THOUGHTS
14 posts
Volunteers at the theater company I helped start have been using GenAI to design flyers. The layouts come back clean: aligned columns, consistent margins. They also come back with colors that miss our style guide, pages that don't fit standard paper, and my last name spelled wrong. That one got me. GenAI is great for a quick prototype, and a human still has to finish it.
A small business wanted to name its new AI receptionist after a real employee, and pass it off as human. That's the mistake. People sense pretty quickly when a voice isn't quite right, and the moment they realize they've been fooled, they feel tricked and lose trust. The fix isn't a better voice, it's transparency. So this week, if you're letting AI answer your phone, make it honest about what it is.
Those built-in AI assistants popping up in your email, your notetaker, your CRM are genuinely helpful, and they're free, which is exactly why I'd pause. When something digital is free, you're usually paying for it with something other than money, and here that something is your data. So this week, figure out whether your AI is training on what you feed it, and set your limits.
You get a video call and it's your business partner — her face, her voice, the way she laughs at the end of a sentence — asking you to move money today. In early 2024, that exact scenario cost one firm $25.6 million, and the raw material to fake you or your partner is already out there. Here's the both/and: the deepfakes are astonishing, and the two defenses that beat them are almost stupidly simple, and very human.
Over lunch yesterday, a friend asked me whether AI is actually making people less productive. I've felt both sides of it: the artificial-productivity treadmill of prompting and waiting, and the real lift of research done in minutes. Here's the honest question to ask before you reach for AI. Is it going to elevate what I can do, or just sideline my brain?
A recent notification on my phone’s lock screen: “Dinner music praised; expressions of love and admiration shared; pride conveyed.” Thanks, Siri, really nailed that sentiment. We live in a world of constant dehumanizing AI influence. But it still needs saying: AI is only as good as the human using it. …
HIPAA is a tricky subject for clinicians. It covers any digital transmission of personal healthcare information (PHI). It’s complex. And it’s easy to violate: sending a text message to a patient can violate HIPAA. So can an e-mail. Putting those disclaimer footers at the bottom of your e-mail? Nope, definitely not sufficient to protect yourself …
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 …
Forgetting is a path to remembering. 🧠💪 Last week I posted about my recent CPLEE project: building a tech-infused, learning science-informed approach to passing a licensing exam. Today let’s talk about some of the learning science I used and how it can help you! We’ve all learned something and then immediately forgotten it. The name …
(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 …
A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a cheap and easy way to protect your data. You should get one. If you’re convinced, go here to pick one. I am currently using NordVPN; I previously used PIA. Not convinced yet? Read on. In short, information does not go directly between your computer and your online …
There’s really no way around it: you must back up your devices. It’s far too easy to lose or damage your phone or laptop, along with the wealth of information on it. Luckily, backups are relatively easy to set up on any laptop, tablet, or smartphone you might own. Here’s how: But backups aren’t sufficient …
Cable TV remote.Television remote.Soundbar remote.Roku remote.Apple TV remote. Lurking in a pile in a drawer. Waiting for you to press the wrong button, jump to an incorrect source, and miss the first five minutes of your show. There’s a better way! A universal remote will improve your digital life! My current favorite is the Logitech …
