Introducing AI ‘Actor’ Tilly Norwood
/A short video from the UK’s Particle6 featuring AI ‘Actor’ Tilly Norwood (and is completely AI generated)
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
17 Articles from Sept about AI & Data Science
/Predictive AI Must Be Valuated – But Rarely Is. – Forbes
5 Cutting-Edge Natural Language Processing Trends Shaping 2026 – KD Nuggets
Turning “human in the loop” from a catchphrase into a design practice – Microsoft Design
Foundation models could revolutionize dexterity in robots - McKinsey
A beginner’s guide to data analysis with Polars—a fast DataFrame library - KD Nuggets
Pentagon begins deploying new satellite network to link sensors with shooters – ArsTechnica
GenAI May Code, But Can it Think Like a Data Scientist? – Analytics India Mag
Should AI Nudge You or Tell You What to Do? - Knowledge
AI Definitions: Digital twin technology
Building AI Products in the Probabilistic Era – Gian@segato
AI definitions: Structured Query Language
We can’t treat LLMs as Swiss Army knives that solve everything, without considering the limitations and without evaluating easy-to-build tailored solutions – Toward Data Science
How the memory of AI agents is evolving -BD Tech Talks
AI Definitions: World modeling
The Generalist: The New All-Around Type of Data Professional? Is over-specialization ending and are data generalists on the rise? - Toward Data Science
The AI Flattery Trap
/Managing negative emotions is a fundamental function of the brain, enabling you to build resilience and learn. But experts say that A.I. chatbots allow you to bypass that emotional work, instead lighting up your brain’s reward system every time they agree with you, much like with social media “likes” and self-affirmations. That means A.I. chatbots can quickly become echo chambers, potentially eroding critical thinking skills and making you less willing to change your mind. -New York Times
No man knows how bad he is
/No man knows how bad he is until he has tried to be good. There is a silly idea about that good people don't know what temptation means. -C.S. Lewis
18 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators
/Can Colleges Be Run Using AI? – Chronicle of Higher Ed
Dozens of fake college websites built with or supplemented by gen AI – Inside Higher Ed
The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started – The Atlantic
Student Loan Defaults Threaten Federal Aid At 1,100 Colleges – Forbes
African universities risk being left behind in AI era - Semafor
A gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for – Popular Information
In California, Colleges Pay a Steep Price for Faulty AI Detectors – Undark
Universities are rethinking computer science curriculum in response to AI tools – Tech Spot
How Do You Teach Computer Science in the A.I. Era? - The New York Times
California colleges spend millions to catch plagiarism and AI. Is the faulty tech worth it? – Cal Matters
AI usage in jobs could lead to AI ‘trade schools,’ expert says - Semafor
How One College Library Plans to Cut Through the AI Hype - Inside Higher Ed
The impact of language models on the humanities and vice versa – Nature
Universities in the UL ‘At Risk of Overassessing’ in Response to AI - Inside Higher Ed
AI in education's potential privacy nightmare - Axios
When AI rejects your grant proposal: algorithms are helping to make funding decisions – Nature
Faculty Latest Targets of Big Tech’s AI-ification of Higher Ed - Inside Higher Ed
Obsessions
/It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions. -Robert Bly
11 Webinars this week about AI, Journalism & Media
/Mon, Sept 29 - How to Start a Non-Profit Newsroom
Who: Brian Lynch Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: New England First Amendment Coalition
Tue, Sept 30 - Building a High-Performance Team in the Age of AI
What: This session will provide practical strategies for building high-performance teams by integrating AI, optimizing communication, and maximizing engagement.
Who: Constance Staley Professor of Communication, University of Colorado.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Training Magazine Network
Tue, Sept 30 - Photojournalism: Best Practices for the Digital Age
What: A panel of experts will discuss best practices for photojournalism, including consent and privacy, how to uphold ethical standards, and how to navigate digital manipulation and cover marginalized communities. Participants will also get tips on narrative composition and techniques for making stories that are engaging across all platforms.
Who: Matthew Pearson, News Photographer, WABE, Atlanta; Alyssa Pointer, Commercial & Editorial Photographer, Independent, Atlanta; Christina Price Washington, Assistant Professor of Art, Oglethorpe University, Atlanta; Dylan Wilson, Assistant Professor of Communications, Augusta University, Augusta; Benjamin J. Grady, SPJ Georgia, At-Large Board Member.
