AI's impact on the job search by college grads

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"Recent history grads have a lower unemployment rate (4.6 percent) than recent computer science grads (6.1 percent), according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. History is one of the most popular college majors among congressional staff members, and historians find work in some surprising places, such as the National Security Agency and the American Girl doll company." -Washington Post

Businesses Racing to Adopt AI: Speed without Control

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If you don’t take steps now to centralize AI strategy, you’ll be left with a patchwork of disconnected tools, uncontrolled costs, and compliance nightmares. The winners in this era won’t be the ones who adopt AI fast, they’ll be the ones who adopt it wisely. Shadow AI isn’t going away; it’s going to accelerate as AI becomes embedded. -Unite AI

18 Articles about how AI is Affecting Jobs

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AI Definitions: Shadow AI

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Shadow AI - Generative AI use inside organizations without the approval or supervision of IT. While not typically malicious, it creates risks that can grow over time. For instance, customer data might end up being stored in a third-party AI’s training environment or proprietary code might be copy and pasted into an AI code assistant to debug an issue.

More AI definitions here

When you plan for Italy but Land in Holland

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It’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Emily Perl Kingsley

14 Articles about AI & Politics

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How AI could help prevent languages from disappearing

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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

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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

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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

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Define Success Upfront

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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

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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

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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