Intrinsically lovable

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No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there an impulse to believe that he does so, not because he is love, but because we are intrinsically lovable. But then, how magnificently we have repented (so) we next offer our own humility to God’s admiration. Surely, he’ll like that. If not that, our clear-sighted and humble recognition that we still lack humility. Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness.

It is easy to acknowledge but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little – however little – native luminosity?

We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock.

CS Lewis, The Four Loves

AI Literacy

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AI literacy does not require waiting for a formal training program. A useful starting point is developing what researchers describe as output skepticism — the habit of asking, for any AI-generated result, whether the system could plausibly have reached that conclusion incorrectly and, if so, what the downstream consequences would be. Effective AI literacy is not about mastering the tool — it is about knowing where the tool ends and your own judgment begins. -JD Supra

Just Saying No isn't Easy

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“The capacity of AI is so endless that it can be really hard to just say no and stop whatever the next improvement is that you want. As a perfectionist, that often can result in not knowing when to stop. The next best thing is possible, so, often, you end up spending more time writing the perfect workflow and telling AI what to do." - Jack Downey, Head of Strategy, Operations and Product at Webster Pass Consulting, quoted by CBS News

AI Definitions: Model Context Protocol (MCP)

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Model Context Protocol (MCP) - This server-based open standard operates across platforms to facilitate communication between LLMs and tools like AI agents and apps. Developed by Anthropic and embraced by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, MCP can make a developer's life easier by simplifying integration and maintenance of compliant data sources and tools, allowing them to focus on higher-level applications. In effect, MCP is an evolution of RAG. This allows an AI model to talk to Excel or PowerPoint, executing tasks autonomously.

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14 Articles about AI & Politics

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Humans — not AI — are to blame for deadly Iran school strike

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Humans — not AI — are to blame for deadly Iran school strike, sources say. According to former military officials and people familiar with aspects of the bombing campaign in Iran, the thousands of people who gather intelligence and analyze satellite photos to build massive target lists ahead of potential conflicts with foreign adversaries are to blame for the deadly Iran school strike. The error was one that AI would not be likely to make: US officials failed to recognize subtle changes in satellite imagery, while human intelligence analysts missed publicly available information about a school located inside the Revolutionary Guard compound. -Semafor

20 Recent Articles about AI & Journalism

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Notes on RISJ’s AI and the Future of News symposium - Harvard’s Nieman Lab

How Journalists Can Make AI Work for Them -  Columbia Journalism ReviewNotes on RISJ’s AI and the Future of News symposium

A lot of journalism folks are offering editing advice as Grammarly’s AI “experts” – Harvard’s Nieman Lab

Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes – Futurism

Can AI Save Local News? – Wall Street Journal

As AI data centers scale, investigating their impact becomes its own beat – Harvard’s Nieman Lab

Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes - Futurism

In This Cleveland Newsroom, AI Is Writing (But Not Reporting) the News – Columbia Journalism Review

Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations by an AI Tool - Arstechnica

Eight in ten of world’s biggest news websites now block AI training bots – Press  Gazette

The Fight over AI at McClatchy - Columbia Journalism Review

New York Times publisher: AI is using our facts without paying for them – Mediaite

Generative Engine Optimization FAQs from the ‘What Is AI Reading?’ report  - Muck Rack  

College paper fights to stop AI slop website from stealing its identity – Washington Post

How AI is reshaping the news industry - Harvard’s Nieman Lab

How will AI reshape the news in 2026? Forecasts by 17 experts from around the world – Reuter Institute

How AI is affecting me as a human (and journalist) – Axios  

Here are the news outlets that got AI right in 2025 — and the ones that got it very, very wrong – Poynter

AI Used to Promote Non-Existent Evacuation Flights From the Middle East – Bellingcat

What the ‘AI inflection point’ means for journalism – Fast Company

Privacy Concerns with AI-powered Meta Ray-Ban glasses

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The things you record with your AI-powered Meta Ray-Ban glasses — yes, even those intimate moments where you think you're alone — are probably being seen by strangers. An investigation by two Swedish newspapers found that offshore Meta workers in Kenya were asked to analyze intimate and even "disturbing" videos taken by glasses wearers, including videos taken in bathrooms, footage featuring nudity and sexual content, and images showing personal information like bank accounts. It's part of a process known as data labeling, used to train AI models with footage first reviewed and annotated by humans so that the AI can understand what it's "looking" at. -Mashable

Arguments worth having

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Parents who browbeat their kids into being obedient and agreeable may not be giving them the best preparation for the real world. A new study shows that encouraging teens to argue calmly and effectively against parental orders makes them much more likely to resist peer pressure.

University of Virginia researchers observed more than 150 13-year-olds as they disputed issues like grades, chores, and friends with their mothers. When researchers checked back in with the teens two and three years later, they found that those who had argued the longest and most convincingly—without yelling, whining, or throwing insults—were also 40 percent less likely to have accepted offers of drugs and alcohol than the teens who had caved quickly.

