Allowing for Transitions

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It's easy to believe you are in a different place in life than you really are-- it's hard to know when you have passed through a transition. You only know it when you are on the other side of it, and are able to glance back and say, "Look at that! Look what I just went through!" 

The in-between time is what William Bridges calls the "neutral zone."  During this period, you will be in the process of "destroying what used to be."  You will be "dismantling" while undertaking “some new building."

Bridges is most helpful in pointing out that life's changes are driven by the desire to reach a goal, while life's transitions:

"Start with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in... although it might be true that you emerge from a time of transition with the clear sense that it is time for you to end a relationship or leave a job, that simply represents the change that your transition has prepared you to make. The transition itself begins with letting go of something that you have believed or assumed, some way you've always been or seen yourself, some outlook on the world or attitude toward others." 

It's an internal move of greater significance than any external move.

  Stephen Goforth

Generative AI Prompt Suggestions  

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Approach

You aren’t supposed to just ask a question of an AI and walk away once an answer is devised and presented like a Google search. The better use is to carry on a conversation with the AI app.

To Get more Accurate Answers

·       Include examples of what you want it to do.

·       Tell the AI to ask you questions so it can give you a robust answer. This will give you some things to think about related to what you are trying to create. “Before you start, ask me any questions that you need answered to help me best solve my problem.”

·       “Provide sources for new information (or a specific piece of information)”

·       “Give me a list of the fundamental facts on which your response relied.”

·       "Base your answer on these following facts…”

·       Tell it to "think step-by-step," so it'll break down its solution into bite-size chunks. Including an example of this process is even better.

·       If you see a repeated factual error in the response, tell it to “rewrite the answer with the following changes in mind."

·       Tell the AI to be curt in its responses and you’ll get a more to-the-point response.

·       Tell the AI to be elaborate in its responses and you’ll get longer amplifications.

·       Disagree with the AI as to its stated responses and prod the AI into defending things.

·       Make a pretend type of scenario that you want the AI to contextually include.

Gathering Information

Ask it to research a specific topic and list the most important or basic information.

Illustration

“Give me a story to illustrate x”

Summaries

“Summarize the documents/press releases/ etc. below.”

“Summarize this article in a punchy paragraph”

“Format this information into bullet points”

“Define/expand/explain/translate”/order chronologically/turn into listicle/make into an explainer”

Story Type

“Rewrite as an informative news story focused on fact”

“Rewrite as an human interest feature” 

Feedback

Provide feedback on writing—what’s missing, editing for style, etc. 

“Rewrite/edit/format”

“Provide an overall critique of your style on a specific document.”

“Rewrite/shorten/expand the second paragraph”

“Add quotes from the CEO” or other official.

Prompt for an itemized list of suggested changes, so that you can make your own judgments. Don't simply accept the A.I. output.        

Writing Style

“Start with an anecdotal lead/quote/example/data/statistics”

“Write with a journalistic/academic/casual/formal style”

“Write in the style of (a particular writer)”

“Format numbers/dates/citations/headlines/capitalizations/etc in this way…”

Length

“This article should be 500 words long, divided into at least 6 paragraphs”

“Sentences of no less/more than x words”        

Study Feedback

“When I am correct, tell me how my response could have been better and when I’m wrong help guide me to the correct answer and give me a clever way to remember it.”  

Journalism

Write a headline for this article

Suggest SEO for the following article

Brainstorm for news article ideas based on a press release or quote.

Images

Reverse engineer real images to find new prompts.

Ask the AI to help you develop better prompts.  

Image Formula

Image content (cat, dog) + style (photo, painting, illustration, film stills) + framing (point-of-view, background) + lighting (soft light, dramatic lighting, sunset) + color + level of realism & detail   

Example 1: "Person with strong determined attitude, forest fire background, close-up shot, purple and green color scheme, dark lighting, realistic."

Example 2: “A child playing on a sunny happy beach, their laughter as they build a simple sandcastle, emulate Nikon D6 high shutter speed action shot, soft yellow lighting.”

Battling Tradition in a Organization

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Without understanding that a tradition is an outdated way to fulfill a good intent, you will just ignore or fight it. But, armed with that understanding, you can argue with tradition — debating what needs to stay and what has to change — precisely in order to keep the organization’s intent alive.

Gianpiero Petriglieri writing in the Harvard Business Review

A Dozen AI-based Creation Tools

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Adoble Firely
Adobe’s AI-driven multimedia production tool. Still in beta. Will do AI video editing, 3D modeling, text-to-image, photo editing and more.

MidJourney
Probably the most popular AI image generator, it uses machine learning to create pictures based on text. You’ll find a good prompt book here.

Perplexity AI
Acts like a search engine but includes results from the web (unlike ChatGPT). Automatically generates citations of sources and suggests follow-up prompts. Free.

