AKA Review - 02.02.2024

From MIT Technology Review

What’s Next for AI in 2024

By Melissa Heikkilä and Will Douglas Heaven

Four trends: (1) Customized Chatbots: Powerful AI easily customized by non-tech users to their specific needs. (2) AI’s Second Wave: Text-to-video—basically today’s text-to-image on steroids. (3) Election Disinformation Everywhere: AI-generated deepfakes make it harder to know what’s real online. 2024 becomes pivotal for fighting the growth of such content. (4) Multitasking Robots: Monotlithic AI models enable multi-purpose robots, able to perform a much wider range of tasks. Tune in next year for results! Read this article

From WIRED

To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare

By Paul Ford

A self-described “English major to death” casts a jaded eye on the regular trashing of the humanities in academia in this funny, self-deprecating essay. His solace is knowing that “liberal arts types will be ascendant” when AI is victorious and erases the need for abstruse knowledge of large language models, neural nets, and similar tools. “At least art goes for the long game….Poems are many things, often lousy, but they are not meant to be disposable, nor do they require a particular operating system to work.” Read this article

From The Hechinger Report

Our College Students Are Struggling Emotionally. We Need To Understand How To Help Them

By Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan

The President of Lewis & Clark College, a clinical psychologist, urges us to make a critical distinction as we read the growing number of news articles about student mental health. Such articles typically use data from student self-reporting, which is not equivalent to clinical diagnoses. By equating them, we risk applying the wrong interventions. Young people entering college are facing normal developmental challenges and are more likely to benefit from support that builds their resilience than from clinical interventions. Read this article

From The New York Times

After Affirmative Action Ban, They Rewrote College Essays With a Key Theme: Race

By Bernard Mokam

With SCOTUS’s affirmative action ruling banning formal indication of race in college applications, some students are emphasizing their racial identities in their essays (as the Court’s decision allowed). Many find that this focus helps them understand who they are. Others feel like they are writing for someone other than themselves. Where critics of affirmative action see this approach as a loophole, admissions officers find it a means for students to highlight personal strengths that will serve them well in college. Read this article

From Chronicle of Higher Education

My Rock 'n' Roll Sabbatical

By Florence Dore

“I didn’t finish my new book. I spent my sabbatical on tour with my rock band instead,” begins UNC-Chapel Hill English professor Florence Dore. The tour mixed club gigs with public lectures on rock music and left her observing that when humanistic education is seen as elitist by many, it makes sense to consider the democratizing power in diverse public forms of literary practice. Or, as she quotes “rockstar” literary critic Merve Emre: “If you’re not trying to get people excited about it, then why are you doing it?” Read this article