AI companions: addiction and privacy concerns

“The design of these AI characters makes lawmakers’ concern well warranted. The problem: Companions are upending the paradigm that has thus far defined the way social media companies have cultivated our attention and replacing it with something poised to be far more addictive.  In the social media we’re used to, as the researchers point out, technologies are mostly the mediators and facilitators of human connection….

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The “power of the summary”: why do we prefer and trust AI-generated summaries over doing the summarization ourselves?

The easy answer is that it is much faster and requires less effort to click a button and get a custom summary of academic papers and their connections–rather than spending the time and mental effort to do it yourself. Or, is this preference just an extension of the utility of abstracts that have been used to summarize academic papers for decades–long before the public rise…

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Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

Frederik Joelving, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (from The Conservation) Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives. It is exceedingly difficult…

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Artificial intelligence and libraries

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a ubiquitous topic.  Looking at social media and technology news gives the impression that the world abounds in AI experts and superusers.  But that is misleading. For most of us, including those of us at the libraries of higher ed institutions facing financial and enrollment challenges, AI can seem an especially daunting topic.  We should pay attention.  After all, will AI…

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AI tools for academic research

There is an ever-growing array of artificial intelligence-based tools available for research use by students and faculty. These tools often use AI to create and find connections and themes between academic papers pulled from very large databases. The tools then use the power of visualizations to illustrate the connections and the power of summary to concisely describe the information, much the same way as abstracts…

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AI, finding information, and surviving

There is a vast amount of hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications. And there are valid concerns about the use of AI and its negative impact on our society. Like the long lineage of communication technologies that have preceded AI, human beings will use it–some for good (or at least with good intentions) and some to further crime, greed, corruption, and to gain…

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