How AI could help prevent languages from disappearing

/

I’m fascinated by how AI could help prevent languages from disappearing entirely. Most TTS development focuses on major languages with massive datasets, but there are over 7,000 languages worldwide, and many are at risk of extinction. What excites me is the potential for AI to create voice synthesis for languages that might only have a few hundred speakers left. This is technology serving humanity and cultural preservation at its best! When a language dies, we lose unique ways of thinking about the world, specific knowledge systems, and cultural memory that can’t be translated. -Claudia Ng writing in Toward Data Science

Be Prepared to Walk Away

/

Your foot is on the gas, professionally. Living by your wits—by your fluid intelligence—you seek the material rewards of success, you attain a lot of them, and you are deeply attached to them. You should be prepared to walk away from these rewards before you feel ready. Even if you’re at the height of your professional prestige, you probably need to scale back your career ambitions in order to scale up your metaphysical ones. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Outsourcing your Thinking

/

The use of AI includes the danger of the illusion of competence. 

One of the impacts of AI on learning is cognitive offloading (letting it do mindless tasks for you).

But when what’s offloaded is important, the result is cognitive debt, an overreliance on outside sources replacing our own thinking. This makes AI a great way to produce the appearance of learning while masking the costs to those who use it.

More: Chronicle of Higher Ed

14 Recent Articles about the Dangers of AI

/

Define Success Upfront

/

Before implementing AI solutions, define success upfront: “I insist on quantifiable metrics like time savings, quality improvements, or revenue increases. If we can’t measure it, we can’t prove it worked. This prevents scope creep and ensures we’re solving real problems, not just building cool technology. AI isn’t always the answer, but when it is, we know exactly why we’re using it and what success looks like.” -Claudia Ng in Toward Data Science

20 Recent Articles about AI Fakes

/

What's behind the TikTok accounts using AI-generated versions of real Latino journalists? – NBC News 

Making cash off ‘AI slop’: The surreal business of AI video - The Washington Post

Don’t Believe What AI Told You I Said – The Atlantic 

Inside a Network of Fake College Websites Dozens of fake college websites built with or supplemented by generative AI – Inside Higher Ed 

Man develops rare condition after ChatGPT query over stopping eating salt – The Guardian  

Why A.I. Should Make Parents Rethink Posting Photos of Their Children Online – New York Times 

Artificial intelligence as author: Can scientific reviewers recognize GPT-4o-generated manuscripts? – Science Direct 

How to spot an AI video? LOL, you can’t. - The Washington Post  

Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles – 404Media  

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds - New York Times

 Volunteers fight to keep ‘AI slop’ off Wikipedia - The Washington Post

AI slop videos are ruining our scrolling - Axios

How journalists can spot and mitigate AI bias - Reuters

AI slop might finally cure our internet addiction - The Atlantic 

Dave Barry Is told by AI that he’s dead – Dave Berry  

LeBron James Not Happy With AI Videos Showing Him Pregnant - Futurism

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

Age Verification Is Sweeping Gaming. Is It Ready for the Age of AI Fakes? – Wired

AI news videos blur line between real and fake reports – NBC News

Battling deepfakes: How AI threatens democracy and what we can do about it – The Conversation

AI Learning Options

/

“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

/

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

20 Articles about AI & Religion

/

 How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance – MIT Tech Review

Chatbot Cheating in Ethics Class – Christianity Today

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

A Catholic AI app promises answers for the faithful. Can it succeed? – Washington Post

A.I. Griefbots Are Just Our Latest Attempt to Talk to the Dead – New York Times

AI in Church Operations Shifts from Early-Adopter to Mainstream – Ministry Watch

When We Make Intelligence in Our Image - Christianity Today

Pope Leo calls for an ethical AI framework in a message to tech execs gathering at the Vatican - CNN

With the help of AI, Experts say Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be older than thought – The Guardian

AI poses new moral questions. Pope Leo says the Catholic Church has answers. – Washington Post  

AI predicted the next pope. Did it get it right? – Science  

What the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ can teach us about AI – Fast Company

Catholic leaders recoil from Trump’s pope post – Washington Post

AI poses new moral questions. Pope Leo says the Catholic Church has answers. – Washington Post

Is AI In The Image Of God? – Patheos

AI-generated prof that speaks 80 languages? A divinity school tests the boundaries – CBC

The Ethical Problems With AI Sermons – Patheos

Jesus chatbots are on the rise. A philosopher puts them to the test – The Conversation

Churches face a new spiritual dilemma from algorithms as Americans turn to AI for faith guidance – Milwaukee Independent

ChatGPT in the pulpit: Meet the OKC pastor using AI as a tool in preparing his sermons – The Oklahoman  

Track Your Progress

/

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

/

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

/

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

/

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

/