AI definitions: Generative AI

/

Generative AI (GenAI) - Artificial intelligence that can produce media content (text, images, audio, video, etc.) by predicting patterns based on huge amounts of data. It doesn’t actually think or create in the way humans do, but it mimics the human brain. As a statistical prediction engine, it operates like the “type ahead” feature on smartphones that makes next-word suggestions. You might say it is like autocomplete at scale that remembers what you've written or said, so the interaction between the user and the AI has a dynamic conversational feel. The ability for it to go back and forth allows users to refine and tweak the requests. Like Wikipedia, it mashes together various sources using statistics. The key difference between generative AI and other types of AI is that generative AI focuses on creating new data, rather than simply analyzing or processing existing data.

More AI definitions here

25 Recent Articles about AI & Journalism

/

Traffic Apocalypse  Google’s AI Overviews are killing click-throughs to news sites. – Columbia Journalism Review

How journalists can spot and mitigate AI bias - Reuters

What Tools Can Newsrooms Use to Evaluate Generative AI Prompts? – Generative AI Newsroom

Amazon to Pay New York Times at Least $20 Million a Year in AI Deal - Wall Street Journal 

Meta Exec Joins BBC News For Key Artificial Intelligence Role- Deadline 

What Legacy Newsrooms Can Learn from Social Media Creators – Nieman Reports  

iOS 26 beta 4 arrives, with Liquid Glass tweaks and AI news summaries – Tech Crunch 

What news sources AI chat bots read – Axios

Beyond the Hype: What AI Can and Can’t Do for Journalism – What’s New in Publishing 

The struggle over AI in journalism is escalating – Blood in the Machine

How Google AI Overviews is fuelling zero-click searches for top publishers – Press Gazette

Argentina’s President Joins A.I.-Fueled Smear Campaign Against Journalist – New York Times  

ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines - Tech Crunch 

The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work – 404 Media

Law360 mandates reporters use AI “bias” detection on all stories - Nieman Lab 

AI, Search and the Future of News Once again, distinctiveness is the best defense – Second Rough Draft 

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools – Wall Street Journal  

A new tool lets your favorite AI model talk with 2 million articles from The Guardian - Nieman Lab

The Newspaper That Hired ChatGPT – The Atlantic  

AI is giving local news a second chance. Will it be ready this time? – Poynter 

Journalist says 4,000 fake AI news websites created to game Google algorithms – Press Gazette 

AI is polluting truth in journalism. Here’s how to disrupt the misinformation feedback loop. – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Politico's Owner Is Embarrassing Its Journalists With Garbled AI Slop – Futurism

Generative AI models love to cite Reuters and Axios, study finds - Nieman Lab

When AI Gives an Answer, No One Cares About the Source: News outlets get left out when AI turns a search engine into an answer engine. – US News

TV channel launches Germany's first completely AI-generated news programme - NotebookCheck.net

Using AI to Flesh Out Half-Baked Ideas

/

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

/

"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 Articles about how AI is Affecting Jobs

/

Job listings looking for people with AI skills are rising fast – CBS News

How AI is impacting 700 professions — and might impact yours – Washington Post  

One in 12 US/UK Employees Uses Chinese GenAI Tools – InfoSecurity Mag

Will AI really wipe out white collar jobs? Tech insiders are split - CNN

Gen Z's broken school-to-work pipeline – Axios  

A robot stole my internship: How Gen Z’s entry into the workplace is being affected by AI – The Conversation

The rise of the AI-native employee – Elena’s Growth Scoop  

The new hot job in AI: forward-deployed engineers – Semafor

AI is coming for entry-level jobs. Everybody needs to get ready. - Washington Post

Welcome to Your Job Interview. Your Interviewer Is A.I. – New York Times

AI is transforming Indian call centers. What does it mean for workers? - Washington Post  

Freelancers in AI earn over 40% more per hour than those doing non-AI work, according to Upwork’s platform data of - Axios 

Which Workers Will A.I. Hurt Most: The Young or the Experienced? - New York Times

The four-day work week gets a new booster: AI - Axios

CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs – Wall Street Journal 

As if graduating weren’t daunting enough, now students like me face a jobs market devastated by AI – The Guardian

How AI Vibe Coding Is Destroying Junior Developers' Careers -  Final Round AI

Will AI really wipe out white collar jobs? Tech insiders are split - CNN

AI is radically changing entry-level jobs, but not eliminating them – CNBC

‘Workforce crisis’: key takeaways for graduates battling AI in the jobs market - The Guardian

20 Recent Articles about the Impact of AI on Health Care

/

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

/

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

/

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.

More

Game Theory & Pascal’s Wager

/

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

/

Teens & AI Companionship

/

“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