Going Back

I learned ... that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back - that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one-way street, isn't it? - Agatha Christie (born Sept 15, 1890)

14 Articles about AI & the Creative Arts

Powell’s Books facing criticism after merchandise created with help of AI – KPTV

Anthropic tells US judge it will pay $1.5 billion to settle author class action – CNN

AI has passed the aesthetic Turing Test − and it’s changing our relationship with art – The Conversation

'AI slop' videos may be annoying, but they're racking up views — and ad money – NPR

Want to take better photos? Google thinks AI is the answer. – Washington Post  

Google's generative AI filmmaking program Flow has over 100 million AI videos in the program - CNET 

Madison Avenue Is Starting to Love A.I. – New York Times

Voiceover Artists Weigh the 'Faustian Bargain' of Lending Their Talents to AI – 404 Media

The 17 Best AI Movies To Make You Dread What’s Coming In 2026 – Thought Catalogue

An Opera Takes A.I., Pronatalism and Hustle Culture to Space - New York Times

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

AI-generated music is going viral. Should the music industry be worried? – CNBC 

Designers: We’ll all be design engineers in a year – UX Design

The AI Motivational Issue

Students who use AI tools to complete assignments tend to do better on homework—but worse on tests. They’re getting the right answers, but they’re not learning. The findings suggest that simply believing information came from an LLM makes people learn less. It is like they think the system is smarter than them, so they stop trying. That’s a motivational issue, not just a cognitive one. AI doesn’t have to make us passive. But right now, that’s how people are using it. -Wall Street Journal

a Well-Meaning Lie?

When caught lying (paternalistically or otherwise), people often defend themselves by saying they lied to protect the other person. But before lying to protect someone’s interests or feelings, ask yourself not only whether you are lying to protect them, but also whether that person would believe your lie was well-intended if they found out. In several studies, we found that people were not likely to believe paternalistic lies were well-intended, and reacted poorly to these lies even when the liar communicated good intentions. However, people were more likely to believe that paternalistic lies were well-intended when they were told by people who knew them well or had reputations as helpful, kind people.  

Even though paternalistic lies are often well-intentioned, if uncovered, they will usually backfire. Lying may be helpful when there is no ambiguity about the resulting benefits for those on the receiving end. But in most other circumstances, honesty is the best policy.    

Adam Eric Greenberg, Emma E. Levine, Matthew Lupoli writing in the Harvard Business Review 

Good Friction

I’m personally excited about AI and think it can improve our lives in a lot of ways. But at the same time I’m trying to be mindful of secondary effects and unintended consequences. Sometimes the friction and inconvenience is where the good stuff happens. Gotta be very careful removing it. I’m personally trying to be mindful about keeping good friction around. -Geoffrey Litt

AI Definitions: Digital Twins

Digital Twins – Digital twin technology is about replicating something physical in a virtual environment. The twin might be a copy of our physiologies, personalities or the objects around us, such as a video avatar of a person or a statistical model of a complex phenomenon (like earth or weather). The models update automatically as new data becomes available and excels best at statistics-heavy applications. For instance, by analyzing large quantities of health data, it can provide more personalized treatments for a patient. Similar to synthetic users, digital twins is more about specific individuals than group-level descriptors. Digital twins raise serious ethical questions related to consent, misrepresentation and biases in data.

More AI definitions here

Breaking Through The Wall

The squeegee of window washer Jan Demczur is in the Smithsonian. His determination and willingness to use what was handy on the morning of September 11, 2001, put it there.

The Polish immigrant was riding in a north tower World Trade Center elevator when a hijacked plane hit the building. The elevator came to a stop on the 50th floor. That's when Demczur and other stranded workers pried open the door, revealing a solid wall.

Rather than give up, Demczur used his brass squeegee handle to hack away at it. He eventually broke through the wall and led the group to safety just moments before the tower fell.

Got a wall to break through in your life? There's probably a tool at your disposal. Work with what you've got and refuse to give up.

