A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Tag: tech/AI: uses and applications

ARTS

    • Artful Intelligence
    • 06/13/25
    “If ideas become machines that make art, why can’t we design those machines in ways that preserve beautiful accidents where individual human judgment drives the creative process? LeWitt’s genius wasn’t in systematizing art-making per se but in designing systems that still required human interpretation—algorithms that needed the serendipities of manual labor to complete.”

CREATIVITY

LEADERSHIP

    • Harvard Business Review
    • 09/26/24
    “While AI’s ability to analyze complex data sets and iterate rapidly could revolutionize corporate strategy, it lacks the intuition and foresight required to navigate black swan events. Rather than fully replacing human CEOs, AI is poised to augment leadership by enhancing data analysis and operational efficiency, leaving humans to focus on long-term vision, ethics, and […]
    • Harvard Business Review
    • 12/15/23
    “This article presents a classroom experiment that compared a strategy developed by a team of MBA students in the traditional way with one developed using a virtual AI assistant, which was an interactive tool that linked a tried-and-tested strategy toolkit as a plug-in to the generative AI underlying Chat GPT. The results of the two […]

READING/WRITING

    • New York Times
    • 09/06/24
    “For over 20 years, writers around the world have participated in National Novel Writing Month, or #NaNoWriMo, as it’s known online. The challenge is simple: Write 50,000 words in the month of November. Well, as simple as writing 50,000 words can be. (That’s 1,667 words per day, for those of you doing the math at […]
    • New Republic
    • 04/22/24
    “But not very far into Baron’s Who Wrote This?, I realized I was being defensive—that I was arguing for a special exemption for writing and language because I consider them such immutable aspects of the mind, and of being human. Baron, with the dry eyes of an actuary, sets about deromanticizing writing.”

A.I. Updates

    • One Useful Thing
    • 03/22/25
    “When working without AI, teams outperformed individuals by a significant amount, 0.24 standard deviations (providing a sigh of relief for every teacher and manager who has pushed the value of teamwork). But the surprise came when we looked at AI-enabled participants. Individuals working with AI performed just as well as teams without AI, showing a […]
    • Ars Technica
    • 03/19/25
    “The study comes with an important caveat. On average, fully AI-generated memes scored higher than those created by humans alone or humans collaborating with AI. But when researchers looked at the best individual memes, humans created the funniest examples, and human-AI collaborations produced the most creative and shareable memes. In other words, AI models consistently […]
    • Understanding AI
    • 02/24/25
    “Seven out of 19 respondents… said OpenAI’s response was at or near the level of an experienced professional in their fields. A majority of respondents estimated it would take at least 10 hours of human labor to produce a comparable report.”
    • Semafor
    • 02/17/25
    “In a series of training documents, editorial guidelines laid out possible use cases for journalists, including prompts such as: How many times was Al mentioned in these episodes of Hard Fork? Can you revise this paragraph to make it tighter? Pretend you are posting this Times article to Facebook. How would you promote it? Summarize […]
    • Anthropic
    • 02/10/25
    “Cognitive skills such as Critical Thinking, Reading Comprehension, Programming, and Writing had the highest prevalence. However, our analysis captures only whether a skill was exhibited in Claude’s responses, not whether that skill was central to the user’s purpose or was performed at an expert level. For instance, while Active Listening appears as the second most […]
    • New York Times
    • 02/02/25
    “The best thing for medicine to do is to find a role for it that doctors can trust. The solution, we believe, is a deliberate division of labor. Instead of forcing both human doctors and A.I. to review every case side by side and trying to turn A.I. into a kind of shadow physician, a […]

TECH/AI

    • Frontiers In Psychology
    • 12/15/23
    “Fifty social dilemma questions were randomly selected from 10 well-known advice columns. In a pre-registered survey, participants (N = 404) were each shown one question, along with the corresponding response by an advice columnist and by ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s advice was perceived as more balanced, complete, empathetic, helpful, and better than the advice provided by professional advice columnists.”

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

    • TechCrunch
    • 10/11/24
    “For many in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., the biggest fear is that China or Russia rolls out fully autonomous weapons first, forcing the U.S.’s hand. At a UN debate on AI arms last year, a Russian diplomat was notably coy. “We understand that for many delegations the priority is human control,” he said. “For […]

TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT AND LAW

    • University of Minnesota
    • 11/07/23
    “We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly—where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the […]

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

    • The Verge
    • 12/03/24
    “They never thought they were the type of person to sign up for an AI companion, by which they meant the type of person you might already be picturing: young, male, socially isolated. I did speak to people who fit that description, but there were just as many women in their 40s, men in their […]

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

TECH/AI: GENERAL

    • Frontiers In Psychology
    • 12/15/23
    “Fifty social dilemma questions were randomly selected from 10 well-known advice columns. In a pre-registered survey, participants (N = 404) were each shown one question, along with the corresponding response by an advice columnist and by ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s advice was perceived as more balanced, complete, empathetic, helpful, and better than the advice provided by professional advice columnists.”

Issues

Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

Subscribe

* indicates required