Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagPsychology Today

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Woman reading a few books on the floor

Reading in the Digital Age

Writer Joseph Epstein argues compellingly on behalf of the novel.

How has the Internet affected the way we read? How many people in your life read novels and serious works of nonfiction on a regular basis? Even for avid readers, the online world is a constant and appetizing distraction. News clips, fiery journalism, and endless reels of photos, memes, and videos are at the average American’s easy disposal 24/7. Is reading deeply, then, outdated? Or even worse: is it even possible anymore? True, these are not easy times to advocate for the reading life, but books still sell despite the primacy of Internet reading, and perhaps now more than ever, our digitalized brains need good novels. Why the Novel? Joseph Epstein, an essayist and longtime professor at Northwestern University, wrote Read More ›

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Young Asian man sitting on stairs outside reading a book

Why You Should Read More Fiction

The mental benefits for reading good stories are many.

When looking for “solutions” to today’s mental health crisis in the United States, particularly among the millions of men who are checking out of society, reading fiction may not immediately come to mind. However, a new article from Psychology Today argues that reading fiction is “essential” for today’s men. The author of the article, psychologist Jett Stone, focuses on men in part because today’s literary market is largely geared towards women, and fiction and femininity are often closely associated. Nonetheless, he believes that reading fiction can benefit both women and men. He writes, Recent research indicates that reading fiction fosters critical thinking by presenting ideas subtly and in more roundabout ways than nonfiction. One study of adolescents found that frequent fiction readers possessed more Read More ›

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Hand click searching data information networking. Concept for network web and technology

Whatever You Do, Don’t Ask GPT for Sources

The chatbot will give you a lot of links that don't necessarily direct you where you want to go

One of the more amusing things I’ve found from OpenAI’s GPT-3 and ChatGPT is the fact that it will very confidently provide you with sources on anything you ask—and they will often be completely made up. It will even provide fake (but real-looking) URLs for you! I stumbled across this feature when researching a previous GPT-3 article about how well it could write blog posts compared to real authors. I initially tried asking GPT-3 to include sources, and it generated complete nonsense for the sources. I decided that, for that article, sources were not the main question, so I left it out of the final queries. However, in response to my latest article about ChatGPT not being a Google replacement, someone commented Read More ›