There is no security
/There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity. -General Douglas MacArthur (born Jan. 26, 1880)
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
24 Webinars this week about AI, Journalism & Media
/Tue, Jan 27- Journalism, Media, & Technology Trends and Predictions 2026
What: This report examines how generative AI, shifting audience behaviors, and the rise of creators are accelerating change across the news industry. Join the lead as he presents and discusses the report’s key findings.
Who: Mitali Mukherjee Director, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism; Nic Newman, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism; Joanna Webster, Global Editor, Agency News Strategy, Reuters.
When: 9 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Tue, Jan 27- Rethinking Visual Design in eLearning with Generative AI
What: We’ll explore how AI-powered image generation is reshaping the way instructional designers create visuals for eLearning. You’ll see how generative AI can help you move beyond generic stock images to create purposeful, contextual, and consistent visuals—faster than ever before.
Who: Sharath Ramaswamy Senior eLearning Evangelist, Adobe.
When: 11 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Adobe
Tue, Jan 27- How journalism collaboratives can accept corporate sponsorships
What: This webinar will help collaboratives understand the range of sponsorship opportunities, including in-kind partnerships, event sponsorship support, and funding for editorial projects, with a focus on how they can work effectively for journalism collaboratives.
Who: Emily Dresslar, Partnerships & Philanthropy at The Assembly.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Center for Cooperative Media
Tue, Jan 27- Enhancing independence with the Meta Glasses
What: This workshop will explore the emerging role of Meta Glasses as assistive technology and examine how wearable AI can enhance independence and everyday functioning for people with diverse needs. We will highlight features such as object identification and text interpretation, along with practical examples across school, work, home, and community settings. The session will also demonstrate how the glasses can be pivotal for users with mobility limitations, low vision, or executive function challenges.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Pacer Center
Tue, Jan 27- 2026 AI Trends That Will Transform Your Organization
What: Learn practical strategies to strengthen digital visibility, protect your data, personalize outreach at scale, and streamline internal processes with intelligent automation. Whether your organization is just beginning its AI journey or is looking to accelerate adoption, this presentation and Q&A will empower you to confidently navigate the future and position your team for long-term success. Tapp Network will guide you through actionable steps to harness AI as a strategic advantage and become a leader in innovation within your industry.
Who: Joe DiGiovanni, Tapp Network, Co-Founder; Kyle Barkins, Tapp Network , Co-Founder.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: TechSoup
Tue, Jan 27- Should publishers block AI bots from scraping their content?
What: We will show you how AI actually impacts different types of publishers, how blocking AI bots impacts your visibility and website traffic, loopholes that AI companies use to scrape your content, and how to block AI bots effectively.
Who: Eric Shanfelt Founding Partner, Nearview Media.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Local Media Association
Tue, Jan 27- Ghostwriting, Meet AI: Build a Custom GPT That Captures Your Exec’s Voice
What: We will guide you step-by-step through building a GPT that writes in your executive’s voice. Following this webinar, you’ll have a tool ready to draft posts, speeches, internal memos or thought-leadership pieces, retaining tone, cadence and personality while giving your team speed and scale.
Who: Allison Carter is the editor-in-chief of PR Daily and Ragan Communications.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: $40 members.
Sponsor: Public Relations Society of America
Wed, Jan 28 - Datawrapper’s API: A Beginner’s Guide with Python
What: How to use Datawrapper’s API with Python to automate chart creation and integrate data visualization into your workflow.
Who: Datawrapper Product Specialist Guillermina Sutter Schneider.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Datawrapper
Wed, Jan 28 - ChatGPT at Work: What Top Performers are Doing Differently
What: We’ll share what top-performing ChatGPT users do differently to change how they work, their impact, and their career trajectory.
Who: Jen Beltran, AI Deployment Manager, OpenAI.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: OpenAI Academy
Wed, Jan 28 - Building AI-Ready Teams: Unlocking Your People’s Potential in Partnership With AI
What: In this webinar, you’ll learn how to: Build your team’s confidence in using AI and clarity around its use within your organization; Model responsible use, remove roadblocks and celebrate wins so that new workflows stick and scale; Spot high-value AI opportunities and create repeatable habits that spread AI adoption and results; Guide yourself and your team to use AI with purpose, consistency and measurable outcomes.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: FranklinCovey
Wed, Jan 28 - Freelance Pitch Panel
What: Freelancers of all experience levels will learn from seasoned editors about best pitching practices and common pitching pitfalls, have their pitches critiqued and get advice on how to build a robust and diverse freelance portfolio.
