23 Surprising Things AI can do now

Google DeepMind unveils an AI-powered model that creates interactive 3D worlds in real time - Google DeepMind

Parkland Shooting Victim Recreated as AI for Jim Acosta Interview.- The Guardian

AI can now beat polygraph tests to tell when you're lying – 311 Institute

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die - Washington Post

AI Comes Up with Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work. – Quanta Magazine 

Missionaries using tech to contact Amazon's Indigenous people – The Week

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

AI helps traditional Japanese fish-killing method get a robotic upgrade – Semafor

Google and OpenAI are vying for top AI mathlete – Axios

AI comes to California’s electric grid – Union-Tribune

AI is helping patients fight insurance company denials – NBC News

Dubai to debut restaurant operated by an AI chef – Reuters

Drones, AI and Robot Pickers: Meet the Fully Autonomous Farm – Wall Street Journal

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

Large language models are proficient in solving and creating emotional intelligence tests – Nature  

How A.I. Is Transforming Wedding Planning – New York Times  

ChatGPT Is Changing the Words We Use in Conversation – Scientific American

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

LooksMapping, an A.I.-powered website, rates not the food, but the attractiveness of the diners. – New York Times  

AI tool diagnoses nine types of dementia with 88% accuracy using a single PET scan – MIT Tech Review 

AI Can Keep Truck Drivers Awake - Wall Street Journal

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

Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad? - New York Times

Using AI for Writing Obituaries

Two days after Jeff Fargo’s mother died, he lay in bed, crying, at home in Nevada and opened his laptop to ChatGPT. Her friends had asked about an obituary, so for nearly an hour he typed about her life. “I just … emptied my soul into the prompt,” said Fargo, 55. “I was mentally not in a place where I could give my mom what she deserved. And this did it for me.”  - Washington Post

20 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

Why a hybrid AI-human approach is necessary to uphold research integrity – The Hindu  

AI research journal with sham board, metrics holds researcher’s paper hostage – Retraction Watch

Artificial intelligence and the death of the academic author – Taylor & Francis

Springer Nature launches new tool to spot awkward, tortured phrases – Chemistry World

AI will soon be able to audit all published research – what will that mean for public trust in science? – The Conversation  

AI, originality, and attribution: Researchers’ perspectives on distinguishing contributions– Taylor & Francis Online

AI-Enabled Cheating Points to ‘Untenable’ Peer Review System – Inside Higher Ed

AI, bounties and culture change, how scientists are taking on errors – Nature

China tops the world in artificial intelligence publications, database analysis reveals - Science.org

Researchers are cheating peer review by hiding AI prompts in papers - The Washington Post

AI ‘scientists’ joined these research teams: here’s what happened - Nature

The accuracy-bias trade-offs in AI text detection tools and their impact on fairness in scholarly publication - PeerJ

Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary -  Science.org 

'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers - Nikkei Asia

Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations – Retraction Watch  

454 Hints That a Chatbot Wrote Part of a Biomedical Researcher’s Paper – New York Times

Are AI Bots Knocking Digital Collections Offline? - The Scholarly Kitchen 

AI, peer review and the human activity of science - Nature

Elsevier journal under fire over ‘AI-generated’ review comments – Times Higher Ed

How AI is shaking up scientific publishing - LeMonde

There’s a tiger over there! (according to my phone)

“Everybody is fighting for your attention, so your only real defense is to make it so that those stimuli don’t come in the door,” says Boston University cognitive neuroscientist David Somers. The idea that your technology should alert you when it thinks you should pay attention is relatively new, and, frankly, it’s a big step backward. You’re letting the bushes rustle nonstop, and telling yourself there’s a tiger over there.

“It’s so important that we define where we want to go as opposed to letting technology drive us and we’re just hanging on for dear life,” says author Amy Blankson, who works in the field of positive psychology, specifically on maximizing happiness.

Still, everyone gets a buzz from this high-octane news environment. Literally. Every notification, every tweet, every beep and buzz releases dopamine and other neurochemicals, providing a moment’s elation. As with any drug, your brain gets used to it. Perhaps even craves it.  

Reclaim control of what you read.

Emily Dreyfuss, Wired

Decline

Decline is inevitable, and it occurs earlier than almost any of us wants to believe. But misery is not inevitable. -Arthur C. Brooks

A Prayer for Protection

Lord, protect me from your followers! (unknown)

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

AI Writing Results

We depend on a calculator to produce identical results no matter who uses it, but identical results in a writing context are boring at best. At worst, these identical AI results amount to an insidious reproduction of the tropes and stereotypes present in the source text. -LitHub

Difficult & Inconvenient

It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. -Josh Billings

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 

It is our choices

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. - J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (born July 31, 1965)

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

The Path to Courage

Can you stay in the hard conversation? Can you tell the truth? Can you give feedback when it's hard? Can you ask for feedback when it's hard? Vulnerability is … the only path to courage and it is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, trust, empathy.

Brené Brown in an interview with CBS News 

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

The AI-generated search Sweet Spot

A key difference between AI-generated search results and traditional SEO is that paid marketing and sponsored links rarely populate. Instead of paid marketing, owned content like thought leadership, fact sheets or corporate blogs "seem to be the sweet spot for getting your content cited by these models." -Axios

Developing Social Skills on AI Platforms

“If teens are developing social skills on AI platforms where they are constantly being validated, not being challenged, not learning to read social cues or understand somebody else’s perspective, they are not going to be adequately prepared in the real world.” - Michael Robb of Common Sense Media, quoted in the Associated Press  

How to Make Yourself Miserable

It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. - Seneca 

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