My mother-in-law invited me to try out the 60- year-old tape machine that belonged to my father-in-law. When I worked in radio news in the late 1980s, we were still loading reels and splicing tape, so it all came back to me pretty quickly. Similar:The Missing Will, by Agatha Christie (WAOB Audio Theatre)'Most Transparent’…
My job is often to help students understand things that they aren’t good at doing yet. If a student arrives in my classroom with a solid ability to construct clear sentences and summarize difficult readings, using an AI tool that helps them spot grammar mistakes with less effort and capture the gist of a reading…
A healthy respect for the free press and the institution of journalism is absolutely crucial for a healthy democracy. Media literacy matters, while a jaded “I don’t trust journalists, I do my own research” DIY attitude is easily co-opted. A false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris was involved in a June 2011 hit-and-run incident…
Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm…
Chatbots are designed to give conversational answers and keep people engaged. Names and links to sources for answers range from nonexistent to hidden, though some companies are starting to make them more visible. Even when AI does include a source, it adds it after the fact, said Jevin West, a professor and co-founder of the…
I worked on LLMs, and now I got opinions. Today, let’s talk about when LLMs make mistakes. On AI Slop You’ve already heard of LLM mistakes, because you’ve seen them in the news. […] LLMs could be used to summarize sources. Something that’s fairly obvious in my journal club is that many researchers are…
I used to spend time in class teaching students about how your act of choosing to link from your blog to someone else’s blog was part of the formula Google used to rank its search results. The words you picked when you crafted your hyperlink was a way of conveying or withholding value. Tagging is…
Glenda Morgan does not sound that impressed with Google’s latest promises about AI and education. [T]hus far I am unconvinced that the kinds of tutoring currently offered via AI matches the concept of watching a student’s thought processes and identifying the core issues they aren’t understanding. Instead, AI tutoring today seems to consist of breaking…
I was never really a fan of MTV, I assume because I grew up without cable TV as a teenager in the 80s, and because I was very busy with grad school and starting a family in the 90s. I didn’t really feel like I had much in common with my “Gen X” cohort (most…
How can a nostalgic, branching-path story-game encourage my 100-level journalism students take risks and learn from their mistakes? Using the ChoiceScript programming language, which features a robust stats system that can remember and respond to player choices, I coded up a “writing your first news story for the student paper” scenario, which unfolds as a…
I was approached on LinkedIn with the opportunity to work to help train an AI, for an hourly wage that’s much higher than I would get for teaching an extra class at my university. I thought about it. I told myself it would help me do my job better if I have a clear sense…
Apple has apologized, but like writer Peter C. Baker, I’m not quite ready to let go of that really horrifying ad depicting a roomful of beautifully displayed musical instruments, sound gear, art supplies, and even toys being slowly squashed by a huge hydraulic press (ostensibly to highlight the creative potential of the latest iPad). Picture…
Already facing scandal, the Washington Post‘s new-ish CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, has announced that the newspaper will be pivoting to artificial intelligence to turn around its dismal financial situation. […] The paper’s chief technology officer, meanwhile, announced to staffers that going forward, WaPo is to have “AI everywhere in our newsroom,” according to Tani. It’s unclear,…
The new AI advanced version of Google Search, aka Google SGE or Search Generative Experience, provides wicked smart AI answers to your queries. And if you ask it how to pass kidney stones quickly, Google will tell you to drink at least two quarts of urine every 24 hours. Source: Google SGE Recommends You Drink…
Weirdly beautiful. Wonderful bit of game history exploring why the code for the 1993 game Doom uses a slightly wrong value for pi (the programmer recalls that he misremembered the 10th digit), and a bizarre exploration of what happens to the gameplay when you deliberately change pi to different values. We all know that the…
I guess now we know why for the past decade or so Google doesn’t seem to be valuing what used to be magical about Google — the ability to rank pages so effectively and connect users to web pages that met their needs. That’s just not what’s driving Google these days. With AI search results…
Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky – as if shot in low light…
Have you seen Apple’s “Crush” ad? It features a huge huge hydraulic press crushing musical instruments, art supplies, google-eyed toys, and other beloved artifacts of imagination and creativity. I remember seeing a video years ago that showed how a smartphone replaced a desktop full of tools like a calculator, notepad, rolodex, and so forth. But…
A little over a century ago, the printer T.J. Cobden-Sanderson took it upon himself to surreptitiously dump every piece of this carefully honed metal letterpress type into the river. It was an act of retribution against his business partner, Emery Walker, whom he believed was attempting to swindle him. With its extra-wide capital letters, diamond shaped punctuation and…
Here’s the underlying problem. We have an operating image of thought, an understanding of what thought is and how to make thought productive of knowledge and truth through the use of various methods. This image and its methods are, of course, products of human history. They change over time, in different cultures, and so on.…