Quizlet
Create study tools like flash cards and quizzes or make use of those created by others. Useful for rote learning. Easy to use but limited functionality. It will link to Google Classroom, but not connect to academic LMS (learning management systems like Blackboard). The company added Q-Chat in 2023. This AI feature tailors material to each user’s needs. The app adjusts the difficulty of the questions according to how well students know the material they’re studying and how they prefer to learn. Free version for most features. $1.99 to make it ad free. $19.99 for more options.

Stable Diffusion
Generates visual creations through AI. Since it is open-sourced, anyone can view the code. Fewer restrictions on how it can be used than DALL-E.

Bard AI
Google’s conversational AI based on LamDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Google has unveiled PaLM 2 to replace Bard’s dependance on LamDA. While it seems more accurate than ChatGPT, it lacks attribution and links to background articles. For access, visit Google Bard's page and sign into your personal Gmail account.

ChatGPT
This OpenAI chatbot remembers what you've written or said, so the interaction has a dynamic conversational feel. Give the software a prompt and it creates articles. GPT-4 can use both images and text as inputs, process up to 25K words (versus 4K with GPT-3). It can write and explain code. Doesn’t do sourcing and limited to info from before 2022. Free or $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus for faster responses and access to new features such as a “code interpreter” that can write and execute python code, and can work with file uploads. For developers, there’s the OpenAI playground. for experimentation.

ChatSonic
Created by WriteSonic built on top of the same technology that powers ChatGPT. Can assume personas such as a philosopher or stand-up comic. Create up to 100 AI-generated images each month for free. Connected to the internet, so it can provide real-time, up-to-date answers, which ChatGPT cannot do. Free.

Claude
This AI is from Anthropic, a startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI execs with funding from Google. Like ChatGPT it can act on text or uploaded files and hasi been trained on huge amounts of infomation. Useful for summarizing long transcripts, clarifying complex writings, and generating lists of ideas and questions. Can analyze up to 75K words at a time. Not good with math and doesn’t deal with images. Free.

Cody
This AI allows users to create (without coding) a chatbot that can answer questions limited to a specific knowledge base to reduce the likelihood of incorrect information. Free up to 100 interactions. Paid accounts start at $29 a month.

DALL-E
OpenAI’s tool that turns written text into realistic images using AI. Named after painter Salvador Dali and Disney Pixar’s WALL-E. A limited number of images are free.

Jasper AI
AI story writing tool for fiction and nonfiction. Pick a tone of voice for style. Pre-built templates available. A more business-focused AI that is particularly helpful for advertising and marketing. Remembers past queries, However, no sources are provided and limited to pre-2022 information. Short free trial. $29 month.

More options

Stress and Performance

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Jeremy Jamieson at Harvard had some students who were prepping for the graduate admissions test read a statement telling them not to worry that feeling anxious will make them do poorly, because research suggests that stress doesn’t hurt performance on tests and can actually help. The students who read the statement scored about 50 points higher on the math section of the practice test than those who didn’t. Plus the students who had been told to interpret the stress positively also did better on the actual GRE, scoring 65 points higher. So in the stressful situations, you want to focus on being excited and challenged rather than worrying that your stress means it’s not going well.

Ashley Merryman quoted in Wired Magazine

11 articles about AI & legal issues

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Overinvolved Parents

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Madeline Levine, psychologist and author of The Price of Privilege, says that there are three ways we might be overparenting and unwittingly causing psychological harm:

  1. When we do for our kids what they can already do for themselves;

  2. When we do for our kids what they can almost do for themselves; and

  3. When our parenting behavior is motivated by our own egos.

 Levine said that when we parent this way we deprive our kids of the opportunity to be creative, to problem solve, to develop coping skills, to build resilience, to figure out what makes them happy, to figure out who they are. In short, it deprives them of the chance to be, well, human. Although we overinvolve ourselves to protect our kids and it may in fact lead to short-term gains, our behavior actually delivers the rather soul-crushing news: Kid, you can’t actually do any of this without me.

Julie Lythcott-Haims, How to Raise an Adult

This is more important than IQ when it comes to success

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Some students aim at performance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the first case, you're working to validate your ability. In the second, you're working to acquire new knowledge or skills. People with performance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you're confident you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative and work hard.

More than IQ, it's discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with a sense of possibility and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success. Study skills and learning skills are inert until they're powered by an active ingredient the active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.

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

The Best Professors

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The best professors.. were no longer high priests, selfishly guarding the doors to the kingdom of knowledge to make themselves look more important. They were fellow students – no, fellow human beings – struggling with the mysteries of the universe, human society, historical development, or whatever. They found affinity with their students in their own ignorance and curiosity, in their love of life and beauty, in their mixture of respect and fear, and in that mix they discovered more similarities than differences between themselves and the people who populated their classes. A sense of awe at the world and the human condition stood at the center of their relationships with those students.