When: 6 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Society of Professional Journalism
Wed, Oct 1 - Instagram – Growing Your Page
What: Join us as we break down the strategies and features that help small businesses thrive on Instagram. With constant updates on the platform and the algorithm, it is important to stay up to date with Instagram and plan out your growth. Whether you’re new to the platform or looking to boost your current presence, we’ll discuss practical steps to attract followers, engage your audience, and convert followers into customers.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Small Business Development Center of Widener University
Wed, Oct 1 - Vanishing Numbers — How Federal Data Manipulation and Removal Threaten Journalism and Public Trust
What: Attendees will learn: Why federal data matters for every beat, from health to the economy; How political manipulation and removals of data are reshaping public understanding and news coverage; Which protective measures keep some datasets resilient, and why others disappear without warning; Why private-sector substitutes can’t fill the gap left by weakened federal systems; Concrete strategies and resources journalists can use now to verify, preserve and report on vulnerable datasets.
Who: Denice Ross served as the U.S. Chief Data Scientist in the Biden administration, where she led the charge to use disaggregated data to drive better outcomes for all Americans; Allison Plyer is Chief Demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans, and co-chair of the Census Quality Reinforcement task force; Erica Groshen is Senior Economics Advisor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Research Fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; Naseem Miller is the senior editor for health at The Journalist’s Resource.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Journalist's Resource
Wed, Oct 1 - AI Literacy for Young Learners
What: In this talk, we will discuss research on designing AI literacy activities with and for elementary and middle-school aged children that integrate social, ethical, and ideological dimensions.
Who: Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens, Vanderbilt University.
When: 4 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Media Education Lab
Thu, Oct 2 - OpenAI and News
What: Participants will hear from key experts on the shifting landscape for news media and AI.
Who: Christina Lim, partner manager, media partnerships, OpenAI; Jodie Hopperton, product and tech initiative lead, INMA; Sonali Verma, GenAI initiative lead, INMA.
When: 10 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: International News Media Association.
Thu, Oct 2 - Learning from The Leading Edge panel: Action-First Learning with AI and XR
What: Topics we’ll cover: Human Flourishing through AI: Offload routine work, surface timely insights, and make room for creativity, empathy, and judgment; Natural Language as the New Design Tool: Prompt, don’t program; talk simulations and prototypes into existence with tools like Genie 3 and vibe coding for rapid iteration. AI-Enhanced Spaced Repetition: Duolingo-style, adaptive reps that keep skills fresh in the flow of work. On Call AI Mentors: SOP-trained micro-experts for just-in-time, task-specific coaching, available 24/7. Immersive Skill Building with VR/AR: Safe, repeatable, hands-on practice at scale as devices get lighter and more affordable. Action-First Learning, Supercharged: Start with authentic challenges, add AI feedback and micro-drills, then reflect for faster transfer, tighter loops, and better retention.
Who: Karl Kapp, Ed.D. Director, Institute for Interactive Technologies, Bloomsburg University; Ellen Wagner Managing Partner, North Coast EduVisory; David Metcalf Director, Mixed Emerging Technology Integration Lab (METIL), University of Central Florida; Anders Gronstedt, Ph.D. President, The Gronstedt Group.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Open Sesame
Fri, Oct 3 - AI Journalism Lab: Adoption Showcase
What: Program participants will share 5-minute lightning presentations of their AI adoption projects.
Who: Kyle Plantz, Senior Director of Leadership Programs; Defne Altiok, journalist/editor at Deutsche Welle; Tom Caputo, CTO at The Belmont Voice; Roni Satria, correspondent/affinity desk head at CNN Indonesia; Demetrius Suggs, digital solutions manager at WFAE; Giovanny Vega-De Lleguas, Innovation and AI Manager at El Vocero de Puerto Rico ;Haley Velasco, Senior Editor, News Audience Development at McClatchy.
When: 11 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: CUNY's AI Journalism Labs
Fri, Oct 3 - Youth Media, Identity, and Expression: Exploring Voice, Culture, and Empowerment
What: We’ll explore media created by and about young people, discuss adaptable activities that invite personal storytelling and critical thinking, and reflect on how different educational and community contexts can nurture authentic youth expression.
Who: Catharine Reznicek, Director, Educational Technology and avid Information Literacy advocate.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Media Education Lab
Fri, Oct 3 - Prompting with Purpose: Best Practices and Techniques for ChatGPT
What: We will move beyond “trial‑and‑error” prompting and lay out a practical, research‑backed framework you can use immediately in your work, studies, creative projects, or everyday problem-solving. This session is best suited for a beginner-intermediate audience.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: OpenAI Academy
AI definitions: Workslop
/Workslop - AI-generated content that masquerades as good work, but lacks substance and does not meaningfully advance a given task. The overwritten language includes unnecessarily long words and empty phrases, similar to student submissions focused on meeting an assignment’s length requirement rather than making every sentence and bullet point push the ball forward.