Who: Allison Entrekin, Executive Editor, Southbound Magazine; Paul Fain, Co-founder and Editor, Work Shift; Lou Harry, Editor-in-Chief, Quill Magazine; Collin Kelley, Executive Editor, Atlanta Intown and Rough Draft; Laura Kate Whitney, Editor-at-Large, Good Grit.
Mark Woolsey, SPJ Georgia At-Large Board Member
When: 6:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Society of Professional Journalists, Georgia
Wed, Jan 28 - AI-Palooza: Tools for Journalists & Communicators
What: Ways journalists and communicators can use AI ethically, enabling both groups to do their jobs smarter and better.
Who: Benét Wilson, owner/editor-in-chief of Aviation Queen.
When: 7 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: National Association of Black Journalists
Wed, Jan 28 - Citizen Journalism 101: Local Voices, Real Stories
What: The Power of Local Stories — Mission, Ideas & Purpose - Why local journalism matters — from holding power to celebrating people. Explore different types of stories; Finding your first story; Where stories begin.
Who: Journalist Kristin Palpini.
When: 7 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Urban Media Arts
Thu, Jan 29 - Collecting Public Opinion During Conflict
What: How AI-assisted methods can be applied to actual public opinion research, especially on highly sensitive and polarized issues. It provides valuable insights for exploring new methods of polling and consensus-building.
Who: Andrew Konya, Remesh USA.
When: 9 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: World Association for Public Opinion Research
Thu, Jan 29 - Social Media Marketing
What: This session breaks down social media marketing into manageable steps you can actually maintain. You’ll learn: How to choose the right platforms for your business; What types of posts work best; How to stay consistent without burnout.
When: 11:30 am
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Small Business Development Center, Gannon University
Thu, Jan 29 - Disinformation Detox: Teaching Disinformation from Inside the Information Ecosystem
What: Participants will leave with a complete worked example of the assignment, a menu of theoretical lenses.This session is designed for media and information literacy educators who want to move beyond fact-checking checklists toward pedagogical practices that mirror the complexity of the information systems our students inhabit.
Who: Gina Marcello, Rutgers University.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Media Education Lab
Thu, Jan 29 - Covering Policies that Restrict DEI
What: Hear from a policy analyst, civil rights lawyer and journalist who can provide attendees with insights into policies and legislation from the state house to the White House. Reporters can expect to walk away with tools to stay ahead of the story and avoid missing critical developments happening in legislative halls, federal agencies, college campuses and classrooms.
Who: Arthur Coleman, founding partner, EducationCounsel; Heidi Tseu, assistant vice president of national engagement, American Council on Education; Brooklyn Draisey, higher education reporter, Iowa Capital Dispatch.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Education Writers Association
Thu, Jan 29 - The 2026 Advertising Reset: Frameworks for AI and Measurement
What: How to support faster audience creation, more resilient measurement, and smarter budget decisions across paid media, without sacrificing governance or control. You’ll see how leaders are navigating new advertising hurdles with AI-driven systems that connect audience intelligence, real-time qualification, rapid experimentation, and continuous optimization.
Who: Sohail Wadera, Senior Engineering Manager, Autodesk; Colleen Wolfe, Uniphore.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Uniphore
Thu, Jan 29 - Copyright in the Age of Generative AI
What: Stay informed on how shifting copyright laws and policy debates are responding to generative AI. This session explores recent legislative developments, emerging case law, and practical guidance for libraries navigating AI driven content and copyright questions.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Idaho Commission for Libraries
Thu, Jan 29 - Strategies for Overcoming Writer's Block
What: Tips and tricks that will get you in the flow and writing like a professional. Whether you're a beginner or advanced, these tools are ones that anyone will find enlightening and invaluable.
Who: Derek Taylor Kent is the author of 19 books.
When: 1:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Author Learning Center
Thu, Jan 29 - What’s New with AI in PowerPoint Copilot?