“We found that what a teen learned in handling these kinds of disagreements with their parents was exactly what they took into their peer world,” study author Joseph P. Allen tells NPR.org. The key to having a constructive debate with your kids, experts say, is listening to them attentively and rewarding them when they make a good point—even if you don’t end up reaching a mutual agreement. “Think of those arguments not as a nuisance,” Allen says, “but as a critical training ground” for wise, independent decision-making.

The Week Magazine

25 Recent Articles about AI & Legal Issues

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AI Legal Platform now Valued at $5.5 Billion – AI Business  

Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI over AI training – Reuters

The AI Literacy Gap is Now a Security and Compliance Liability – JD Supra

Who’s liable when AI is used for harm? – KARE-11

Grammarly is using our identities without permission – The Verge  

Thaler Is Dead. Now for the AI Copyright Questions That Actually Matter. - Copyright Lately

AI legal advice is driving lawyers bananas - Axios 

AI Deepfakes in the Workplace: A New Frontier of Employer Liability – JD Supra

A judge in New Zealand questioned the remorse of a defendant who had used A.I. to write apologies to victims and the court. - New York Times

Employers Turn to AI to Screen Candidates’ Social Media: Best Practices to Minimize Legal Threats – JD Supra

Arkansas attorney resigns after using AI to assist in case work – Thv11 

Interest in Law School Is Surging. A.I. Makes the Payoff Less Certain. – New York Times

AI research should always be verified, especially in court – Post Crescent

League City police to review policies after giving theft suspect an AI mug makeover – ABC13

How AI and social media sites are still collecting kids’ data despite privacy laws – Technical.ly  

ABA Highlights AI’s Challenges for Legal Education and Liability – Bloomberg

Proposed New York law would bar AI chatbots from posing as lawyers, allow duped users to sue – Reuters

What Was Grammarly Thinking? – The Atlantic

Legal advocates object to bill to allow AI interpretation in court – Wisconsin Public Radio

Federal Court Rules Some AI Chats Are Not Protected by Legal Privilege – Crowell Legal

White House puts red state AI laws under scrutiny – Axios

AI Legal Compliance for Law Firms: What Lawyers Need to Know in 2026 – JD Supra

A Long-Running AI Copyright Question Gets an Answer as Supreme Court Stays Mum – CNET

DOJ attorney in Raleigh accused of fake legal arguments, prompting warning about AI from prosecutor - WRAL

AI pilot program in L.A. County courts will help judges craft rulings in some cases – LA Times

AI Definitions: Machine Learning

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Machine Learning (ML) - This type of AI can spot patterns in data sets and then improve what it can do on its own, making predictions or decisions. This process evolves and the ML adapts as it is exposed to new data, improving the output without explicit human programming. An example would be algorithms recommending ads for users, which become more tailored the longer it observes the users‘ habits (someone’s clicks, likes, time spent, etc.). A developer of a ML system creates a model and then “trains” it by providing it with many examples. Data scientists then combine ML with other disciplines (like big data analytics and cloud computing) to solve real-world problems. However, the results are limited to probabilities, not absolutes. It doesn’t reveal causation. A subset of “narrow AI,” ML is an alternative approach to symbolic artificial intelligence, and it is better at spotting faces and recognizing voices. Machine learning can be divided into four types: supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning. A clever computer program can be considered AI if it can mimic human-like behavior. However, the computer system is not machine learning unless its parameters are automatically informed by data without human intervention. Video: Introduction to Machine Learning

AI Bioweapons

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Microsoft researchers selected 72 different proteins that are subject to legal controls, such as ricin, a bacterial toxin already used in several terrorist attacks. Using specialized AI protein design tools, they came up with more than 70,000 DNA sequences that would generate variant forms of these proteins. Computer models suggested that at least some of these alternatives would also be toxic. The researchers asked four suppliers of biosecurity screening systems used by DNA synthesis labs to run these sequences through their software. The tools failed to flag many of these sequences as problematic. Their performance varied widely. One tool flagged just 23% of the sequences.  Some DNA vendors, accounting for perhaps 20% of the market, don’t screen their orders at all.  -Science.org

28 Professional Journalism Organizations

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11 Articles about AI & Leadership

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AI Definitions: Decision Science

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Decision Science (or Decision Intelligence) – A branch off the “AI engineer” tree, this career path is less focused on software and more about how to make the most of AI outputs through both quantitative and qualitative methods. This interdisciplinary approach combines data science tools (statistics, analytics, causal inference, and strategic analysis) with the behavioral sciences (psychology, neuroscience, economics, and the managerial sciences) to offer a broader perspective than many data science efforts. In effect, decision scientists support the human-in-the-loop effort to make actionable decisions from AI results for real business value.  

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