The Way Out
/Sometimes the only way out is through.
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company
/Trump orders wide-ranging "Genesis Mission" to boost AI research – Axios
AI Investors Want More Making It and Less Faking It – Wall Street Journal
The Biggest AI Companies Met to Find a Better Path for Chatbot Companions – Wired
Major music studios strike licensing deals with AI firms - Semafor
In the A.I. Race, Chinese Talent Still Drives American Research – New York Times
How the U.S. Economy Became Hooked on AI Spending – Wall Street Journal
Are we in an AI bubble? Eight charts will help you decide. – Washington Post
The AI boom isn't going anywhere – Axios
How Trillions in New AI Debt Will Test the Bond Market – Wall Street Journal
OpenAI tests ChatGPT in group chats - Axios
Balance sheets, cash flows are showing the strain of AI investments and forcing investors to think about companies differently – Wall Street Journal
When AI Hype Meets AI Reality: A Reckoning in 6 Charts – Wall Street Journal
OpenAI fights order to turn over millions of ChatGPT conversations – Reuters
The risks of giving ChatGPT more personality - Axios
The AI Cold War That Will Redefine Everything – Wall Street Journal
Google, the sleeping AI giant, awakens - Axios
OpenAI Wants Brands to Allow Their Mascots to Appear in Gen AI Videos – Wall Street Journal
AI stocks waver as ‘Big Short’ investor bets against Palantir, Nvidia - Washington Post
Stability AI largely wins landmark UK intellectual property lawsuit brought by Getty Images – Associated Press
Who Will Pay for the AI Revolution? Retirees – Wall Street Journal
A.I. Is a Bubble. Maybe That’s OK. - New York Times
Hundreds of thousands of videos from news publishers like The New York Times and Vox were used to train AI models – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
Poets as Cybersecurity Threats
/Researchers say they were able to trick AI into ignoring its safety guard through poetry. Hostile prompts disguised as hand-crafted poems "achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62%.” Generic harmful prompts worked "approximately 43%" of the time. - PC Gamer
24 Articles about AI Audio & Video
/An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week — and People Are Listening – The Wrap
AI artists blow up on country music chart – Axios
Inside Reuters’ agentic AI video experiment - Digiday
The Current No. 1 Christian Artist Has No Soul – Christianity Today
People can't tell AI-generated music from real thing anymore, survey shows – CBS News
OpenAI Wants Brands to Allow Their Mascots to Appear in Gen AI Videos – Wall Street Journal
AI Video Has Changed Marketing Forever — and Standing Out Requires a New Strategy - Entrepreneur
My journey into the artificial world of Sora 2 – Poynter
OpenAI blocks Sora 2 users from using MLK Jr.'s likeness after "disrespectful depictions" – CBS News
How AI Hears Accents – Accent Explorer
Indonesia’s film industry embraces AI to make Hollywood-style movies for cheap – Rest of World
AI video app tops the download charts —horrifying many families of dead celebrities – Washington Post
ElevenLabs strike deals with celebs to create AI audio – TechCrunch
Can AI Music Ever Feel Human? It’s Not Just about the Sound – Scientific American
Inside the work of an AI content creator as online video gets unreal – Washington Post
Is this the end of Adobe as we know it? Unless Adobe listens to users it could be – Amateur Photographer
Coca-Cola Injects ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Ads With an Upgraded Dose of AI - Wall Street Journal
Walmart adds AI-generated audio summaries to select product pages – Modern Retail
How to Apply Powerful AI Audio Models to Real-World Applications – Toward Data Science
The Best AI Video Generators for 2025 – PC Mag
Hundreds of thousands of videos from news publishers like The New York Times and Vox were used to train AI models – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
The number one sign you're watching an AI video – BBC
Deepfake Videos Are More Realistic Than Ever. Here's How to Spot if a Video Is Real or AI - CNET
Major music studios strike licensing deals with AI firms – Semafor
2 Webinars this week about AI & Journalism
/Tue, Nov 25 - Telling Memorable Stories That Matter With Will Potter
What: We will discuss how to tell powerful stories that engage audiences in complex subjects, even as journalists increasingly face repression and threats from those who want to hide the truth and keep the public ignorant.
Who: Will Potter is a thought leader and award-winning investigative journalist whose work has focused on social justice and environmental movements, as well as attacks on civil rights post-9/11.
When: 12:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: American University of Armenia
Wed, Nov 26 - The dangers of AI
What: In this session: Understanding AI’s limitations and biases – how AI reinforces bias, risks for journalism, and implications for democracy; Safe and ethical use – knowing an organisation’s politics/legal stance, protecting sensitive data, and treating AI as a "tireless but error-prone intern."; Practical safety strategies – spotting mistakes, avoiding over-reliance, and using AI for learning without compromising accuracy; Environmental impact.