More AI definitions here
Each time you lie
/Each time you lie, even if you’re not caught, you “become a little more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valanced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are. You become the person who could commit such an act, and how you are known in the world is irrelevant to this state of being.” In the end, who we are inside matters more than what others think of us.
Michael Dirda in a Washington Post review of Plato at the Googleplex by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
16 Articles about AI & the Bigger Questions
/AI as teleportation – Geoffrey Litt
Our AI Fears Run Long and Deep – The Atlantic
We must build AI for people; not to be a person – Mustafa Sulyman
Designing AI tools that support critical thinking - Vaughn Tan
AI is a Mass Delusion Event - The Atlantic
On consciousness, AI, and panpsychism - Big Think
Is AI eroding our critical thinking? – BBC
A better way to think about AI - The Atlantic
A Spirited Debate Around AI - Spyglass
Will true AI turn against us? - Big Think
I asked ChatGPT to invent 6 philosophical thought experiments – and now my brain hurts – Tech Radar
“AI will kill everyone” is not an argument. It’s a worldview. - Vox
‘Existential crisis’: how Google’s shift to AI has upended the online news model – The Guardian
Bringing AI to medicine requires philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethicists – Stat News
Why the AI “megasystem problem” needs our attention – Big Think
Philosophers and a psychiatrist consider what we lose when we outsource struggle to AI – Medical Xpress
How to Spot a Liar
/Can you spot a liar? Is averting the eyes a sign? Perhaps nervous behavior like a sweaty appearance? How about rapid blinking? Researchers will tell you the answer is no, no, and no. There are no telltale nonverbal signs of guilt. Not shifting posture or pausing. There is a small increase in pitch—but it’s too small for the human ear to detect. Jessica Seigel writes:
Researchers have found little evidence to support this belief despite decades of searching. “One of the problems we face as scholars of lying is that everybody thinks they know how lying works,” says Hartwig, who coauthored a study of nonverbal cues to lying in the Annual Review of Psychology.
There’s also “no evidence that people were any better at detecting lies told by criminals or wrongly accused suspects in police investigations than those told by laboratory volunteers.” And it doesn’t matter whether the deceit is verbal or nonverbal.
While liars feel more anxious and nervous, those are internal feelings—not observable behavior.
However, there are some ways to spot what may be evidence of lying:
1. Contradictions. If a subject is allowed to talk enough, they may reveal discrepancies in their story or their story may contradict known information.
2. Details. Someone who is telling the truth about an event is more likely to provide details. In one experiment, they provided 76% more detail than those who were being deceptive.
Stephen Goforth
AI Climate Costs
/You’d be hard-pressed to ask enough questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity or other AI services to meaningfully change your personal emissions. Asking AI eight simple text questions a day, every day of the year, adds up to less than 0.1 ounces of climate pollution, our data suggests. The exception is AI-generated video: One five-second clip (is) equivalent to riding 38 miles on an e-bike. Overall, our personal and work-related digital emissions are dominated by just three things: TV, digital storage and internet or video use on your computer. -Washington Post
26 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses
/These short online courses and webinars will strengthen your journalism skills (and add a line to your resume). Most of the Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.
Prompt Engineering for Journalists
Learn how to effectively use AI language models and automation tools to enhance your journalistic work while maintaining ethical standards and journalistic integrity.
Shut out: How Pulitzer winners worked with reluctant sources to tell powerful stories
Designed for journalists, editors, students, and anyone looking to refine their writing, this course will teach you how to keep articles clear and compelling—without sacrificing essential details.
Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values
A five-hour, self-directed course that covers basics in five areas: newsgathering, interviewing, ethics, law and diversity.
Learn the fundamentals of audio reporting and editing in this self-directed course.
How to Spot Misinformation Online
Learn simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information
This course is designed to help journalists understand the applications of Title IX.
Clear, Strong Writing for Broadcast Journalism
One-hour video tutorial
Powerful Writing: Leverage Your Video and Sound
In this one-hour video tutorial, early-career journalists will learn how to seamlessly combine audio, video and copy in captivating news packages.
In this five-part course, you’ll learn everything you need to write more effective audio narratives.
Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online
News Sense: The Building Blocks of News
What makes an idea or event a news story?
Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More
Finding and fixing the most common style, grammar and punctuation errors.
The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use
Ethics of Journalism Build or refine your process for making ethical decisions
Conducting Interviews that Matter
Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals
How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust
How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust (International Edition)
What news audiences in various parts of the world don’t understand about how journalism works
Is This Legit? Digital Media Literacy 101
MediaWise’s Campus Correspondents explain the fact-checking tools and techniques that professionals use in their day-to-day work.
Dignity and Precision in Language
Research for the Newsroom: Practical tools for adding depth to breaking and enterprise stories
Covering Vulnerable Sources: A Mental Health Reporting Project Webinar
Presented through a collaboration between Poynter and The Carter Center.
Women and prisons: Covering the impact of incarceration
Safeguarding your journalism against legal threats
AI & the Future of Fact-Checking: Building tools, ClaimReview, Sustainability and the IFCN Code
How to Know who Really Loves You
/It isn’t that those who love you ignore your inadequacies. They will, instead, pitch in to help and cheer you along. They will allow you the opportunity to grow and chances to fail. This is what love drives them to do.
11 Articles about AI Bias
/AI reveals gender bias in family courts – PhysOrg
Can AI Help Us See Our Own Bias? – Psychology Today
Biased AI chatbots can sway people’s political views in minutes - Futurity
Study: Google's Gemma model downplays women's health needs compared to men's – Technology Mag
10 Ways to Guard Against Algorithmic Bias and AI Narcissism – Psychology Today
How journalists can spot and mitigate AI bias - Reuters
Surface Fairness, Deep Bias: A Comparative Study of Bias in Language Models – Arxiv
Grok brings to light wider AI antisemitism - The Week
Autocorrect, Other AI Applications, Are Biased Against Rural Language Like Hunting And Fishing Terms – Above The Law
AI researcher Joy Buolamwini discusses bias in facial recognition technologies at Duke event – Duke Chronicle
10 FAQs About California’s New Algorithmic Discrimination Rules – National Law Review
AI’s risks
/"As with the technology fears of the past, AI’s risks—the unintended consequences of autonomous systems, deepfakes, control by rogue actors, et al.—will be real, but for the foreseeable future they will be manageable in the much same way that every important technology has been in the past—through evolving rules, practices, and system refinements. While it’s easy to imagine a dystopia where super intelligent and highly dexterous legions of robots dominate and revolutionize life on Earth, that’s still the realm of science fiction, where technology fears have always found a home." - David Moschella writing for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Reframe anxiety
/Reframe anxiety, not as dread but as evidence of an exciting opportunity. The Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Kevin Majeres has defined anxiety as “adrenaline with a negative frame.” The right objective is not to get rid of the adrenaline, which is a performance-enhancing hormone, but to change the frame. This can be as simple as saying, when something is stressing you out, “This is exciting.” -Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic
23 Articles about the Dangers of AI
/Hey, AI Job Doomers: Wanna Bet? - Policy Arena
‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy – The Guardian
Should We Listen to the A.I. Doomsayers? – New York Times
AI Is Going to Consume a Lot of Energy. It Can Also Help Us Consume Less. – Wall Street Journal
We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. – MIT Tech Review
AI’s Emerging Teen-Health Crisis – The Atlantic
Anthropic CEO on AI: "There's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly" – Axios
Parents, Your Job Has Changed in the A.I. Era – New York Times
The family of teenager who died by suicide alleges OpenAI's ChatGPT is to blame – NBC News
A.I. Is Coming for Culture – The New Yorker
Our AI Fears Run Long and Deep – The Atlantic
ChatGPT Convinced 37-Year-Old Psychologist His Sore Throat Was Fine; Biopsy Revealed Stage 4 Cancer – Mashable
OpenAI Is Updating ChatGPT to Better Support Users in Mental Distress – Wall Street Journal
AI Experts No Longer Saving for Retirement Because They Assume AI Will Kill Us All by Then – Futurism
What Worries Americans About AI? Politics, Jobs and Friends - Cnet
AI as teleportation – Geoffrey Litt
What happens when fake AI celebrities chat with teens - Washington Post
Complaints about deepfake AI videos more than doubled this year, FBI says. Here are warnings from experts. – CBS News
AI Is Grown, Not Built Nobody knows exactly what an AI will become. That’s very bad. – The Atlantic
AI Is Making Online Dating Even Worse – The Cut
America is in a literacy crisis. Is AI the solution or part of the problem? - CNN
How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society – Pew Research
What people ask ChatGPT
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Read more at The Washington Post