AI Learning Options

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“In facilitating learning, AI gets us more quickly to the important work (examples might include providing suggestions for how to start researching a topic or possible ways to phrase something). In replacing learning, AI does the important work for us (such as answering exam questions). To these I would add a third category: supplementing learning, the murky middle where AI is used alongside or incorporated into one’s own work (such as providing supporting data or creating an essay outline). Naming this usually unrecognized middle ground is important, because whether AI is helping or harming in these cases will often depend on the context and goals. Managing appropriate forms of AI use will likely be one of our society’s major challenges going forward, in education and elsewhere.” -Chronicle of Higher Ed

An electric charge in words

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The poet W. S. Merwin once said that you know you are writing a poem when a “sequence of words starts giving off what you might describe as a kind of electric charge.” I’ve been thinking about how to place the sort of liveness Merwin describes—the sense of your body as a living circuit that the poem moves through—in a world filling up with noise, marred by misdirection and distraction. When, how, and why do we make room for the miraculous? From moment to moment. In any way we can. Because it is part of the practice of being human. -Joshua Bennett is the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities and a literature professor at MIT writing in The Atlantic

Track Your Progress

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Keep an account of your personal progress to create an objective record of your momentum toward your goals, as opposed to obsessing over what you haven’t yet achieved. So for example, if you’ve recently started a new job, think each day about the new skills and knowledge you’ve acquired, rather than worrying about what you still don’t know or can’t do. Keep a log of these accomplishments and review it regularly. -Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

25 Articles about AI & Legal Issues

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New Bloomberg Law Report Highlights AI and the Impact on the Legal Industry - Bloomberg

California Courts Announce New AI Regulations - National Law Review

Illinois law will punish students using AI for cyberbullying – WAND-TV

Meet the early-adopter judges using AI – MIT Tech Review

Does AI owe you for your small part in creating it? – Axios

The AI Law Professor: When chatbots become senior partners - Reuters

Courts aren't ready for AI-generated evidence - Axios 

Trump Says He’s ‘Getting Rid of Woke’ and Dismisses Copyright Concerns in AI Policy Speech – Wired

AI guzzled millions of books without permission. Authors are fighting back. – Washington Post 

US authors suing Anthropic can band together in copyright class action, judge rules – Reuters

Law360 mandates reporters use AI “bias” detection on all stories – Harvard’s Nieman Lab  

Federal court says copyrighted books are fair use for AI training – Washington Post

Does ownership rights over original scholarship extend to the elements of a single course on AI? – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

ChatGPT lawyer? Why small firms need professional-grade AI - Reuters 

Getty drops copyright allegations in UK lawsuit against Stability AI – Associated Press  

Group of high-profile authors sue Microsoft over use of their books in AI training – The Guardian

A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books without authors’ permission – Tech Crunch

Ethical uses of generative AI in the practice of law - Reuters

Please Do Your Best Not to Appear in the “AI Hallucination Database” – Lowering the Bar

A Legal Database of AI Hallucination Cases – Damien Charlotin 

Will America Learn to Love A.I. Slop? - Puck 

AI isn’t just entering law offices—it’s challenging the entire legal playbook – Fortune

Concerns and legal issues surrounding AI – Reuters

Australian lawyer apologizes for AI-generated errors in murder case – ABC News

Agentic workflows for legal professionals: A smarter way to work with AI - Reuters

Why Founders are often Forced out of their own Companies

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Not infrequently, those who start a company either decide to leave voluntarily or are forced out. The irony of this: The person who founded the organization is now found to be irrelevant, or even detrimental to it.

From the standpoint of a theory of styles, such an event is neither surprising nor unusual. The styles of thinking that are compatible with rugged entrepreneurship are often not the styles that are compatible with management in a more entrenched and possibly bureaucratic firm. Similarly, different styles may be required for different levels of kinds of responsibility in an organization.

The startup entrepreneur has no lack of ability; if he or she had, the company never would have succeeded in the first place. Rather the individual has a revolutionary spirit that is more suitable to the earlier than the later stages of organizational development.  What had worked so well earlier on simply no longer works. If the person cannot be flexible, he or she is likely to find it hard to fit into the organization.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

Three Ways to Use AI for Teaching

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AI can be used to:

1. Facilitate learning - AI gets us more quickly to the important work

         Examples: Providing suggestions for how to start researching a topic,

         possible ways to phrase something.

2. Replace learning - AI does the important work for us

         Example: answering exam questions

3. Supplement learning - AI is used alongside or incorporated into one’s own work

Examples: providing supporting data, creating an essay outline  

Read more at the Chronicle of Higher Ed

13 Things People are Trying to Get AI to Do

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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

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