From an essay that includes a reflection on discovering AI-fabricated quotes while peer-reviewing a scholarly essay for potential publication. (Academics don’t get paid for the labor of pre-reading scholarly drafts for potential review. An author who uses AI is squandering the resources of human peer-reviewers.) Humanistic study once promised — and for many, still delivers…
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable. During a lesson on the Narrative of…
The illustrations clients bring to her are commonly littered with unclean lines and nonsensical text, and they look like a mess of pixels when blown up beyond a certain size. “There’s people that are aware AI isn’t perfect, and then there’s people that come to you angry because they didn’t manage to get it done…
Traffic on my website has plunged over the past few years. In 2019, my site attracted almost 1.5 million visitors. The content on my site has not gotten this bad, this quickly! Back in 2016, a single popular page on my website attracted almost 1 million visits — about as many visits as my entire…
Journalists who can’t verify their sources, or their own humanity, face consequences. Multiple news organisations have taken down articles written by an alleged freelance journalist that now appear to have been generated by AI. On Thursday, Press Gazette reported that at least six publications, including Wired and Business Insider, have removed articles from their websites…
Ever since DuoLingo announced it was pivoting away from human workers to AI, I’ve enjoyed my visits with the spunky little owl less and less. Today’s switch from the “hearts” system to “energy” was just too much. It used to be, you could keep doing lesson after lesson as long as you answered correctly…
Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy. I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the…
Though not in a hospital setting, the “basilar ganglia” is a real error that was served up by Google’s healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini. A 2024 research paper introducing Med-Gemini included the hallucination in a section on head CT scans, and nobody at Google caught it, in either that paper or a blog post announcing it. When Bryan…
Coders who used AI self-reported that they worked 20% faster, but an objective study found AI actually made coders 19% slower. This study confirms that while AI can help for general low-level tasks, humans with deep knowledge of the specific project could spend far more time working on higher-level tasks, rather than hunting for errors…
I’m getting ready to record about 18hrs footage from four different cameras, and I noticed my new 4K webcam was heating up pretty fast. I’m settled in a dorm room at the University of Toronto, far from the junk drawers and tool boxes that would have aluminum foil and copper wire. I suppose I could…
The market is rough for college grads, and especially rough for computer-related majors that the STEM-first mindset pushed as a guaranteed safe career track. According to a recent report, employment for journalism majors is not only better than CS and computer engineering, but also a notch or two better than the average employment rate for…
So much to see at the Heinz History Center but I absolutely had to check in with Nellie Bly. As a child I was fascinated by a drawing of a firefighter’s pole ladder in a book by Richard Scary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real one before but I instantly recognized it. Similar:Physician:…
We’re drawn to activities that invite us to grow, by trying and trying again, because we want to evolve as people. Life is mostly repetitive—wake, eat, work, sleep, repeat—and each day can feel like an unsatisfying circle. But repetition with variation broadens us. It makes our circular days into spiralling journeys. “The spiral is a…
This is what we have to look forward to, as a torrent of AI-generated slop that’s good enough for the CEOs to monetize squeezes out the human-generated content that actually matters. Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s…
Pope Leo XIV, in his first address to journalists at the Vatican, called for the release of imprisoned journalists, championed the free press, and urged caution about AI. My social media feed is full of memes that purport to represent the words of Leo XIV. Legitimate news sources have already published stories about Pope Leo…
…I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response…
The newest and most powerful technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why. Today’s A.I. bots are based on complex mathematical systems that learn…
Some 50 years ago, my father took me to his office in Washington, DC. I believe he was working for the Social Security Administration as a technical writer. I remember he held tightly onto my hand as we used a moving lift like this. The event was notable to young me for two reasons. One,…
Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and even people who intentionally break the law, are less likely to kill people with their cars. On 22 May 1997, the Swedish government presented Bill 1996/97:137 to parliament. It cemented zero deaths as a long-term goal for road fatalities. It reiterated that…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…