What: You’ll see how Copilot can help develop story outlines that relate to your audience, create highly graphic slides, manipulate images, update data, align slide content, and create useful summaries and handouts to share as resources afterwards. And, given that this is being written several months before we go live, who knows what else will come through.
Who: Richard Goring, Director, BrightCarbon.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: ispring
Thu, Jan 29 - Amplify your voice: How to build credibility and connections on LinkedIn
What: How to use LinkedIn with the intention to build authentic connections, expand your reach, and strengthen your professional reputation.
Who: Cory Welsh, LinkedIn
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: USC Anneberg School for Communication & Journalism
Fri, Jan 30 - How to Legally Protect Your Newsgathering, with the Cornell First Amendment Clinic's Local Journalism Project
What: A free webinar for journalists on how they can legally protect their newsgathering. The program will include a refresher on the basics of defamation law, how to strengthen an article against any potential defamation claim, what to avoid in terms of internal communications that could be twisted in later litigation, best practices for protecting sources, your right to record law enforcement, etc.
When: 11 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic
Fri, Jan 30 - ASERL Copyright Office Hour
What: Please bring your puzzling and perplexing copyright questions.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Association of Southeastern Research Libraries
LLM Strengths & Weaknesses
/Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and planning [but] LLM-based agents continue to fail in complex, multi-step planning tasks. More from a paper published in Arxiv
Life is About
/Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain. - Vivian Greene
Knowledge collapse
/In a world where AI increasingly mediates access to knowledge, future generations might lose connection with vast bodies of experience, insight and wisdom. AI developers might argue that this is simply a data problem, solvable by incorporating more diverse sources into training datasets. While that might be technically possible, the challenges of data sourcing, prioritization and representation are far more complex than such a solution implies. - Deepak Varuvel Dennisonis
AI Definitions: Liquid Foundation Models
/Liquid Foundation Models (LFM) – This type of AI has a smaller memory footprint but packs greater computational power than the transformer models found in most GenAI systems. Using fewer parameters and neurons than transformers, LFMs are designed to handle a variety of sequential data (such as text, video, and audio) with significant accuracy. LFMs do not rely on existing frameworks as transformers do. They are built from the ground up (that is, built on “first principles”).
Change Talk
/Sermonizing about goals is change-talk. But not growth-talk. Each has a place and a time, but they are not to be mistaken for each other. We may be fooling ourselves, thinking we are moving forward — when really, on the inside, we are idle, going nowhere.
17 Recent Articles about AI Fakes
/AI Surveillance Systems Are Causing a Staggering Number of Wrongful Arrests - Futurism
Grok deepfakes accelerate Hill action - Axios
Matthew McConaughey Trademarks Himself to Fight AI Misuse – Wall Street Journal
There’s One Easy Solution to the A.I. Porn Problem – New York Times
Resisting AI slop in Science & Higher Ed – Science.org
A bibliography of genAI-fueled research fraud from 2025 – Sharon Kabel
Publisher under fire after ‘fake’ citations found in AI ethics guide – The Times
Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was the one expelled – Associated Press
Researchers call for retraction of two recent Nature studies about AI-generated crystals – Chemical & Engineering News
More than half of researchers now use AI for peer review — often against guidance – Nature
The rise of deepfake cyberbullying poses a growing problem for schools – Associated Press
This guy’s obscure PhD project is the only thing standing between humanity and AI image chaos – Fast Company
A.I. Videos Have Flooded Social Media. No One Was Ready. - New York Times
How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian – Card Catalog for Life
AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals – Scientific American
More A than I: Testing for Large Language Model Plagiarism in Political Science – Political Science Now
A.I. Videos Have Flooded Social Media. No One Was Ready - New York Times
Bots Can't Spot AI Videos
/Three leading chatbots failed to detect fake videos generated by Sora most of the time.
