews with The Associated Press and a new study, teenagers say they are increasingly interacting with AI as if it were a companion, capable of providing advice and friendship. ‘Everyone uses AI for everything now. It’s really taking over,’ said Kayla Chege, a high school student in Kansas, who wonders how AI tools will affect her generation. ‘I think kids use AI to get out of thinking.’ More than 70% of teens have used AI companions and half use them regularly, according to a new study from Common Sense Media.” -Associated Press

AI Definitions: Natural Language Processing

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Natural language processing - This type of machine learning transfers language into numbers to make it intelligible to machines. The first step is tokenization, where text is divided into word units called tokens. These tokens are then transformed into vectors. These vectors are lists of numbers. A single word token might be represented by more than 1,000 numbers in a vector. The vector is considered to have a higher dimension when many numbers are used. The meaning is therefore nuanced. A low dimension for a vector means the list of numbers is low. While a low dimension is not as nuanced, it is easier to work with. A deep learning model (typically a transformer model) can use these vectors to understand the meaning of words and determine how the words relate to one other. An example would be “king “relates to “man” while “queen” relates to “woman.”

More AI definitions here

What the Humanities are For

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As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” It’s a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision. The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You’re in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character. -Sigal Samuel writing in Vox

China's AI Lead

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"China has taken a commanding lead in the exploding field of artificial intelligence (AI) research, despite U.S. restrictions on exporting key computing chips to its rival, finds a new report. In 2000, China-based scholars produced just 671 AI papers, but in 2024 their 23,695 AI-related publications topped the combined output of the United States (6378), the United Kingdom (2747), and the European Union (10,055). U.S. influence in AI research is declining, with China now dominating." -Science.org

I like your style

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Many of us have had the experience of being in a close relationship with someone for whom we could hardly ever do anything right, and also being with other people for whom we could hardly ever do anything wrong. Yet both kinds of people are likely to think about what they value is what really should be valued in an interpersonal relationship.

Often, the difference in what they value is question of style. People tend not to recognize this fact, however. They confuse what they value with what is “right.” 

One person may feel very comfortable with someone who is highly organized, whereas another person feels bored and cramped with the same highly organized person. One person may love to interact with someone who flits from idea to idea and can never finish a sentence, while another person may feel highly frustrated by the same individual.

One person may like someone who is evaluative and often points out the strengths and weaknesses of friends, while another person feels threatened by the same individual. Compatibility in relationships often means finding someone who appreciates not only who we are, in general, but the styles we have, in particular.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles