You don't have wait until you know who you are to start creating

So many people get stuck on things like “being a writer” or “being an entrepreneur” and they never get around to getting things done because they’re too busy trying to figure out if their ontological state gives them permission to do the thing they want to do.

Forget about your state of being for a second. Forget about your identity for a moment. Just do something. If you’re interested in it right now, then that’s enough to try it out. You’ll find out the most valuable information about yourself not by naval gazing and analyzing your soul all day long, but by getting to know what the creative process actually feels like. 

Your sense of self will evolve and expand until the day you die. So you’ll be waiting around forever if you insist on knowing who you are before beginning the work you feel compelled to do in the moment.

Knowledge of self is the effect, not the cause of all these things.

TK Coleman, 5 Ways to Steal Like An Artist

7 Free Webinars this Week about Media & Journalism

Mon, Aug 14 - Fact-checking 101: How to distinguish fact from feeling

What: The host will walk reporters and editors through the fundamentals of fact-checking. What are the key types of questions reporters should be asking when searching for sources for their stories? What are the essential pieces of evidence that editors should be seeking to substantiate the reporter’s findings? The fundamentals of this essential reporting process will be brought to life in a concrete way.

Who: CCIJ's Editorial Director, Yaffa Fredrick

When: 8 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism  

More Info

Mon, Aug 14 - Writing for Impact: A Nonprofit Professionals Guide to Drafting Content that Inspires

What: This workshop encourages learners to pause before putting pen to paper in order to find the voice of the organization they're working with, understand the audience they’re speaking to, and pick a tone that elevates their message clearly enough to engage effectively.

Who: Maura O'Leary & Sarah Hogan, Barefoot PR

When: 11 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Nonprofit Learning Lab

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Tue, Aug 15 - How Reporters Can Use NAEP Tools to Examine Achievement Gaps

What: This webinar will teach journalists about federal education statistics from subjects including math and reading scores, and demonstrate federal tools that will help them go back to their newsrooms to tell the best education stories possible.

Who: Ebony Walton, statistician, National Center for Education Statistics; Grady Wilburn, statistician, National Center for Education Statistics; Matt Barnum, interim national editor, Chalkbeat (moderator)

When: 12 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Education Writers Association

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Tue, Aug 15 - Developing a Website That Tells Your Story

What: In this session, we will share more than a decade of focus group research that reveals: The 5 elements of an engaging website. The one thing every nonprofit should be thinking about, but isn’t. The importance of storytelling and how to incorporate stories into your website. Real-world examples of nonprofit organizations that have mastered their online presence.

Who: Kiersten Hill Director of Nonprofit Solutions

When: 2 pm, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Firespring

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Wed, Aug 16 - Amplify Your Social Media Presence with Canva

What: Designed exclusively for journalists looking to enhance their social media skills. We'll share some nifty tips and tricks that will save you time and boost productivity when working with Canva. We'll also unveil some cool techniques to create content that truly wows your audience and sets you apart from the competition.

Who: Diana Abeleven, Canva's Senior Global Strategic Partnerships Manager, News & Media

When: 9 pm, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: The Walkley Foundation

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Thur, Aug 17 - Generative AI: What journalists need to know about ChatGPT and other tools

What: Understanding the AI capabilities that have emerged and what we do about those and how we take advantage of those, while also really trying to make sure we are poised for what feels like another wave upon wave of progress over the next couple of years as well. During the webinar, the Knight Center will announce a new massive open online course (MOOC) on generative AI and journalism.  

Who: Marc Lavallee, director of technology product and strategy for journalism at Knight Foundation; Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager of AI strategy for the Associated Press’ Local News AI initiative; and Sil Hamilton, a machine learning engineer and AI researcher-in-residence at the journalism organization Hacks/Hackers.

When: 11 am, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

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Thu, Aug 17 - Assessing the 988 mental health hotline   

What: Panelists will discuss the national 988 mental health crisis line: How well has the hotline functioned, has it result in distressed people being involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospital wards and has it put callers at risk of trauma by sending armed police untrained in mental health interventions?

Who: Vincent Atchity, president and CEO of Mental Health Colorado; Heather Saunders, a postdoctoral fellow in the Kaiser Family Foundation Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured; Katti Gray, AHCJ's health beat leader for behavioral and mental health.

When: 1:30 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Assoc of Health Care Journalists

More Info 

17 articles about the Misuse of AI

Facial Recognition Software leads Detroit Police to Wrongly Arrest Pregnant Woman – Click on Detroit

Supermarket AI meal planner app suggests recipe that would create chlorine gas – The Guardian

AI is being used to give dead, missing kids a voice they didn’t ask for – Washington Post

AI is sleepwalking us into surveillance – UX Design

The dangers of open source AI - Axios 

Single mother taking night classes evicted after facial recognition software flagged the movements of her babysitter– Futurism  

FBI issues warning about AI malware assaults – Analytics Insights

The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn’t destroy humanity – Vox

ChatGPT falsely accused me of sexual harassment. Can we trust AI?  USA Today 

A New Frontier for Travel Scammers: A.I.-Generated Guidebooks – New York Times

Don't get scammed by fake ChatGPT apps: Here's what to look out for – ZD Net

Seven AI companies commit to safeguards at the White House's request – Engadget  

The 'AI Apocalypse' Is Just PR – The Atlantic  

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things Like AI (the problems with facial recognition)  - Above the Law

'ChatGPT is the new crypto': Meta warns hackers are exploiting interest in the AI chatbot – CNN

A.I. Needs an International Watchdog, ChatGPT Creators Say – New York Times

IBM researchers show ways ChatGPT, Bard can be tricked into helping with hacks – Axios  

Your brain power on distraction

Imagine your task is to ride a bicycle for 10 miles. You begin to pedal and just as you build up speed and start making progress, something unexpectedly makes you hit the brakes. Because you had to stop, you’ve lost your momentum and have to expend more effort to get going again. Imagine you are forced to brake every time you start to go faster. You can never coast. You have to pedal — hard — all the time. How much longer do you think it’s going to take you to get to your destination? How much more difficult and frustrating do you think it’s going to be? This is your brain power on distraction, and it causes unsatisfying, unfulfilling work days.

Maura Thomas writing in the Harvard Business Review

10 Things AI Can Do Now

Stability AI has now released a code generator called StableCode – VentureBeat

AI is already helping 911 operators. Here’s what the future of emergencies looks like – Fast Company

Generative AI: Here are the use cases across industries – Economic Times

How AI is bringing film stars back from the dead – BBC  

How AI is Revolutionizing the Insurance Industry - Stack Diary

How to Create QR Code Art using Stable Diffusion – Urvashi on Medium

8 questions CISOs should be asking about AI – CSO

How to Use A.I. for Family Time – New York Times

Sweetspot is an AI search engine for the U.S. government contract maze - Semafor

ChatGPT Code Interpreter: What is It and What Can You Do With It – Stack Diary 

dull activities can spark creative thinking

What if boredom is a meaningful experience—one that propels us to states of deeper thoughtfulness and creativity? That’s the conclusion of two fascinating recent studies. Boredom might spark creativity because a restless mind hungers for stimulation. Maybe traversing an expanse of tedium creates a sort of cognitive forward motion. A bored mind moves into a “daydreaming” state, says Sandi Mann, a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire.

The problem, the psychologists worry, is that these days we don’t wrestle with these slow moments. We eliminate them (with mobile devices). This might relieve us temporarily, but it shuts down the deeper thinking that can come from staring down the doldrums. Noolding on your phone is “like eating junk food,” she says.

So here’s an idea: Instead of always fleeing boredom, lean into it. Sometimes, anyway. When novelists talk about using Freedom, the software that shuts down one’s Internet connection, they often say it’s about avoiding distraction. But I suspect it’s also about enforcing a level of boredom in their day—useful, productive monotony.

And there is, of course, bad boredom. The good type motivates you to see what can come of it: “fructifying boredom,” as the philosopher Bertrand Russell called it. The bad type, in contrast, tires you, makes you feel like you can’t be bothered to do anything. (It has a name too: lethargic boredom.)

A critical part of our modern task, then, is learning to assess these different flavors of ennui—to distinguish the useful kind from the stultifying. (Glancing at your phone in an idle moment isn’t always, or even often a bad thing.) Boredom, it turns out, may be super-interesting.

Clive Thompson writing in Wired Magazine

9 Articles about the Impact of AI on Medicine

Cigna Accused of Using AI, Not Doctors, to Deny Claims: Lawsuit – Medscape

Here's what AI-powered doctor's visits are like – CNBC

 AI-supported mammogram screening increases breast cancer detection by 20%, study finds – CNN

New AI tool can help treat brain tumors more quickly and accurately, study finds – The Guardian  

Google’s medical AI chatbot is already being tested in hospitals – The Verge  

The AI Opportunity for Life Sciences and Pharma in the Age of ChatGPT – Expert.ai 

A mental health tech company ran an AI experiment on real users. Nothing’s stopping apps from conducting more – NBC News  

IBM is using generative systems to develop new semiconductors and molecules that can help fight cancer or bacterial infection – IMB  

AI-Generated Data Could Be a Boon for Healthcare—If Only It Seemed More Real – Wall Street Journal

AI-brain implant helped patient gain feeling in his hand again – Mobile Syrup  

Worry Deadlines

Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to the time we allow it. Put simply, if you give yourself one month to create a presentation, it will take you one full month to finish it. But if you only had a week, you’d finish the same presentation in a shorter time.   

I’ve observed a similar principle among sensitive strivers — that overthinking expands to the time we allow it. In other words, if you give yourself one week to worry about something that is actually a one-hour task, you will waste an inordinate amount of time and energy.

Melody Wilding writing in the Harvard Business Review

Eight Suggestions about AI for Those Teaching this Fall

The challenges that generative AI poses to teaching requires campus-wide faculty discussions. Most students will have to use generative AI when they move into their careers, and it would be a shame for them to graduate without understanding how to use it and without having wrestled with its ethical limits. As you prepare for your fall classes consider these suggestions: 

Have a Class Discussion. Talk openly and frankly with your students about your expectations regarding the use of generative AI in your classes as well as how you are using it yourself. Invite your students to share with you in an honest discussion about these and related questions. Keep in mind that the line between which AI is acceptable and which is not is often blurry because AI is being integrated into many different apps and programs.

Keep the Door Open. Cultivate an environment in which students will feel comfortable approaching you if they need more direct support—whether from you, their peers, or a campus resource to successfully complete an assignment. Talk to them about their motivations for turning to generative AI: time pressure, curiosity, burn out, etc.  Barnard College 

AI Bias. Make the students aware that AI can reflect societal prejudices. If the AI training sets underrepresent the views of marginalized populations, then the essays they produce may omit those views as well. Bloomberg

Vulnerable Students. Consider how chatting with AI systems might affect vulnerable students, including those with depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Privacy Issues. It is important for students to be aware that personal information provided to generative AI tools has the potential to be shared with third parties. This can may raise serious privacy concerns for your students and perhaps in particular, those students who are from marginalized backgrounds. Barnard College 

Think Through the Pedagogical Impact. What are the cognitive tasks students need to perform without AI assistance? When should students rely on AI assistance? Where can an AI aid facilitate a better outcome? Are there efficiencies in grading that can be gained? Are new rubrics and assignment descriptions needed? Inside Higher Ed 

A Syllabus Statement. Include a syllabus statement that gives clear guidance regarding your expectations for the use of generative AI in your classes. The Sentient Syllabus Project

AI Detectors. If you plan to put students’ work through an AI detector, please inform them in advance, keeping in mind that a reliable detection tool has yet to be developed. False positives carry real harm when a student is wrongly accused. English language learners, international students, and students with learning challenges might write in a style that instructors wrongly assume is AI when it is not. Washington Post

“There’s more of a danger in not teaching students how to use AI. If they’re not being taught under the mentorship of scholars and experts, they may be using it in ways that are either inappropriate or not factual or unethical.” Johanna Inman, quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Stop chasing originality

The quest for originality is a distraction. It usually leads to a self-obsessive focus on saying what’s never been said when all that really matters is saying what you believe, saying what you feel, and saying what you mean. When you first start doing this, you might not sound very original, but this process is precisely how you find your voice. 

TK Coleman, 5 Ways to Steal Like An Artist

8 Articles about Detecting AI

How Easy Is It to Fool A.I.-Detection Tools? – New York Times 

Can you tell which poem was written by ChatGPT? – Al Jazeera

ChatGPT sparks surge of AI detection tools - Axios

Can We No Longer Believe Anything We See? – New York Times

20 Questions (with Answers) to Detect Fake Data Scientists: ChatGPT Edition, Part 1 – KD Nuggets

AI-Created Images Are So Good Even AI Has Trouble Spotting Some – Wall Street Journal

Did a Fourth Grader Write This? Or the New Chatbot? - New York Times

Only Half of Americans Can Differentiate Between AI and Human Writing – PC Mag

The artist is a collector

An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love. There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

Austin Kleon, How to Steal Like an Artist

8 insightful quotes about AI Bias

In an analysis of thousands of images created by Stable Diffusion, we found that image sets generated for every high-paying job were dominated by subjects with lighter skin tones, while subjects with darker skin tones were more commonly generated by prompts like “fast-food worker” and “social worker.” Most occupations in the dataset were dominated by men, except for low-paying jobs like housekeeper and cashier. Bloomberg

Eight years ago, Google disabled its A.I. program’s ability to let people search for gorillas and monkeys through its Photos app because the algorithm was incorrectly sorting Black people into those categories. As recently as May of this year, the issue still had not been fixed. Two former employees who worked on the technology told The New York Times that Google had not trained the A.I. system with enough images of Black people. New York Times

MIT student Rona Wang asked an AI image creator app called Playground AI to make a photo of her look "professional." It gave her paler skin and blue eyes, and "made me look Caucasian." Boston Globe 

We have things like recidivism algorithms that are racially biased. Even soap dispensers that don’t read darker skin. Smartwatches and other health sensors don’t work as well for darker skin. Things like selfie sticks that are supposed to track your image don’t work that well for people with darker skin because image recognition in general is biased. The Markup

AI text may be biased toward established scientific ideas and hypotheses contained in the content on which the algorithms were trained. Science.org

No doubt AI-powered writing tools have shortcomings. But their presence offers educators an on-ramp to discussions about linguistic diversity and bias. Such discussions may be especially critical on U.S. campuses. Inside Higher Ed

Major companies behind A.I. image generators — including OpenAI, Stability AI and Midjourney — have pledged to improve their tools. “Bias is an important, industrywide problem,” Alex Beck, a spokeswoman for OpenAI, said in an email interview. She declined to say how many employees were working on racial bias, or how much money the company had allocated toward the problem. New York Times

As AI models become more advanced, the images they create are increasingly difficult to distinguish from actual photos, making it hard to know what’s real. If these images depicting amplified stereotypes of race and gender find their way back into future models as training data, next generation text-to-image AI models could become even more biased, creating a snowball effect of compounding bias with potentially wide implications for society. Bloomberg

Adapting to Change

Understand the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present movement. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to changing circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be. The more we lose ourselves in predigested theories and past experiences, the more inappropriate and delusional our response.

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

13 creative things people are trying to get AI to do

Can AI Read my mind?

A.I. Is Getting Better at Mind-Reading In a recent experiment, researchers used large language models to translate brain activity into words. – New York Times

Can AI translate the Bible?

USC researchers use AI to help translate Bible into very rare languages – Religious News Service

Can AI make astrological readings?

Is A.I. the Future of Astrology? – New York Times

Can AI Do your taxes?

Ready for AI to help you do your taxes? Taxfyle’s got you covered – Refresh Miami

How about answering questions from a ‘biblical’ perspective?

