AI Definitions: Context Engineering

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Context Engineering – Broader than prompt engineering, context engineering has been described as the art of providing all the context needed for a task to be solved by an LLM. Rather than a single prompt, context engineering is everything the model sees before it generates a response. Instead of a string, it’s a system. Providing a proper context is particularly critical for AI Agents to succeed, even more important than then quality of the model and algorithm.

More AI definitions here

How Students are Using AI: Here's what the Data Tell Us

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  • AI use by students is increasing.

  • The higher the education level, the more likely that students will use AI. 

  • Business, STEM, and social-science majors are more likely to use AI and are less likely to have concerns about using it than humanities majors. 

  • Top uses by students: information or getting explanations (50-70 percent of respondents in the studies cited above); generating ideas or brainstorming (40-50 percent); and writing support, including checking grammar, editing, starting a paper, and drafting an essay (30-50 percent).

  • 86 percent of students who use ChatGPT for assignments say their use was undetected.

  • A plurality of students think AI will have both positive and negative consequences.

  • A study of high-school students conducted before and after AI became mainstream found no increase in the percentage of students who cheat.

  • 15-25 percent of students across several studies feel AI should not be allowed at all in education or refuse to use it themselves.

  • In a survey asking students why they use AI, the strongest agreement was with the statement that AI “will not judge me” followed by anonymity.

  • Four out of five students think their institutions have not integrated AI sufficiently.

  • 55 percent of students think overreliance on AI in teaching decreases the value received from a course.

  • 89 percent are worried about AI grading.

  • Students think AI is important, in other words, but not that it should replace professors.

    Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Ed

How will AI affect my job?

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The answer to the question, “How will AI affect my job?” might be better stated: “Does AI look like it is going to do the most highly skilled parts of my job or the low-skill parts?” If it’s the former, your pay and business value will fall. If it’s the latter where AI can do the mundane parts of your job for you, then you might get paid more (and it might get more fun). 

The Truth about Empathy

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Empathy is not feeling sorry for someone in physical or emotional pain—that’s sympathy. Rather, it is mentally putting yourself in the suffering person’s shoes to feel their pain. It’s the difference between “Get well soon” and “I can imagine how much discomfort you must be feeling right now.” 

Empathy can “make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives,” because sometimes an act of love involves doing something that causes pain rather than relieving it, such as confronting an awful truth. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

15 Articles about how Businesses are using AI

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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