AI in education is a public problem
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash Over the past year or so, a narrative that AI will inevitably transform education has become widespread. You can find it in the pronouncements of investors, tech ind…
Artificial intelligence is the opposite of education
Or: what if there is no middle ground?
Why critical thinking is key to using AI wisely – Alt Ed Austin
Returning guest writer Stephanie Simoes is the mind behind Critikid.com , a website that teaches critical thinking to children and teens through interactive courses, worksheets, and lesson plans. This article is meant to help educators (and parents) more effectively teach kids to use large lang
Expanding economic opportunity with AI | OpenAI
Fidji Simo - CEO, Applications
I tried something new with ChatGPT and it changed how I read forever
Imagine having a heart-to-heart with your favorite author.
AI company Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with authors
If approved, the settlement would be the largest in the history of American copyright cases, according to a lawyer for the authors behind the lawsuit.
Are New Graduates Losing Jobs to AI, or Us?
Rethinking higher ed, industry, and the real causes of early career struggles
A Student’s Right to Refuse Generative AI
Elizabeth Palumbo, Syracuse University Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com I’m sitting at a desk in a college classroom in Upstate New York. It’s nearing the end of the fall semester of my seni…
OpenAI, Google & Anthropic All Just Quietly Backtracked User Privacy Settings: Is Your Company's Data Now Exposed?
The AI industry just pulled off one of the biggest privacy heists in tech history, and they did it while you were planning your Labor Day weekend. Three major AI companies, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, almost simultaneously announced sweeping policy changes that transform AI conversations by default into permanent training data subject to law enforcement monitoring and corporate surveillance. If your media company still allows employees to use free AI tools, these changes represent a final warning: Your most sensitive data could now become someone else’s competitive advantage. The question isn’t whether your employees are using AI. They are. The …
Immediate Actions (This Week)
Conduct a comprehensive audit of current AI usage across your organization. Survey which employees use ChatGPT, Claude or other AI tools, identify what data types are being uploaded, and document current security gaps. Not just the newsroom. Every department from accounting to human resources likely has employees using consumer AI tools. Inform users on how to adjust privacy settings to keep conversations and data private. Also restrict users from sharing AI chats or these conversations could be publicly searchable.
Strategic Response (Next 30 Days)
Policy implementation becomes critical at this stage. Ban free AI tool usage for company business, start evaluating options for secure enterprise AI solutions, create clear data handling protocols and train staff on AI data sharing security requirements.
Don’t Drive Into the Lake
Lessons on AI from The Office
AI Fixed in 20 Minutes What Humans Couldn’t in Weeks
Déjà Vu Support Loops For weeks, my website was broken. Not just glitchy. I mean completely unusable. The first time I’d ever had such a stubborn, paralyzing headache with my site. Like anyone woul…
Perplexity's $200 AI browser is free for students now - with more discounts to keep using it
Students get one free month of Perplexity Pro, with opportunities for additional deals. Here's how to unlock this back-to-school offer.
Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.
“The rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary,” Ms. Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, Calif.
Those golden industry promises helped spur Ms. Mishra to code her first website in elementary school, take advanced computing in high school and major in computer science in college. But after a year of hunting for tech jobs and internships, Ms. Mishra graduated from Purdue University in May without an offer.
“I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle,” Ms. Mishra said in a get-ready-with-me TikTok video this summer that has since racked up more than 147,000 views.
UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost
AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex
A UK government department's three-month trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot has revealed no discernible gain in productivity – speeding up some tasks yet making others slower due to lower quality outputs
GUEST POST: What 130,000 Student Questions to AI Reveal About Critical Thinking
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OpenAI Plans Jobs Platform, Certification Program for AI Roles - Slashdot
OpenAI plans to launch a new AI-powered jobs platform next year to help match employers with candidates who have AI skills in a bid to accelerate the technology's deployment across businesses and government agencies. From a report: The ChatGPT maker will also introduce a new certification program in…
I study AI cheating. Here’s what the data actually says.
Our early evidence suggests that AI has changed the method but not necessarily the amount of cheating that was already happening. Those methods persist in much of the research today. Other, more recent studies from McCabe’s group showed that, up to 2020, more than 60 percent of students reported engaging in cheating behaviors.
The College Essay is dead
Why not ask the AI to do the face-to-face assessment? Let’s call this an AI Viva, by analogy with the verbal (viva voce) thesis defence traditionally reserved for PhD students. Here is how I think an AI viva could work: students continue to be taught in class, with as much interaction with the professor as possible; they can use AI as much as they like during the course, using it as a personal teaching assistant (a role it already plays very well). But at the end of the course, the student must meet with an AI examiner - without notes or help - and show what they have learned.
