To be Creative

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I hope everyone will decide to take control of their lives, to reach inside themselves, to explore who they are and what they have, and learn to use those inner powers. Not for success, not to be seen; that's not important. What is important is that you fulfill your own personal need to keep growing.

Examine yourself and how you work. Get used to the pattern by which things come up in your mind and in your imagination. Find out when and at what times of the day you work best and what motivates you. Is it anger or serenity? Do you want to prove someone else wrong? What sort of inner needs do you fulfill?

Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do

Be a Poet

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In 2016, educational psychologists, Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar found that people who try to solve creative problems are more successful if they behave like an eccentric poet than a rigid librarian. Given a test in which they have to come up with as many uses as possible for any object (e.g. a brick) those who behave like eccentric poets have superior creative performance. This finding holds even if the same person takes on a different identity.  When in a creative deadlock, try this exercise of embodying a different identity. It will likely get you out of your own head, and allow you to think from another person’s perspective. I call this psychological halloweenism.   

Srini Pillay writing in the Harvard Business Review

19 Articles about AI Audio & Video

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OpenAI Launches Video Generator App to Rival TikTok and YouTube – Wall Street Journal  

A short video from the UK’s Particle6 featuring AI ‘Actor’ Tilly Norwood (and is completely AI generated) - YouTube

AI video wars heat up - Axios 

OpenAI’s New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out - Wall Street Journal

What Happened to Lionsgate’s Splashy Plan to Make AI Movies With Runway? – The Wrap

Charlie Kirk's AI resurrection ushers in a new era of digital grief – Religious News Service

The rise of A.I. nostalgia bait – New York Times  

An agreement with the AI startup to make AI movies can serve as a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of embracing a technology too early - The Wrap 

OpenAI Backs AI-Made Animated Feature Film - Wall Street Journal

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

How AI is reshaping the audiovisual industry - UKTN

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

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

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

Is It Still Disney Magic if It’s AI? - Wall Street Journal

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

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

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

In an era of AI slop and mid TV, is it time for cultural snobbery to make a comeback? – The Guardian

The Power of Small Wins

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Try to remember the last time you – or anyone you know – had a truly enormous breakthrough in solving a problem or achieving one of those audacious goals. It’s pretty hard, because breakthroughs are very rare events. On the other hand, small wins can happen all the time. Those are the incremental steps toward meaningful (even big) goals. Our research showed that, of all the events that have the power to excite people and engage them in their work, the single most important is making progress – even if that progress is a small win. That’s the progress principle. And, because people are more creatively productive when they are excited and engaged, small wins are a very big deal for organizations.

Religiously protect at least 20 minutes – and, ideally, much more – every day, to tackle something in the work that matters most to you. Hide in an empty conference room, if you have to, or sneak out in disguise to a nearby coffee shop. Then make note of any progress you made (even if it was a small win), and decide where to pick up again the next day. The progress, and the mini-celebration of simply noting it, can lift your inner work life.

Teresa Amabile talking about her book The Progress Principle  

The AI Flattery Trap

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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

18 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators

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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 

‘It’s just bots talking to bots’: AI is running rampant on college campuses as students and professors alike lean on the tech - Fortune

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

AI definitions: Workslop

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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

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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

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How to Spot a Liar

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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

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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

AI’s risks

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"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

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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

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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 

Those who predict that superintelligence will destroy humanity serve the same interests as those who believe that it will solve all of our problems – The Atlantic  

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