How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future? AI will obviously make it easier to produce disinformation—from fake images to deepfakes to fake news. That will affect people’s sense of trust as they’re scrolling on social media. AI can also allow someone to imitate your loved ones, which further erodes people’s…
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is…
Years ago I spent some time in Second Life, taking my young son to visit a display of NASA rockets and historical sites from classical history, and for my own amusement wandering through a few Star Trek exhibits, and exploring the mostly empty landscapes. My university bought an island, and I was briefly excited at…
A good article about kids and dopamine. Apps and sweets can hijack the neural pathways we need to survive, triggering tantrums and aggression. The problem describes plenty of adults, too! It’s not actually happiness we feel when we fulfill that craving. While she’s staring into the technicolor images, her brain experiences spikes in dopamine, over and…
As Mike Edwards notes, “AI doomers will eagerly tweet this article, unaware that it’s not about the dangers of LLMs: it’s about *information literacy*”
In a cringe-inducing court hearing, a lawyer who relied on A.I. to craft a motion full of made-up case law said he “did not comprehend” that the chat bot could lead him astray.
It was time to download Google Chrome on a new Windows 11 computer. I typed “Chrome” into the Microsoft Edge search bar. I was greeted with a full-screen Microsoft Bing AI chatbot window, which promptly told me it was searching for… Bing features. Source: Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my ‘Chrome’ search with a…
“In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that … require the most educational background.” In March, Goldman Sachs…
Shortly after my online AmLit survey began, I received two obviously AI-generated submissions. The responses did not address the prompt, there was no textual annotation and brainstorming assignment that was supposed to lead up to the written response, and the student did not take me up on my offer to meet to discuss how the…
The other day I got a last-minute request to video a show. I usually like to watch a dress rehearsal first, which gives me the chance to check out my equipment and get a sense of where the important action will take place. But yesterday I had to go in cold, and I felt a…
Long, self-indulgent essays from a writer I idolized, a gorgeous online portfolio of photos taken by a photographer in Japan, a repository of old State Department language learning resources, all gone. Link rot is real, folks, and with it comes a slow, steady sloughing off things on the internet we once loved — or still love,…
Students who cheat with ChatGPT can look forward to these $15/hr jobs training the AI that they relied upon to get them their degrees. The students who actually did the work themselves should be much be better prepared to demonstrate how their work differs from the mediocre stream of bot-produced content. Savreux is part of…
I am curious enough about cockatoos that I might click a link to read an article about people who own a cockatoos. I feel the same about British royalty, or “van life,” or VR. Other than remembering a cool exhibit that stacked up various NASA and other historical rockets so you could see the scale,…
Today’s students have many strengths. They are great at collaboration, introspection, and remixing. While my students are very familiar with phone apps, even the English majors who want to be professional writers are not very familiar with the conventions of writing for the World Wide Web. Because their sense of “being online” mostly entails interacting…
When I worked at a radio news station in the late 80s, when I was about 20, I would often saunter into the newsroom a half hour before my shift started, so that I could sit down with a sandwich and a bottle of apple juice, and page through the newsroom’s copies of The Washington…
A new study from researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with scientists from MIT and the University of Glasgow, investigated what happened when a group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones. The results suggest that video calls could help parrots approximate birds’ communication in the wild, improving their…
NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other…
When I’m stressed, or I feel life is spinning out of control, I buy lights. I’m sure there’s something symbolic in that action. Over the years I’ve picked up a half dozen photography lights with umbrella reflectors, and as the cool-white spiral fluorescent bulbs fail — one every two years or so — I’ve been…
I’m still grappling with exactly how the rise of AI writing apps will affect my teaching. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ban technology from the classroom. While I will likely assign more in-class, hand-written activities, that strategy won’t work for online classes — and I am just not interested in requiring students to use…
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We are assigning more societal decision-making power to systems that we don’t fully understand and can’t always audit, and that lawmakers don’t know nearly well enough to effectively regulate. As impressive as modern artificial intelligence can seem, right now those AI systems are, in a sense, “stupid.” They tend to have very narrow scope and limited computing…