18 Surprising Things AI can do now

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How AI is Changing Entry Level Jobs

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Rather than have rookie employees compile reports or write memos — things the A.I. is good at — you might have them start, say, creating new ideas for products right away. Traditionally, this kind of work would be reserved for deeply experienced workers, but it won’t need to stay that way. By empowering young, inexperienced workers, A.I. can enable them to be more entrepreneurial, faster. And this means that a greater range of the organization — with a wider range of perspectives — can be hunting for new great ideas or new areas for growth rather than busying themselves with repetitive office tasks. -New York Times 

AI Definitions: Big Data

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Big Data - Data that’s too big to fit on a single server. Typically, it is unstructured and fast-moving. In contrast, small data fits on a single server, is already in structured form (rows and columns), and changes relatively infrequently. If you are working in Excel, you are doing small data. Two NASA researchers (Michael Cox and David Ellsworth) first wrote in a 1997 paper that when there’s too much information to fit into memory or local hard disks, “We call this the problem of big data.” Many companies wind up with big data, not because they need it, they just haven’t bothered to delete it. Thus, big data is sometimes defined as “when the cost of keeping data around is less than the cost of figuring out what to throw away.”    

Big Data looks to collect and manage large amounts of varied data to serve large-scale web applications and vast sensor networks. Meanwhile, data science looks to create models that capture the underlying patterns of complex systems and codify those models into working applications. Although big data and data science both offer the potential to produce value from data, the fundamental difference between them can be summarized in one statement: collecting does not mean discovering. Big data collects. Data science discovers.  

More AI definitions here

Form a strong identity … and let it go

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Fixating on one part of your identity and saying, “I am this—and this is all I am” stagnates your identity. A more holistic approach allows your identity to shift and change and expand as you become more fully who you are. Different experiences and people will draw different things out of you. Yes, form a strong identity and find words that help you express where you are at in this moment. But do it in order to ultimately let it go.

The Trivial & the Bureaucratic

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The Bikeshed Effect (focusing on the trivial to the neglect of the important) is a spiral toward the insignificant.

The time and energy waster grows from a lack of working from priorities. If you don’t continuously cut off its oxygen, you adopt to the surrounding culture that fuels spotlighting the details.   

The Bikeshed Effect is related to Parkinson’s Law, which suggests a project will take as long as is given to finish it. The further out the deadline, the longer it will take to complete a task. Thus, bureaucracy expands to use up whatever resources are devoted to it.

To get at what’s underneath Parkinson’s Law and the Bikeshed Effect, why we focus on the trivial and put off deadlines, we must ask ourselves, “What are we afraid of?” Sabina Nawaz wrote in the Harvard Business Review:

When we’re scared, we might spin up a frantic list of activities to avoid confronting our fear. The more afraid we are, the more we retreat from what spooks us by believing we’re too busy to tackle it.

To escape the ranks of the fearful and dead bureaucrats, take a serious look at the angst underneath and disempower it.

Making us Average

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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

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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 Definitions: AGI

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AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – A machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. Rather than focusing on solving specific problems (like Deep Blue, which was good at chess), this type of AI has broader uses and may possess seemingly human-level intelligence to learn and adapt. Scientists have had difficulty defining human intelligence and disagree as to what would count as AGI. Regardless of where they draw the line, most experts say AGI is at least decades away. Scientists have no hard evidence that today’s technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Beyond AGI lies the more speculative goal of "sentient AI," where the programs become aware of their existence with feelings and desires.

More AI definitions here

Mottos Learned in Childhood

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(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?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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