Who: Nicole Kobie is a technology & digital policy journalist and the author of “The Long History of the Future.”
When: 7:30 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: members: £10, non-members: £20
Sponsor: Women in Journalism
AI Definitions: Technical Debt
/Technical Debt - A software development term referring to the cost of choosing fast solutions now and putting off fixing issues until a future time. The benefit of a rush to market is matched with a hope that bugs will be found later, and repairs made. It can result from limited testing during the development process. Related: Ethical Debt
Making Friends
/You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. -Dale Carnegie (born Nov. 24, 1888)
AI Definitions: AI engineers
/AI engineers – Unlike traditional IT roles, people in this position will fix the AI when it breaks, digging through the layers to determine what went awry, why it went wrong and how to repair it. Like a plumber, they’ll snake the pipes to clear out the system and figure out how to avoid the problem next time. This will be particularly important when it comes to models that have been highly customized to an organization.
And how are you mad?
/All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.
The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’
24 Articles about Relationships with AI
/How AI is Powering Modern Love – Axios
AI Relationships Are on the Rise. A Divorce Boom Could Be Next – Wired
Are A.I. Therapy Chatbots Safe to Use? – New York Times
How people really use ChatGPT, according to 47,000 conversations shared online – Washington Post
What if you're being manipulated? – Understandably
The right place for AI companions in mental health care – Stat News
They Fell in Love With A.I. Chatbots — and Found Something Real – New York Times
Character.AI to ban kids from talking to its chatbots – USA Today
AI for therapy? Some therapists are fine with it — and use it themselves. – Washington Post
‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder- The Guardian
With therapy hard to get, people lean on AI for mental health. What are the risks? – NPR
Many teens are turning to AI chatbots for friendship and emotional support – American Psychological Association
Somebody to love: should AI relationships stay taboo or will they become the intelligent choice? - The Guardian
ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce – Futurism
Next Time You Consult an A.I. Chatbot, Remember One Thing – New York Times
How chatbots will likely develop as general life advisers. – Osmarks
‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy - The Guardian
AI Is Making Online Dating Even Worse – The Cut
People are starting to talk like ChatGPT - The Washington Post
The family of teenager who died by suicide alleges OpenAI's ChatGPT is to blame – NBC News
People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners – Futurism
Teenage boys using ‘personalised’ AI for therapy and romance, survey finds – The Guardian
AI Definitions: Test-time training (TTT)
/Test-time training (TTT) – Instead of being given truthful data to get an LLM model started in the right direction, TTTs learn by performing a task with the data. An alternative to transformers (which have high energy demands), TTTs only process more data faster, they can do so without consuming nearly as much computing power. Instead of growing as it processes data, like a transformer, it encodes the data into representations called weights. No matter how much data it processes, a TTT model won’t grow and become unwieldy.
Is an AI Relationship Cheating?
/"Some 60 percent of singles now say AI relationships are considered a form of cheating, according to two recent surveys. As chatbot romances become more commonplace, causing irreparable rifts in relationships, a new legal frontier is emerging in family law that is rewriting the rules of marital misconduct: An AI affair is now grounds for divorce." -Wired
Clint on Fear
/It’s what people know about themselves inside is what makes them afraid. – Clint Eastwood in “High Plains Drifter”
26 Recent Articles about the Dangers of AI
/Judge Horrified as Lawyers Submit Evidence in Court That Was Faked With AI - Futurism
How would-be authors were fooled by AI in suspected global publishing scam - The Guardian
Report finds some AI-enabled toys shared inappropriate content or collected data – NPR
AI-designed viruses raise fears over creating life. - The Washington Post
An Economist Asked, How Much Should We Spend to Avoid the A.I. Apocalypse? - New York Times
AI is reinventing crime and cops aren't ready – Axios
AI’s infinite memory could endanger how we think, grow, and imagine - Amy Chivavibul
Chinese hackers used Anthropic's AI agent to automate spying – Axios
How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’ - New York Times
It’s Easier to Cheat When You Can Blame AI – Wall Street Journal
A.I. is making death threats more realistic, enabling online harassers to generate images showing their victims in imagined violent situations. – New York Times
US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for gun – The Guardian
Woman sent husband AI photos of intruder as a prank. He called 911. – Washington Post
As tech companies build A.I. data centers worldwide, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages. – New York Times
The Fight Over Whose AI Monster Is Scariest - Wall Street Journal
‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder – The Guardian
ChatGPT Is a Fictional Character What makes OpenAI’s chatbot so dangerous? It’s a character without an author. – The Atlantic
The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World - New York Times
How AI-powered hackers are stealing billions – The Economist
ChatGPT’s new parental controls failed my test in minutes - The Washington Post
ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce – Futurism
AI can design toxic proteins. They’re escaping through biosecurity cracks. - The Washington Post
A stunning scientific accomplishment: Computers can now design new viruses that can then be created in the lab - The Washington Post
AI Definitions: AI translator
/AI translator (trust director) – People who understand AI well enough to explain its mechanics to others in the business, particularly to leaders and managers, so that they can make effective decisions. These workers will not only explain what the AI output means (especially when it is technical) but also how trustworthy the information and conclusions are. This role may fall under that of a compliance officer, helping organizations understand contracts and reports written by AI.