Stephen Goforth

20 Articles about AI & Writing

A researcher’s view on using AI to become a better writer – Hechinger Report  

GEO for PR - MuchRack 

The AI cheating panic is missing the point - The Washington Post  

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks – Nature

AI Writing Disclosures Are a Joke. Here’s How to Improve Them. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

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

One-fifth of computer science papers may include AI content – Science.org  

Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

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

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die – Washington Post

Springer Nature launches new tool to spot awkward, tortured phrases – Chemistry World 

The Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor - Gizmodo

AI is flattening language — and redistributing power – UX Design

I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students. – New York Times

ChatGPT Is Changing the Words We Use in Conversation – Scientific American

I am no longer chairing defenses or joining committees where students use generative AI for their writing – Stat Modeling

454 Hints That a Chatbot Wrote Part of a Biomedical Researcher’s Paper – New  York Times

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

AI Writing Disclosures Are a Joke. Here’s How to Improve Them. - Chronicle of Higher Ed 

I Tested Three AI Essay-Writing Tools, and Here’s What I Found – Life Hacker

Getting hired in the age of AI

If you can say you worked a job where you had to show resiliency and adaptability, those are things that employers are looking for. We are individuals with unique experiences, unique energy and unique resilience. That's what we're going to get hired for. – Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20250825-aneesh-raman-young-people-employment-opportunities-katty-kay-interview

AI definition: SQL

SQL - Structured Query Language (SQL pronounced ess-kew-ell or sequel) is the most widely used method of accessing databases. This programming language can be used to create tables, change data, find particular data, and create relationships among different tables. For data scientists, SQL is second in importance after Python. Similar in structure and function to Excel, SQL can work with Excel and is able to handle billions of rows in multiple tables and thousands of users can access this data securely at the same time.

More AI definitions here

22 Recent Articles about AI & Teaching

Will AI Choke Off the Supply of Knowledge? - Wall Street Journal

Universities could bolster democracy by fostering students’ AI literacy – The Conversation

How Are Instructors Talking About AI in Their Syllabi? – Chronicle of Higher Ed

The AI cheating panic is missing the point - The Washington Post

An AI Tool Says It Can Predict Students’ Grades on Assignments. Instructors Are Skeptical. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI-driven private schools are popping up around the U.S., from North Carolina to Florida – Axios  

How to Use AI in Online Courses and Teach Your Students to Use It Too – Faculty Focus

The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started – The Atlantic

AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser - Elroy 

These College Professors Will Not Bow Down to A.I. – New York Times 

Faculty Latest Targets of Big Tech’s AI-ification of Higher Ed – Inside Higher Ed 

ChatGPT’s Study Mode Is Here. It Won’t Fix Education’s AI Problems – Wired

What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom - LitHub

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

ChatGPT’s new Study Mode is designed to help you learn, not just give answers – Arstechnica

The Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor - Gizomodo

In California, Colleges Pay a Steep Price for Faulty AI Detectors – Undark

ChatGPT's new study mode won't give you the answers - Axios

What the panic about kids using AI to cheat gets wrong - Vox

AI Has Done Far More Harm Than Good in My Classroom - Education Week

How teachers say they're embracing AI in the classroom – ABC News

In training educators to use AI, we must not outsource the foundational work of teaching - Chalkbeat  

I got an AI to impersonate me and teach me my own course – here’s what I learned about the future of education - The Conversation

Handling offensive behavior

Whenever possible, express your feelings about offensive behavior from a positive rather than a negative perspective. Negative expressions state your dislike, as in “I hate you when you do that,” “You make me angry,” “You make me feel insecure and unloved,” or “You’re insensitive and overbearing.” You can be more effective if you focus on the common goals and the shortcomings of the interaction, rather than your hatreds.

Goal oriented statements might be, “I think that your behavior and my reaction to it are preventing us from having a pleasant relationship.”

You might try new ways to express your feelings, using metaphors on describing the concrete aspects of your emotional reactions. Thus you might express embarrassment by the metaphor “I feel naked and exposed,” or express conflict by “I feel my head spinning in two directions at once.” Striking metaphors may produce a greater impact than the accustomed “emotional words” that have been worn out in your interchanges with others.

