If we ingest a daily avalanche of shortform content, eventually we may feel starved for a good book, or a long, thematic movie that is actually about something.
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Can journalistic objectivity ever be regained in today’s fractured, highly online culture? Also, can comedians make jokes about everybody, not just one side?
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Recently, Spotify was found to be publishing AI-generated songs by deceased musicians. In addition, AI bands are starting to pop up.
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“The left hemisphere, left to itself, is deluded,” says McGilchrist. It lacks context. It will try to force things into its own purview.
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She’s been fired, despite the huge success of her classic books program, which is now “going in a different direction.”
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While millionaires can manage major cash hemorrhages, the average American faces devastation by just a single bet gone awry.
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Free speech entails engaging with views one might not agree with. Why not enjoy the books (or not) and debate the ideas in the public arena?
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Whatever one’s opinion, it’s still a fact that, unlike a human writer or artist, AI can’t think or feel.
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A new study from MIT links excessive use of ChatGPT to a decline in critical thinking skills. Instead of making users more productive, the study finds that dependence on ChatGPT is associated with loss of memory and cognitive decline. In short, the AI tool isn’t making us smarter. It’s doing quite the opposite to us. The researchers divided participants into three groups: the LLM group, the search engine group, and the brain-only group. Here is a section of the abstract from the study, Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed Read More ›
Three books stand at the top of the dystopian genre, even several decades after their publication: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury; and perhaps supremely, 1984, by George Orwell. Each novel features versions of a futuristic society in which freedom is restricted (through different means) and foresees a bleak existence governed by the basest impulses in the human race. While Orwell’s masterpiece is typically hailed as a warning of the surveillance state, where individuality is erased in favor of group identity, it is also about the rise of technologies that replace human thought. Novelist Walter Kirn points this out in a recent episode of America This Week: 1984 is the story of the extinguishing, the Read More ›
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em? Ohio State University recently announced that each of its students must take an AI skills class starting in the Fall of 2025. Micaiah Bilger of The College Fix reports, Every undergraduate major at Ohio State will include classes that incorporate “AI Fluency,” NBC 4 WCMH reports. The public university’s leaders have developed a strategy that they believe will equip students to use the technology both creatively and responsibly. As AI continues to shape and disrupt higher education, administrators and teachers have to grapple with how to deal with this powerful technology. Many reports, personal testimonies, and commentary illustrates how much students today depend on AI systems like ChatGPT to do their assignments. Professors, meanwhile, Read More ›
AI, as a tool, can have a lot of benefits and uses, but as we’ve witnessed time and time again, it often makes mistakes.
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People are likely to encounter online pornography even if they don’t actively seek it out. That’s how pervasively adult content inundates the internet.
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Suppose that AI genuinely poses a threat to the human species, but in a much subtler way than we expect?
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Policy helps. So do concrete steps that parents can take to protect children from the dangers of the online life.
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Humans aren’t computers. We are persons, centers of consciousness, who have physical bodies and come from particular contexts.
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In a bizarre twist, Opus threatened to expose a fictional affair if it were to lose its spot to another AI system.
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Moments in silence with a newspaper might not save the world, but it could start saving our attention, arguably our most valuable and endangered resource.
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Perhaps the human conversation alone is argument enough on why AI can never replace us.
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Humans write the only books worth reading, and, as we’ve now seen, they’re still the only ones who can come up with an actual list of readable books.
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