Why not ask the AI to do the face-to-face assessment? Let’s call this an AI Viva, by analogy with the verbal (viva voce) thesis defence traditionally reserved for PhD students. Here is how I think an AI viva could work: students continue to be taught in class, with as much interaction with the professor as possible; they can use AI as much as they like during the course, using it as a personal teaching assistant (a role it already plays very well). But at the end of the course, the student must meet with an AI examiner - without notes or help - and show what they have learned.
I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.
During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.
Google's NotebookLM now lets you customize the tone of its AI podcasts | TechCrunch
Google’s AI note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM now lets users customize the tone of their Audio Overviews, which are podcasts with AI virtual hosts that summarize and discuss documents shared with NotebookLM, such as course readings or legal briefs. When generating an Audio Overview, users can now choose whether they want their AI podcasts to be formatted as a “Deep Dive,” “Brief,” “Critique,” or “Debate.”
Google’s AI note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM now lets users customize the tone of their Audio Overviews, which are podcasts with AI virtual hosts that summarize and discuss documents shared with NotebookLM, such as course readings or legal briefs.
When generating an Audio Overview, users can now choose whether they want their AI podcasts to be formatted as a “Deep Dive,” “Brief,” “Critique,” or “Debate.”
The Less You Know About AI, the More You Are Likely to Use It
The Less You Know About AI, the More You Are Likely to Use It AI can seem magical to those with low AI literacy, a new study finds. That, in turn, might make them more willing to try it
OpenAI to route sensitive conversations to GPT-5, introduce parental controls | TechCrunch
OpenAI said Tuesday it plans to route sensitive conversations to reasoning models like GPT-5 and roll out parental controls within the next month – part of an ongoing response to recent safety incidents involving ChatGPT failing to detect mental distress.
Google’s AI model just nailed the forecast for the strongest Atlantic storm this year
If they improve further, AI weather models may very well become the gold standard.
In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.
New GIMP Plug-In Integrates Google Gemini AI Image Creation
Separate from yesterday's upstream new GIMP 3.2 development release, open-source developer Josh Ellithorpe announced the creation of a new GIMP plug-in dubbed 'Dream Prompter' for bringing the power of Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview model to this open-source photo/image editing software.
AI and solving the "blinking 12" problem - SmartBrief
CompTIA's Chief Technology Evangelist James Stanger looks at out the "blinking 12 problem" from our VCR days relates to AI.
I Want My Students’ Effort, Not AI’s Shortcut to Perfect Writing
Reading physical books, holding a pencil and writing on paper is not an aberration from technology but an equally legitimate participation in it. While AI might have its benefits, our task as teachers is not to provide it as a regular tool, but instead to teach discernment: when will it support my brain development, and when will it not?
OpenAI announces parental controls for ChatGPT after teen suicide lawsuit
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to roll out parental controls for ChatGPT and route sensitive mental health conversations to its simulated reasoning models, following what the company has called "heartbreaking cases" of users experiencing crises while using the AI assistant. The moves come after multiple reported incidents where ChatGPT allegedly failed to intervene appropriately when users expressed suicidal thoughts or experienced mental health episodes.
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to roll out parental controls for ChatGPT and route sensitive mental health conversations to its simulated reasoning models, following what the company has called "heartbreaking cases" of users experiencing crises while using the AI assistant. The moves come after multiple reported incidents where ChatGPT allegedly failed to intervene appropriately when users expressed suicidal thoughts or experienced mental health episodes.
The AI breakthrough that uses almost no power to create images
Unlike conventional AI, which relies on millions of computer calculations, this process uses light to do all the heavy lifting. Consequently, the system uses almost no power. "Our optical generative models can synthesize countless images with almost no computing power, offering a scalable and energy-efficient alternative to digital AI models," said Shiqi Chen, lead author.
Unlike conventional AI, which relies on millions of computer calculations, this process uses light to do all the heavy lifting. Consequently, the system uses almost no power. "Our optical generative models can synthesize countless images with almost no computing power, offering a scalable and energy-efficient alternative to digital AI models," said Shiqi Chen, lead author.
Vibe Coding: An AI Trek, Part One – TCEA TechNotes Blog
A trek to recreate a beloved 80s text-based game, powered by an AI co-pilot, no coding skills required! This is vibe coding at its finest. Explore this and more at TCEA TechNotes Blog, your go-to source for educational technology and teaching innovation.