Christian creators build chatbots with ‘biblical’ worldview – Religious News Service

Can AI change the way wars are fought?

Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of AI Weapons – New York Times

Can AI replace humans?

We Went to the Fast-Food Drive-Through to Find Out – Wall Street Journal

Can AI build websites?

Mobile website builder Universe launches AI-powered designer – Tech Crunch

Can AI write sermons?

Start-up AI Platform Aims to Help Pastors Make the Most of Their Sunday Sermons – Christian Standard 

Can AI write a song?

We asked Google’s new AI music bot to write us a song. We instantly regretted it – Science Focus

Can AI pilot airplanes or drones?

AI pilots, the future of aerial warfare – Air Force Tech

Can AI bring historical figures to life?

AI Chatbots Now Let You Talk to Historical Figures Like Shakespeare and Andy Warhol – My Modern Met 

Can AI create decent headshots?

I Used AI To Create My Professional Headshots And The Results Were Either Great Or Hilarious – Digg

Lasting Love

Lasting love is a passion that grows. The more we know the person, the more deeply we love him. There are a few who are struck like lightning. The minute they see someone they hear violins. This usually happens only in the movies. As one writer has suggested, it has to be “love at first sight” in a show that only has two hours to run.

Surveys continuously support love by growth. The overwhelming majority say they did not “fall in love” all at once. They met a person and found him attractive or interesting. Whatever caught their attention made them want to learn more. Possibly they met the person again or went on a date. At any rate, something started to grow. The person became more interesting.

Some people are frustrated because falling in love wasn’t like a divine revelation or a heart seizure. Consequently they even wonder if it is real. Such “falling” is a romantic dream that most of use have never experienced. But love which takes time can be the most enduring kind.

It is a question of expectation. Those who expect love to be automatic and instantaneous are often disappointed. It is more realistic to expect love to grow into full bloom as you live together in marriage. Then, rather than looking for an ideal experience, both lovers expect to change and grow.

William Coleman from his book Engaged

10 articles about AI limitations

No ChatGPT didn’t ace MIT classes — it cheated - Chronicle of Higher Ed

You'd likely be disappointed if you asked ChatGPT for internet links to research sources - MakeUseOf 

ChatGPT is no CPA: The Popular chatbot can’t pass accounting test - Study Finds

We’re Using A.I. Chatbots Wrong. Here’s How to Direct Them - New York Times

If ChatGPT doesn’t get a better grasp of facts, nothing else matters - Fast Company

AI chatbots are having their "tulip mania" moment - Salon  

Why data contamination is a big issue for LLMs - BDtechtalks

Are you better than an AI? - Bandt

AI needs better metaphors - Dylan Collins blog

Be an AI realist - Axios

Practice Like you Play

Officers are trained to take a gun from an assailant in close quarters, a maneuver they practice by role-playing with a fellow officer. It requires speed and deftness: striking an assailant's wrist with one hand to break his grip while simultaneously wrestling the gun free with the other. It's a move that officers have been in the habit of honing through repetition, taking gun, handing it back, and taking it again.

Until one of their officers, on a call in the field, took the gun from an assailant and handed it right back again. In a mutual astonishment the officer managed to re-seize the gun and hang onto it. The training regime had violated the cardinal rule that you should practice like you play, because you will play like you practice.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

9 AI Predictions

What Happens When AI Has Read Everything? - The Atlantic

Hallucinations Could Blunt ChatGPT’s Success - Spectrum

The ChatGPT buzz and why it will be over sooner than you think - VentureBeat

When the Movies Pictured A.I., They Imagined the Wrong Disaster - New York Times

AI Is About to Make Social Media Much More Toxic - The Atlantic 

The AI-powered, totally autonomous future of war is here - Wired

The AI emotions dreamed up by ChatGPT - BBC  

What happens when we can no longer differentiate a human from a machine? - The Hill

The Hype Cycle of AI - Expert AI

The Information Riot

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information.

On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive.

Nicholas Carr
The Shallows