22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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Bank of England warns of potential AI bubble - Semafor

Publishers with AI licensing deals have seven times the clickthrough rate – Press Gazette

Morgan Stanley warns the AI boom may be running out of steam – Quartz

Meta Will Begin Using AI Chatbot Conversations to Target Ads - WSJ  

ChatGPT’s new parental controls failed my test in minutes - The Washington Post

Perplexity AI rolls out Comet browser for free worldwide – CNBC

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Pulse to proactively write you morning briefs- Tech Crunch

Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia – The Verge

OpenAI Launches Video Generator App to Rival TikTok and YouTube – WSJ

Top A.I. Researchers Leave OpenAI, Google and Meta for New Start-Up to accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other fields. – New York Times

OpenAI’s New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out - WSJ

‘All-of-the-above’ approach needed to power AI boom, Nvidia sustainability chief says - Semafor

Musk’s xAI accuses rival OpenAI of stealing trade secrets in lawsuit – Washington Post

Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off? – WSJ

Turning “human in the loop” from a catchphrase into a design practice – Medium

The Psychology Of Trust In AI: A Guide To Measuring And Designing For User Confidence – Smashing Magazine

Why Meta Thinks It Can Challenge Apple in Consumer AI Devices – WSJ

Record labels claim AI generator Suno illegally ripped their songs from YouTube – The Verge

Microsoft looks to build AI marketplace for publishers – Axios

China's DeepSeek AI publishes peer-reviewed study finding its AI model R1 did not rely on rival models like ChatGPT for training, - Yahoo

Hundreds of Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight Over Working Conditions – Wired  

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Pulse, a paid feature that generates personalized subject matter briefs for users overnight– Tech Crunch

Talking Through a Problem

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Can’t figure out a complicated problem? Talk about it out loud or doodle on some paper. Psychologists in Spain say their tests show that processing information verbally or visually is more effective than remaining silent and still. They put students in separate rooms and gave them the same problems to solve. The students who talked to themselves or drew pictures to map out solutions finished first and scored higher. Psychologist Jose Luis Villegas Castellanos says he isn’t sure why it works this way, but believes verbal and visual problem-solving creates greater opportunities to discover the right answers.

Stephen Goforth

22 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

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Fraud, AI slop and huge profits: is science publishing broken? (a podcast) – The Guardian

AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds – Science

AI tools could reduce the appeal of predatory journals – Nature

Fake microscopy images generated by AI are indistinguishable from the real thing. – Chemistry World

The Machines Finding Life That Humans Can’t See – The Atlantic

Can researchers stop AI making up citations? - Nature 

AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers – MIT Tech Review

AI tool detects LLM-generated text in research papers and peer reviews – Nature

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review – Cornell University arXiv

Chatbots and large language models are being used to fact-check scientific work, but how effective are they? – Q.space 

Far more authors use AI to write science papers than admit it, publisher reports – Science  

What do researchers acknowledge ChatGPT for in their papers? – London School of Economics  

The rising danger of AI-generated images in nanomaterials science and what we can do about it – Nature

ChatGPT Fails to Flag Retracted and Problematic Articles – The Scientist  

Beyond ‘we used ChatGPT’: a new way to declare AI in research – Research Professional News  

Study looks at how biomedical journal editors-in-chief feel about AI use in their journals. – Springer

AI-generated medical data can sidestep usual ethics review, universities say – Nature

AI could be used for a Research Excellence Framework, says Royal Society president – Research Professional News  

Can Generative AI Restore Hope or Result in a Decline in the Quest for Academic Integrity – Sage  

When AI rejects your grant proposal: algorithms are helping to make funding decisions - Nature  

We risk a deluge of AI-written ‘science’ pushing corporate interests – here’s what to do about it – The Conversation

Far more authors use AI to write science papers than admit it, publisher reports – Science

Managing Your Professional Decline

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The shelves are packed with titles like The Science of Getting Rich and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There is no section marked “Managing Your Professional Decline.”  But some people have managed their declines well.   

At some point, writing one more book will not add to my life satisfaction; it will merely stave off the end of my book-writing career. The canvas of my life will have another brushstroke that, if I am being forthright, others will barely notice, and will certainly not appreciate very much. The same will be true for most other markers of my success.  What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of.

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

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