Sharon and Gordon Bower, Asserting Yourself

AI automation versus collaboration

"Using AI well will require knowing when to automate versus when to collaborate. This is not necessarily a binary choice, and the boundaries between human expertise and AI’s capabilities for expert judgment will continually evolve as AI’s capabilities advance. Although collaboration is not intrinsically better than automation, premature or excess automation—that is, automation that takes on entire jobs when it’s ready for only a subset of job tasks—is generally worse than collaboration." -David Autor and James Manyika writing in The Atlantic 

The Delusion

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. -Leo Tolstoy (born Sept. 9, 1828)

24 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

Peer Review Paranoia The system is built on trust between scholars. AI is undermining that. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI Makes Research Easy. Maybe Too Easy. – Wall Street Journal

AI-generated scientific hypotheses lag human ones when put to the test – Science.org

JAMA Editors on Artificial Intelligence in Peer Review – JAMA  

AI tool labels more than 1000 journals for ‘questionable,’ possibly shady practices - Science.org

AI for Scientific Integrity: Detecting Ethical Breaches, Errors, and Misconduct in Manuscripts – Frontiers  

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks - Nature

Image fraud in nuclear medicine research – Springer

Does ChatGPT Ignore Article Retractions and Other Reliability Concerns? - Wiley

NIH to reject research applications written by AI – Beckers Hospital Review

AI-based fake papers are a new threat to academic publishing says journal editor – Times Higher Ed 

AI-Assisted Tools for Scientific Review Writing: Opportunities and Cautions. – ACS Publications 

Comparing AI-generated and human peer reviews: A study on 11 articles – Science Direct 

Evaluating the potential risks of employing large language models in peer review - Wiley

One-fifth of computer science papers may include AI content – Science.org

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

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

AI can’t learn from what researchers don’t share – Research Professional News

AI content is tainting preprints: how moderators are fighting back.” - Nature

AI can simplify the process enormously and help publishers get ahead of the industry’s upheavals,” says publisher’s head of marketing. – Research Information

 AI Writing Disclosures Are a Joke. Here’s How to Improve Them. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

Make all research data available for AI learning, scientists urge – Research Professional News

Machine learning model flags almost 10 percent of cancer research literature as being paper mill papers – Biorxiv

AI-based research mentors: Plausible scenarios and ethical issues – Taylor & Francis Online  

The DuckDuckGo AI Option

When you use ChatGPT, Claude or Llama technology within DuckDuckGo’s chatbot, the company acts as a middleman that limits what the AI companies know about you and what you’re chatting about. DuckDuckGo says that when you use its chatbot, your conversations aren’t used to train AI for DuckDuckGo or any of its partner AI companies. Your chats may be saved only anonymously for, at most, 30 days, with limited exceptions. And the AI companies don’t have access to personal information such as your device’s unique digital ID number, which could be used to assemble dossiers on your habits. -Washington Post

A “strikingly realistic” short AI video

The Wall Street Journal explains how it put together a “strikingly realistic” short AI video using Google’s Veo 3 and Runway can now create video.

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This is a Mistake

A few years ago, I saw a cartoon of a man on his deathbed saying, “I wish I’d bought more crap.” It has always amazed me that many wealthy people keep working to increase their wealth, amassing far more money than they could possibly spend or even usefully bequeath. One day I asked a wealthy friend why this is so. Many people who have gotten rich know how to measure their self-worth only in pecuniary terms, he explained, so they stay on the hamster wheel, year after year. They believe that at some point, they will finally accumulate enough to feel truly successful, happy, and therefore ready to die. This is a mistake, and not a benign one.  

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Strength & Desire

It is not strength but desire that moves us.

A truth about today’s AI Tools

"A truth about today’s AI tools: They’re not really information experts. They have challenges determining which source is the most authoritative and most recent. It’s fair to ask whether relying on any of these AI tools as your new Google is a good idea. In many ways, AI is best suited for complex questions that take some hunting. In the best cases, AI tools could find needles in a haystack — answers that weren’t obvious in a traditional Google search." - Washington Post