THOUGHTS
26 posts
AI agents are huge timesavers. But also: BE REALLY CAREFUL about how much agency you give them. Witness Summer Yue, Safety and Alignment Chief at Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, whose own AI agent tried to delete all her e-mails. You read that right: Meta’s AI Safety Chief gave an AI agent control of her inbox, including …
I’m seeing a dangerous trend right now: using AI fakes to protest AI problems. It goes like this: someone shares a personal experience of AI’s biases, sometimes with utterly racist or misogynistic results. Often the post includes an expert offer to help people navigate this new world. And to illustrate the story, they include a …
The wonderful people at The Upside used AI to create a haiku about me, based on my professional bio. While I’m grateful as always for their support, I almost didn’t post it. But it’s just too good an opportunity to pass up! Feels like it hit some of the right marks — science, tech, change! …
You don’t paint a wall with a hammer. With AI, as with everything, you find the right tool for the job. My last post showed why ChatGPT and Gemini were the “hammer” for factual analysis. For this project, the “paintbrush” was NotebookLM. Which was no surprise. There’s a huge difference in how these AIs work.🌐 …
Lesson learned: for factual analysis, consumer-grade AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini can be dangerously unreliable. The project: create an AI study partner for the California psychology licensing exam, feeding in over 1,000 pages of dense legal text plus strict rules to ONLY use the sources provided. And it had to be an off-the-shelf AI with …
AI and learning? Everything has changed. And nothing has. The “everything” is obvious: AI tutors, automated assessments, rampant cheating, legit fear of replacement, and the potential of truly individualized learning. The learning landscape is facing enormous disruption. And yet: A few of the constants:👉 Intentionality: Great learning requires meaningful goals and meaningful assessment built from …
Critical thinking with AI?Don’t trust. VERIFY! (👆 there’s your AI mantra for the week) I just came up for air after a lengthy project helping someone study for the California Psychology Laws and Ethics Exam (CPLEE), the licensing exam for psychologists who practice in CA. They’d already tried one of the 3rd party exam prep …
Sometimes it’s not this or that. Sometimes it’s both.That’s why I’m pivoting my consulting business in the new year. Thanks to The Upside‘s This or That campaign, I got to thinking about some things I’ve learned (or re-learned) about myself this year:🤏 Less is more (except for the clutter on my desk, that’s just more)🤯 …
I went down a rabbit hole of Gen AI and engineered an AI ghostwriter! A human ghostwriter would try to understand and mimic the voice and style of your writing. Your AI ghostwriter Invisible Ink does the same thing!
(I haven’t lost my mind. Allow me to explain.) Math and math-adjacent fields faced a crisis in the 1970s when digital calculators arrived in students’ hands. These were just basic versions, nothing close to scientific or graphing calculators (just go look up the TI-30!), but they were a quantum leap ahead of the slide rule …
✅ Consider politics: deepfakes are already influencing elections. 👩🎓 Consider education: I recently showed a team of teachers how to generate an entire term paper with Gen AI. (Chicago-style citations and all.) 🎭 Consider industries: OpenAI‘s Sora videos, or Midjourney‘s images, or Anthropic‘s Claude AI writing. Then consider Gen AI has been in the public …
That question was at the heart of the professional development session I ran last week for Horace Mann School‘s History Department. I think the teachers left a little less certain about the answer. (Which was one of my goals. Sorrynotsorry.) I showed them how, with just a few minutes of prompting, Generative AI can create …
