Making us Average

A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the caliber of the ideas. Other, older technologies have aided and perhaps enfeebled writers, of course—one could say the same about, say, SparkNotes or a computer keyboard. But with A.I. we’re so thoroughly able to outsource our thinking that it makes us more average, too. - Kyle Chayka writing in the New Yorker

18 Articles about AI & the Creative Arts

Amid the A.I. Deluge, What Counts as Art? Ask the Curators. - New York Times

Indonesia’s film industry embraces AI to make Hollywood-style movies for cheap – Rest of World  

Let's talk about AI art. – The Oatmeal

I’m a Screenwriter. Is It All Right if I Use A.I.? – New York Times

DC Comics won’t support generative AI: ‘not now, not ever’ – The Verge  

Inside the work of an AI content creator as online video gets unreal – Washington Post 

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

Is this the end of Adobe as we know it? Unless Adobe listens to users it could be – Amateur Photographer  

When A.I. Came for Hollywood - New York Times

I didn’t believe the hype about Google Mixboard — now I’m obsessed - Tom’s Guide

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

Creator of AI Actress Tilly Norwood Responds to Backlash: “She Is Not a Replacement for a Human Being” – Hollywood Reporter

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

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

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

Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI – Blood in the Machine

How AI is disrupting the photography business – Axios

Writing alt text with AI - Jared Cunha

AI Evolution

AI Evolution

1. Generative AI sounds like a person.

2. AGI (artificial general intelligence) reasons like a person.

3. Sentient AI thinks it's a person.

More AI definitions here

The snotty-nosed delinquent down the street

It's easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.--Eric Hoffer

It's easy

It's easy to give time to the harmless and inconsequential over the significant and enduring.

AI Definitions: AI assistance

AI assistance - Using AI to improve grammar, revise sentence structure, provide style suggestions, generate transcription, content summaries, or assisting with literature searches. This contrasts with AI-generated content is produced by the AI itself.

More AI definitions here

The Educated Mind

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.  –Aristotle

Mottos Learned in Childhood

(not necessarily verbalized)
 
a. Measure up (you’re climbing a ladder to get to ahead and when you get there it’s already been moved 3 rungs up)
b. Don’t let your guard down. People won’t like you.
c. You can’t trust a man until he’s 6 feet under
d. Sex is dirty. So save it for the one you love.
e. Good Christians don’t show negative emotions
 
You must let go of false messages from your childhood and carry your OWN cross. Not someone else’s.
 
What mottos have you had to battle and what effect have they had on your life? 

David Seamonds

Is AI Is Making the College Experience Lonelier?

Even for those students committed to doing their own work, AI poses a threat that is quieter and harder to measure: that they will go off to college and find the experience of learning far more solitary, far lonelier, than ever before. That is the threat that AI increasingly poses to higher education today: not that it will steal our words, but that it will steal our ability to think and work together. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

Wanting Black Coffee in a World of Expanding Options

Even though cartoons and skits over the last decade have made fun of exotic coffee drinks by suggesting it’s hard to just get a regular coffee these days, this has never happened. No one is being turned away from Starbucks for asking to buy a black coffee. So why is this scenario repeated as if regular coffee drinkers are being excluded? Jason Pargin explains:

This exaggeration is of a world that doesn’t exist. No one took his black coffee from him. All that happened is that the range of options for other people were expanded. He perceived that as persecution as if his choice was taken away. Most people are not satisfied to simply have the option to live the life the way they want. They also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice that they have made. If they see that, over time, their preference has become less popular, and even worse, is seen as being base or unsophisticated, they will perceive the mere existence of those other options as a criticism of them, even if they’ve never heard anyone voice that criticism. There is basic psychological comfort in knowing that you are conforming to what the world wants and in the reassurance that that world is not going to change.

It’s not about the coffee. It’s the fear that if everybody else stops drinking coffee the way I drink it then I will become an outcast. That is scary to someone who is suddenly remembering how they have always treated outcasts.  