Seeking the Best is a Trap
/We have this sense that there is an objective best, and in virtually no area of life is that true. It’s not even that, “Well, there’s the best for me, and then there’s the best for you.” It isn’t even clear that there is a best for me. There’s a whole set of things that are probably more or less equivalent.
If you have this mindset that says, “I have to get the best,” it’s so hard to figure out what that is that you end up looking in panic around you at what other people are choosing as a way to help you figure out what is the best. I think it’s partly because they are struggling to define the best, and they can’t do it on their own, so they’re madly checking out other people’s decisions as a way of figuring out what really is the best. It’s extremely destructive.
Barry Schwartz quoted in Vox
23 Recent Articles about the Impact of AI on Students
/Universities are embracing AI: will students get smarter or stop thinking? – Nature
Professors, students divided over AI technology in classrooms – EdSource
What Is Gen Z Supposed to Do When AI Takes Entry-Level Jobs? - New York Magazine
Yonsei University plans public hearing amid AI-linked cheating scandal - The Korea Times
College students are panicking about AI. Here’s why they shouldn’t – Fast Company
Their Professors Caught Them Cheating. They Used A.I. to Apologize. – New York Times
AI Is Teaching the Next Generation of M.B.A.s the Classic Case Study – Wall Street Journal
University wrongly accuses students of using artificial intelligence to cheat - ABC News (Australia)
More college students are using AI for class. Their professors aren't far behind – NPR
This school district asked students to draft its AI policy – Washington Post
AI tutors coming to California Community Colleges - Axios
AI safety tool sparks student backlash after flagging art as porn, deleting emails - Washington Post
AI Is Making the College Experience Lonelier – Chronicle of Higher Ed
How to ask sharper questions about AI in your kid's classroom - Axios
AI gives students more reasons to not read books. It’s hurting their literacy – Fast Company
10 Ways AI Is Ruining Your Students’ Writing – Chronicle of Higher Ed
The Rapid Rise of AI in the Classroom – Plagiarism Today
College students are caught between 'AI gets you in trouble' and 'AI is the future' – Fast Company
My Students Use AI. So What? – The Atlantic
These Students Are Using AI to Visualize Their Reading Comprehension – Education Week
AI Is Changing What High School STEM Students Study – Wired
Caught cheating in class, college students “apologized” using AI—and profs called them out – Ars Technica
Can AI keep students motivated, or does it do the opposite? – The Conversation
3000 AI Podcast Episodes a Week
/"Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees is cranking out 3,000 episodes a week of AI podcasts covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and its cultural impact, to a biography series on Anna Wintour. It’s podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400.000 subscribers — so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts." -The Wrap
Becoming
/It's not about “being.” It’s about “becoming.”
24 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship
/Evaluating AI guidelines in leading family medicine journals: a cross-sectional study – BMC
Can a Research Agent Write Convincing but Unsound Papers that Fool LLM Reviewers? – arXiv
University of Hong Kong probes non-existent AI-generated references in paper; prof. says content not fabricated – Hong Kong Free Press
An Early Investigation Into In-Paper Prompt Injection Attacks and Defenses for AI Reviewers - arXiv
AI ‘Godfather’ hits record 1 million citations on Google Scholar - Semafor
Large language models in peer review: challenges and opportunities – Springer
arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated 'Research' Papers – 404 Media
Letters to scientific journals surge as ‘prolific debutante’ authors likely use AI – Science.org
From Language Barrier to AI Bias: The Non-Native Speaker’s Dilemma in Scientific Publishing – Scholarly Kitchen
Will AI + OA be OK? - Cabells
Why AI transparency is not enough - Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University
AI tools combat paper mill fraud in scientific publishing as peer review system struggles – Chemistry World
AI-powered fraud: Chinese paper mills are mass-producing fake academic research - South China Morning Post
AI bots wrote and reviewed all papers at this conference – Nature
Low-quality papers are flooding the cancer literature — can this AI tool help to catch them? – Nature
The chemistry community should ban drawing chemical structures with generative AI, chemists warn – Chemistry World
How ChatGPT-5 redefines scientific reproducibility.” – Elephant in the Lab
AAAI Launches AI-Powered Peer Review Assessment System - Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Research commissioner appears to cite discredited study in AI speech – Science Business
AI in peer review: where to draw the line? – Research Professional News
MIT takes down article on an AI platform for churches -MIT Technology Review
Journal defends work with fake AI citations after Hong Kong university launches probe - South China Morning Post