Most important, that humility, that fear, that veneration of the unknown spawned a kind of quiet conviction on the part of the best teachers that they and their students could do great things together.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

14 quotes worth reading about students using AI

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Bots like ChatGPT show great promise as a “writing consultant” for students. “It’s not often that students have a chance to sit down with a professor and have long discussions about how to go about this paper, that paper, how to approach research on this topic and that topic. But ChatGPT can do that for them, provided…they know how to use the right ethics, to use it as a tool and not a replacement for their work.” CalMatters 

Don’t rely on AI to know things instead of knowing them yourself. AI can lend a helping hand, but it’s an artificial intelligence that isn’t the same as yours. One scientist described to me how younger colleagues often “cobble together a solution” to a problem by using AI. But if the solution doesn’t work, “they don’t have anywhere to turn because they don’t understand the crux of the problem” that they’re trying to solve. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Janine Holc thinks that students are much too reliant on generative AI, defaulting to it, she wrote, “for even the smallest writing, such as a one sentence response uploaded to a shared document.” As a result, wrote Holc, a professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland, “they have lost confidence in their own writing process. I think the issue of confidence in one’s own voice is something to be addressed as we grapple with this topic.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

It’s a conversation that can be evoked at will. But it’s not different in the content. You still have to evaluate what someone says and whether or not it’s sensible. CalMatters 

Helena Kashleva, an adjunct instructor at Florida SouthWestern State College, spots a sea-change in STEM education, noting that many assignments in introductory courses serve mainly to check students’ understanding. “With the advent of AI, grading such assignments becomes pointless.” Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Given how widely faculty members vary on what kinds of AI are OK for students to use, though, that may be an impossible goal. And of course, even if they find common ground, the technology is evolving so quickly that policies may soon become obsolete. Students are also getting more savvy in their use of these tools. It’s going to be hard for their instructors to keep up. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

In situations when you or your group feel stuck, generative AI can definitely help. The trick is to learn how to prompt it in a way that can help you get unstuck. Sometimes you’ll need to try a few prompts up until you’ll get something you like.  UXdesign.cc

Proponents contend that classroom chatbots could democratize the idea of tutoring by automatically customizing responses to students, allowing them to work on lessons at their own pace. Critics warn that the bots, which are trained on vast databases of texts, can fabricate plausible-sounding misinformation — making them a risky bet for schools. New York Times

Parents are eager to have their children use the generative AI technology in the classroom. Sixty-four percent said they think teachers and schools should allow students to use ChatGPT to do schoolwork, with 28 percent saying that schools should encourage the technology’s use. Ed Week

Student newspaper editors at Middlebury College have called for a reconsideration of the school’s honor code after a survey found two-thirds of students admitted to breaking it—nearly twice as many as before the pandemic. Wall Street Journal 

If you are accused of cheating with AI Google Docs or Microsoft Word could help. Both offer a version history function that can keep track of changes to the file, so you can demonstrate how long you worked on it and that whole chunks didn’t magically appear. Some students simply screen record themselves writing. Washington Post 

There is no bright line between “my intelligence” and “other intelligence,” artificial or otherwise. It’s an academic truism that no idea exists in an intellectual vacuum. We use other people’s ideas whenever we quote or paraphrase. The important thing is how. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Quizlet has announced four new AI features that will help with student learning and managing their classwork, including Magic Notes, Memory Score, Quick Summary, and AI-Enhanced Expert Solutions.  ZDnet 

James Neave, Adzuna’s head of data science, recommends interested job applicants build up their AI skills and stand out from the competition in three key ways: Stay on top of developments, use AI in your own work, and show how you’ve used AI successfully to achieve a specific goal. CNBC

Preparing Media Students for their AI Future

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When I was teaching at a journalism school some 15 years ago, many professors were wringing their hands about digital media. “Would print survive?” they wanted to know. The focus was on their past rather than the students’ future. By asking the wrong questions, they were leading themselves into irrelevance and their students unprepared.

Here we are again, only this time it is generative AI. Much of what’s called AI is mislabeled or overrated, but it doesn’t matter. Media students will need help understanding how to use it effectively and ethically. Employers will be expecting it from them. The students also need an idea as to where AI is inadequate—this will inform them as to which parts of the media process they will need to do themselves.

There is no way to do this without having a clear understanding of the goal: understanding what separates “great” writing/audio/video from “good” writing/audio/. They have always needed to be able to evaluate their own writing to get better. And now, they must be able to evaluate what the AI produces for them.

The advent of digital platforms changed the process and tools of journalism and media. The goal remained the same. Likewise, generative AI will impact the process but not the ultimate goal.

Stephen Goforth

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

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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

17 articles about the Misuse of AI

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Your brain power on distraction

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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

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