Stop Asking Whether AI Can Write Good

Can I, um, use it at a friend’s house?

Is it ok to use AI for spell check? What about grammar? Writing image captions? Smoothing transitions between paragraphs? Translating from other languages? Search Engine Optimization? Is my email autoresponder some kind of AI? If I accidentally click an ad for a Large Language Modal (LLM) targeted to me by ...
Read More
Stop Asking Whether AI Can Write Good

What If Using AI Isn’t Cheating?

Meghan O’Rourke’s essay about technology’s uses and abuses makes me wonder if students can help us reinvent the humanities

In the last 18 months, publicly available artificial intelligence (AI) programs have turned conversations about the humanities on college campuses into conversations about cheating. Do you remember when life was easy, and all you had to detect was whether a student had purchased a paper or plagiarized portions of it? I ...
Read More
What If Using AI Isn’t Cheating?

Who Does My Algorithm Think I Am?

A portrait of the author according to her apps

My phone thinks I might have a dopamine addiction. While scrolling social media recently, I paused on a video advertisement depicting a woman scrolling on her phone, lounging on the couch, and slamming down her laptop in frustration. It may as well have been security footage from my own apartment, except ...
Read More
Who Does My Algorithm Think I Am?

The Rise of AI Ethics

The focus on far-off consequences distracts from existing threats to human rights, fairness, justice, equality, and safety

AI ethics is not really a distinct field or coherent discourse, but more of an amalgamation of different perspectives considering the potential implications of automated systems and algorithms making decisions with consequential impacts on human lives. ...

Read More
The Rise of AI Ethics

What Computers Can Explain

About how humans learn

_____ The mystery of learning is as old as philosophy: how does the nearly insensate newborn become, within just a few years, a walking, talking, intelligent being? In his new book entitled How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, Stanislas Dehaene illuminates the great ...
Read More
What Computers Can Explain