Hi everyone,

Just a quick post to remind you of two upcoming webinars. This is the second time I’ve presented these two topics via Library 2.0.

June 5th - AI & Accessibility

What should librarians know about AI and accessibility? This webinar goes beyond accommodation to explore how AI tools can support agency and inclusion for people with disabilities. See real examples across vision, hearing, cognitive, and physical access — from smart glasses and auto-captioning to AI chatbots. Leave with practical strategies for your library or campus.

Agenda:

Understand how AI tools intersect with accessibility and UDL (universal design for learning)

See concrete examples across disability types:

• Blind and low-vision access

• Deaf and hard-of-hearing access

• Physical disabilities and speech access

• Neurodivergent and cognitive accessibility

Consider ethics and institutional responsibility.

Leave with practical strategies and resources for learning more.

Sign up here: https://www.library20.com/ai-sessions/ai-accessibility
June 5th, 2-3pm Eastern daylight time
(You’ll get the recording & slides if you can’t make it live).

Comment from an attendee of the April 24th session:
”I found the topic incredibly timely and valuable. Our community will benefit greatly from seeing the real-world examples and practical strategies you share—particularly regarding vision, hearing, cognitive, and physical access.”

June 12th - Vibe Coding for Beginners

Create Interactive Visuals, Mini Apps, and Learning Tools with AI

This session is designed for information professionals who want to create dynamic digital experiences—without needing a coding background.

Learn how to turn library statistics and information literacy content into beautiful, accessible interactives. We’ll demonstrate how these can be created using natural-language prompts in a few beginner-friendly “vibe-coding” tools. We’ll walk through how these tools work, what they’re good at (and not so good at), and how to iterate from a rough draft to something you can actually use.

You’ll see examples of how to create:

• Engaging educational quizzes and activities

• Mini-sites or simple web pages for visualizing library data

• Interactive graphics to help explain complex topics

Demos may include a mix of browser-based, natural-language “build it for me” tools and AI-assisted design environments. You’ll leave with concrete examples and ideas you can adapt for your own library context.

Agenda:

• What we mean by “vibe coding” (and the approach we’ll use)

• Practical limitations to understand up front

• Examples of vibe-coded quizzes and learning games (and how they were made)

• Examples of visual data displays (and how they were made)

• Ways to share interactives: hosted on the sites where they were created, or embedded in your website or libguides.

• Tool categories and recommendations

• Capabilities of free vs. paid accounts

• Recommended resources for learning more

Sign up here: https://www.library20.com/ai-sessions/vibe-coding-for-beginners
June 12th, 2-3:15 pm Eastern daylight time
(You’ll get the recording & slides if you can’t make it live).

Comment from an attendee of the March 20th session:
“I wanted to reach out and say thank you for the fantastic webinar you gave with Library 2.0 a few weeks back on Vibe Coding!“ (And she went on to share a few tools she had vibe-coded).

Share

And as always, you can follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon where I post daily about generative AI.

Hi everyone!

The big topic everywhere these days is agents. Also “vibe-coding.”

There’s also a LOT happening in libraries these days, as you’ll see in the section below.

In this issue we’ll look at:

• Education: College students are writing with AI – but a pilot study finds they’re not simply letting it write for them - Jeanne Beatrix Law, The Conversation

• Libraries: ARL and CNI Release Report on Strategic Implications of AI Futures for Research Libraries - ARL & CNI Communications, Association of Research Libraries

• Agents: Desktop Agents Are Having a Moment - Alexey Shabanov, Testing Catalog

• Vibe-coding: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: One Semester, Eight Vibe-Coded Teaching Tools - Rebecca Fordon

• Claude had so many upgrades! How to Use Claude’s Massive New Upgrades - The AI Daily Brief, YouTube

• AI art: Who’s the Artist?: Remixing in the Age of Intelligence - Nettrice Gaskins, Medium

• Reporting on AI: AI Isn’t Stressing People Out. The AI Discourse Is. - Nielsen Norman Group

• AI & politics: Sanders Sounds the Alarm on AI
  You might think that left-wing views about AI in the U.S. are all in alignment, but Bernie doesn’t agree with those who say it’s overhyped, not that powerful, and only a bubble. Instead he’s been talking with the x-risk people (Hinton, Yudkowsky, and others) and is more worried about how powerful it’s getting.