(Graph by NewsGuard)
True Self
/We grow toward true self in a space where our growth is not driven by external demands but drawn forward, by love, into our best possibilities. -Parker Palmer
18 Articles about AI & the Creative Arts
/Using AI as a Design Engineer – Jakub.kr
The Problem With Letting AI Do the Grunt Work AI is destroying the career ladder for aspiring artists – The Atlantic
8 Ways A.I. Affected Pop Culture in 2025 – New York Times
Universal Music Group and Splice Ink AI Partnership – Hollywood Reporter
AI Is a Gift to Human Creativity When anyone can produce passable work, real talent becomes more readily apparent than ever. – Wall Street Journal
What does it mean to be a designer in the age of AI? - Figma
Inside the Creation of Tilly Norwood, the AI Actress Freaking Out Hollywood - Wall Street Journal
Town’s Christmas art contest ends in scandal: Did the winner use AI? – Washington Post
The Current No. 1 Christian Artist Has No Soul – Christianity Today
AI artists blow up on country music chart – Axios
People can't tell AI-generated music from real thing anymore, survey shows – CBS News
From design to direction: Bridging product design and AI thinking – UX Design
Coca-Cola Injects ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Ads With an Upgraded Dose of AI – Wall Street Journal
More AI actors are in development - Deadline
A handful of creators have been paid more than $1 million to license their videos to AI companies. – Semafor
On AI Removing Creative Constraints – Illusion of More
Using AI for UX Work: Study Guide – NN Group
AI Definitions: Reinforcement Learning
/Reinforcement Learning - Rather than being given specific goals, the AI is deployed into an environment where it can train with minimal feedback. This trial-and-error approach involves adjusting weights until high-reward outcomes are achieved. Desirable behaviors are rewarded, and undesirable behaviors are punished. It is similar to a person learning how to work through levels of a video game, searching for an effective strategy. This type of machine learning sits somewhere in between supervised (by humans) and unsupervised learning. Reinforcement learning is used in video game development and has helped robots adapt to new environments.
Writing your Own Eulogy
/A visualization technique that asks people to write their own eulogy. It’s a technique that Daniel Harkavy, co-author of Living Forward, has been teaching executives for over 20 years.
Harkavy’s tip is to write your eulogy first as if your funeral was today and everything you’ve accomplished so far was all you ever would. “Picture your memorial service as if it were being held right now. Your casket is sitting center stage, and as you look down the center aisle you see the first three rows, usually reserved for those with whom we were closest. Who’s sitting there for you?” he asks. “Most likely your family and dearest friends. Now keep looking down the aisle, and now you’re looking at rows 10 through 20. Who’s sitting there? Probably acquaintances, clients, customers. What did you give to the people in these rows?”
Harkavy says when he walks clients through this exercise during his speaking engagements, they usually all say the same thing: “We gave them our best!” He then asks them what they gave to the people sitting in rows one through three–and their answers usually amount to “We gave them our leftovers.” In other words, their work-life balance is out of whack.
“When you go to write your eulogy, you need to be brutally honest. Don’t pull any punches. You want to really feel this,” Harkavy says. “What would those closest to you say about who you were, how you lived, and what you had to give them, and why would they say that?”
Michael Grothaus writing in Fast Company
LLMs Reflect Western Cultural Value
/It should not come as a surprise that a growing body of studies shows how LLMs predominantly reflect Western cultural values and epistemologies. They overrepresent certain dominant groups in their outputs, reinforce and amplify the biases held by these groups, and are more factually accurate on topics associated with North America and Europe. - Deepak Varuvel Dennisonis
19 Articles about AI & Coding
/On Coding Agents and the Future of Design – Veen
Developers Use AI Coding Tools To Get Started, Not Finish The Job – Forbes
10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents - ArsTechnica
Anthropic's "infinite vibe coding machine" – Axios
Generative coding: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026 – MIT Tech Review
Dramatic drop in Stack Overflow questions as devs look elsewhere for help - DevClass
Vibe Code Reality Check: What You Can Actually Build with Only AI - KDnuggets
“Tinder for Nazis” hit by 100GB data leak, thousands of users exposed with the help of AI – CyberNews
AI Tools Make Coders More Important, Not Less – Harvard Business Review
Finding Meaningful Work in the Age of Vibe Coding - KDnuggets
AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job. – Terrible Software
As a first-time vibe coder, I wish AI knew when to say no – Rest of World
Millions of Coders Love This AI Startup. Can It Last? – Wall Street Journal
How coding agents speed up the software development lifecycle – Open AI Developers
The New Calculus of AI-based Coding - Joe Magerramov's blog
The Joy of Coding Isn’t Dead, It’s Being Redefined – RT Insights
The real problem with AI coding - Paul Sanglé-Ferrière
Code like a surgeon - Geoffrey Litt
AI Code Is a Bug-Filled Mess – Futurism
AI Definitions: Vibe Coding
/Vibe Coding – An LLM generates code that meets the specifications stated in the user's prompt. This is not the same as software development, where the user reviews the AI coding and can explain it. This type of coding uses natural language to communicate desired outcomes. Vibe coding platforms would include Claude Artifacts, Creator Hunter, and Cursor. While the goal is a finished product, in practice, this approach entails risks, such as hidden bugs and subtle security issues. Some degree of human oversight and refinement is still needed for most LLM-generated code outcomes to become production-ready.