Generative AI Doesn't Know How to Write Suspense

Suspense, in some form, is what keeps people watching anything longer than a TikTok clip, and it’s where A.I. flounders. A writer, uniquely, can juggle the big picture and the small one, shift between the 30,000-foot view and the three-foot view, build an emotional arc across multiple acts, plant premonitory details that pay off only much later and track what the audience knows against what the characters know. A recent study found that large language models simply couldn’t tell how suspenseful readers would find a piece of writing. -New York Times

Staying Power

Faith supplies staying power. It contains dynamic to keep one going when the going is hard. Anybody can keep going when the going is good, but some extra ingredient is needed to enable you to keep fighting when it seems that everything is against you.

You may counter, "But you don’t know my circumstances. I am in a different situation than anybody else and I am as far down as a human being can get.

In that case you are fortunate, for if you are as far down as you can get there is no further down you can go. There is only one direction you can take from this position, and that is up. So your situation is quite encouraging. However, I caution you not to take the attitude that you are in a situation in which nobody has ever been before. There is no such situation. 

Practically speaking, there are only a few human stories and they have all been enacted previously. This is a fact that you must never forget – there are people who have overcome every conceivable difficult situation, even the one in which you now find yourself and which to you seems utterly hopeless. So did it seem to some others, but they found an out, a way up, a path over, a pass through.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

23 Recent Articles about the Impact of AI on Health Care

Harvard Medical School licenses consumer health content to Microsoft – Reuters

AI maps how a new antibiotic targets gut bacteria – MIT

AI can design toxic proteins. They’re escaping through biosecurity cracks. – Washington Post

Doctors develop AI stethoscope that can detect major heart conditions in 15 seconds – The Guardian

A stunning scientific accomplishment: Computers can now design new viruses that can then be created in the lab - Washington Post 

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

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

Study: Google's Gemma model downplays women's health needs compared to men's – Technology Magazine  

Are AI Tools Making Doctors Worse at Their Jobs – New York Times

ChatGPT Convinced 37-Year-Old Psychologist His Sore Throat Was Fine; Biopsy Revealed Stage 4 Cancer – Mashable

AI designs antibiotics to fight drug-resistant superbugs – Semafor

Study: Some doctors lost skills after just a few months of using AI – Bloomberg

Using generative AI, researchers design compounds that can kill drug-resistant bacteria – MIT

Man develops rare condition after ChatGPT query over stopping eating salt – The Guardian

Ethical Obligations to Inform Patients About Use of AI Tools – Stanford Law

Study finds AI is better than experts at differentiating between human- and AI-written stroke papers - AHAIASA

Bringing AI to medicine requires philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethicists – Stat News

How AI Is Transforming Kidney Care – MedScape

AI Reads Your Tongue Color to Reveal Hidden Diseases – Scientific American  

A Chinese AI tool can manage chronic disease — could it revolutionize health care? – Nature

With therapy hard to get, people lean on AI for mental health. What are the risks? – NPR

A new AI model can forecast a person’s risk of diseases across their life - Economist

Only temporary

Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.

The Real Threats AI Poses

The real threats AI poses come not from AI itself but from the humans who wield it. As an extension of human intelligence, it is a reflection of our own selves. When AI produces hateful or violent outputs, it is not because it has malicious intent but because it has integrated human hatreds into its programming. If it generates destructive malware, it is because someone intentionally requested it. If it is misaligned with our goals, it is because we were not clear in our commands. For now, AI remains a tool, and we should focus on harnessing and constraining it effectively. -Eric Oliver writing in the Washington Post

Your cynical, I’ve-seen-some-things attitude.

You’re at the beginning of your life with the entire world in front of you. Whatever happened before reaching this point is done and unchangeable. What lies ahead is entirely up to you. Get the chip off your shoulder and walk on. Allow your past to be a source of strength and direction, not the thing that keeps you from moving on with your life.

Alex McDaniel

22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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

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

The Dizziness of Freedom

Anxiety is, in Kierkegaard’s words, the “dizziness of freedom”—the cost of doing the business of being fully alive. - Arthur C. Brooks

Prompt Pack

Here’s a prompt pack covering competitive research, strategy, UX design, content creation, and data analysis from the makers of ChatGPT.