Teachers Using AI

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Nearly a third of K–12 teachers say they used the technology at least weekly last school year. Sally Hubbard, a sixth-grade math-and-science teacher in Sacramento, California, told me that AI saves her an average of five to 10 hours each week by helping her create assignments and supplement curricula. “If I spend all of that time creating, grading, researching,” she said, “then I don’t have as much energy to show up in person and make connections with kids.” Lila Shroff writing in The Atlantic

16 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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Rewriting Prompts Doesn't Always Work

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MIT study: Surprisingly, rewriting prompts using generative AI led to worse performance. The team found that the automatic rewrites often added extra details or changed the meaning of what users were trying to say, leading the AI to produce the wrong kind of image. It shows how AI systems can break down when designers make assumptions about how people will use them. -MIT

Good Listening

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Good listening takes practice; it’s actually a discipline. It doesn’t come easily or naturally. Listening means more than just hearing what a person says. A counselor I know expressed the difference like this: “hearing captures the words a person speaks; listening captures the meaning and the feeling beneath those words.” Listening is the mental step by which we become more aware of the other person than we are of ourselves. The best definition of listening I ever came across is that given by Norman H. Wright, who said, “Listening is not thinking about what you are going to say when the other person has stopped talking.’

A Good Prompt Should Include

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A good AI prompt should include: 

  • Sample content

  • Specific guidance on tone, length, structure, word count, etc.

An example:    

Write a 1,000-word article on estate planning, targeting mid-aged professionals in the southeast US. The tone should be informative but approachable. Use plain language and a clear structure so it’s easily scannable. Include actionable tips and examples. Our firm focuses on public service professionals, such as teachers and firefighters, so please use language, scenarios, and tips that are relevant to this audience. 

Keep providing feedback until the output meets your requirements.

More at JD Supra 

AI Definitions: Artificial Intelligence

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) – AI typically refers to computers that imitate the human thinking process, so they that are able to make some decisions on their own without the need of human intervention. The defining feature of artificial intelligence is that the behavior is learned from data rather from being explicitly programmed. AI can effectively mimic and mix established patterns in creative ways. However, it does not perform as well at breaking expectations and conventional forms to create entirely new things.   

More AI definitions here

Your self-evaluations

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Your self-evaluations are important because they influence most areas of your behavior, defining the limits of what you will attempt. You avoid an activity if your self-concept predicts you will perform so badly as to humiliate yourself. For instance, if your self-concept includes the belief that you would be a poor ice skater, you might never try it, and will indeed remain a poor ice skater. Often people excuse themselves with “That’s just the way I am.” By using this excuse, they deny themselves opportunities for personal growth.

Sharon and Gordon Bower, Asserting Yourself

22 Recent Articles about Using AI

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How to Use AI for Website Content and Still Appear Human - JD Supra

Study: Generative AI results depend on user prompts as much as models – MIT

Google’s NotebookLM can now make narrated slideshows with AI – The Verge

I'm a college writing professor. How I think students should use AI this fall – Mashable

Startup Writer builds corporate AI agent that doesn’t go off-script - Semafor

Seriously, Why Do Some AI Chatbot Subscriptions Cost More Than $200? – Wired  

How neurodivergent people are using AI tools – Reuters  

We asked 2,000 Substack publishers how they’re using and thinking about AI. Here’s what we found. - Substack

YouTube Shorts is adding an image-to-video AI tool, new AI effects – TechCrunch

Do people click on links in Google AI summaries? - Pew Research Center

The AI Replaces Services Myth – Mert Deveci

Try these hidden ‘NOPE’ buttons to stop AI content How to turn off AI in Google – Washington Post

AI Search Is Growing More Quickly Than Expected – Wall Street Journal

OpenAI Unveils Agent That Can Make Spreadsheets and PowerPoints - Wall Street Journal

Google AI's new trick: Turn any image into a brief video - Axios

Building a Personal AI Factory – John Rush

The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering – Philipp Schmid

6 tips to avoid using AI chatbots all wrong - Washington Post

How artificial intelligence is transforming the way people use the internet - NPR

AI chatbots’ content rules often frustrate users, study finds - Washington Post

Get Started With ChatGPT: A Beginner's Guide to Using the Super Popular AI Chatbot – CNET

Duke Just Introduced An Essay Question About AI—Here’s How To Tackle It - Forbes 

The Question that Will Predict How AI Impacts Your Job

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A clarifying question: does AI look like it is going to do the most highly skilled part of your job or the low-skill rump that you’ve not been able to get rid of? The answer to that question may help to predict whether your job is about to get more fun or more annoying — and whether your salary is likely to rise, or fall as your expert work is devalued. -Tim Harford

23 Surprising Things AI can do now

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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

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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

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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)

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“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