My, my we’re looking smug
/Want to be condescending? Here are four easy steps:
Evaluate people from above, not from alongside.
Give others no room to change or grow.
Once you’ve slapped a label on someone, never revise your opinion.
Forget how it feels to be on the receiving end of judgment.
25 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship
/Do you use generative AI to help identify literature you missed? If so, how? – Dynamic Ecology
Two-thirds of universities report AI use among doctoral students – Times Higher Ed
After the PDF: A new unit of knowledge for the AI era – research Information
AI in Scholarly Publishing — SSP Pulse Check Report – Scholarly Kitchen
AI Shift: Agentic AI is coming for quantitative research – Financial Times
Peer review needs a revolution. AI is already driving it – Scholarly Futures
In Memoriam: The Academic Journal (death by LLM) – Arxiv
Guidelines needed for the use of AI in the preparation or review of IRB, IBC, and IACUC applications – Tandfonline
What to expect in scholarly communications in 2026 (?Or what AI believes could occur...) – Scholarly Futures
A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of AI Policies in Academic Peer Review – Wiley
Fine-Grained Detection of AI-Generated Writing in the Biomedical Literature – Bioxiv
Funders ‘should support shared AI tools for translational research’ – Research Professional News
AI-generated commentaries and letters to the editor of peer-reviewed publications: editors and authors beware! - Tandfonline
A bibliography of genAI-fueled research fraud from 2025 - Sharonkabel
Meet the author who has published more than 500 letters to the editor in a year – Retraction Watch
Evaluating the Use of Large Language Models as Synthetic Social Agents in Social Science Research – Sciopen
Publisher under fire after ‘fake’ citations found in AI ethics guide – The Times
The H-Index of Suspicion: How Culture, Incentives, and AI Challenge Scientific Integrity – NEJM
Researchers who use generative AI to write papers are publishing more – C&EN
Deep Research, Shallow Agency: What Academic Deep Research Can and Can't Do – Aaron Tay
Will AI stop new curation-led publishing models thriving before they’ve even had a chance to grow? – Scholarly Futures
AI-assisted cheating could impact universities' global standings – Korean Times
AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals – Scientific American
Publisher under fire after ‘fake’ citations found in AI ethics guide – the Times
Hack reveals reviewer identities for huge AI conference – Science.org
The People who Understand AI Broadly
/Not everyone working with AI today has a background in data science and machine learning. According to Huntr’s Q3 2025 Job Search trends report, in the real world, it’s people who understand AI broadly and can apply it flexibly who thrive, rather than specialists who excel in narrow domains. - Hacker Noon
Three types of Perfectionists
/A study measured three types of perfectionism: self-oriented, or a desire to be perfect; socially prescribed, or a desire to live up to others’ expectations; and other-oriented, or holding others to unrealistic standards. A person living with an other-oriented perfectionist might feel criticized by the perfectionist spouse for not doing household chores exactly the “right” way. Socially prescribed perfectionism is “My self-esteem is contingent on what other people think.”
Perfectionists tend to devalue their accomplishments, so that every time a goal is achieved, the high lasts only a short time, like “a gas tank with a hole in it.”
There are also different ways perfectionism manifests. Some perfectionists are the sleeping-bag-toting self-flagellants, always pushing themselves forward. But others actually fall behind on work, unable to complete assignments unless they’re, well, perfect. Or they might self-sabotage, handicapping their performance ahead of time. They’re the ones partying until 2 a.m. the night before the final, so that when the C rolls in, there’s a ready excuse. Anything to avoid facing your own imperfections.
Olga Khazan writing in The Atlantic