• The usual sections: Tips, Just for fun, Thought-provoking, and The future.
  

Also I’m offering this webinar on April 24th at 2pm Eastern.
AI & ACCESSIBILITY: How AI Can Benefit People Across a Range of Disabilities

See also my blog post: Who to follow for staying current with AI.

Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Foundation Models

Anthropic

’Put Claude to work’: Claude can now use your computer autonomously, you just have to tell it what to do - Craig Hale, TechRadar

Improving skill-creator: Test, measure, and refine Agent Skills - Anthropic blog
“Skill authors can now verify that their skills work, catch regressions, and improve descriptions.”

1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 - Anthropic
“Standard pricing now applies across the full 1M window for both models, with no long-context premium. Media limits expand to 600 images or PDF pages.”

Anthropic rolls out Code Review for Claude Code as it sues over Pentagon blacklist and partners with Microsoft - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat

How to Use Claude’s Massive New Upgrades - The AI Daily Brief, YouTube

Useful overview of Claude features. The overarching theme is a shift toward an always-on, context-maintaining, persistent orchestration model — work happens continuously even when you’re away, with multiple remote interaction modalities (phone, terminal, chat channels) to check in and direct it from wherever you are.

Covers these features: remote control, dispatch, Claude Code channels, scheduled tasks, computer use, projects, code review, 1 million token context window and interactive charts/diagrams.

Google

Google Maps Gets Chatty With a New Gemini-Powered Interface - Reece Rogers, Wired
““Ask Maps,” rolling out today to Google Maps on mobile, lets you ask Gemini questions about locations and even to plan trips on your behalf.”

Google made Gmail and Drive easier for AI agents to use - Allison Steffens Herrera, The Next Web
“A new command-line tool published to GitHub consolidates Workspace’s sprawling APIs into a single interface. It also signals how seriously the company is taking the agentic AI moment.”

OpenAI

OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 with native computer use mode, financial plugins for Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
“The big headlines on this release are efficiency, with OpenAI reporting that GPT-5.4 uses far fewer tokens (47% fewer on some tasks) than its predecessors, and, arguably even more impressively, a new “native” Computer Use mode available through the API and its Codex that lets GPT-5.4 navigate a users’ computer like a human and work across applications.”

Introducing GPT‑5.4 mini and nano - Fast and efficient models optimized for coding and subagents

Microsoft

Microsoft’s New AI Health Tool Can Read Your Medical Records and Give Advice - Sebastian Herrera, Wall Street Journal
“The company on Thursday unveiled Copilot Health, a feature within the Copilot app that lets the chatbot dispense personalized healthcare advice informed by the user’s disease history, test results, medications, doctors’ visit notes and biometric data as recorded by wearable devices. Health data imported into the feature will be encrypted and firewalled from the rest of the app to address the privacy concerns of handing over one’s medical records to a generative AI platform.”

Meta

Exclusive: Meta hires duo behind Moltbook - Ina Fried, Axios
“Meta has acquired Moltbook, a viral social network designed for AI agents, Axios has learned. Why it matters: The deal brings Moltbook’s creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the unit run by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.”

Open source models

Open source Mamba 3 arrives to surpass Transformer architecture with nearly 4% improved language modeling, reduced latency - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
“As new information flows in, the model simply updates this snapshot instead of re-reading everything from the beginning. This allows the AI to process massive amounts of information, like entire libraries of books or long strands of DNA, with incredible speed and much lower memory requirements.”

OpenClaw unveils ClawHub Marketplace; draws more than 331,000 stars on GitHub - The Economic Times
“The open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform OpenClaw has introduced a plugin marketplace called ClawHub alongside a slate of new AI features aimed at accelerating the development of autonomous agents.”

Nvidia’s Nemotron coalition brings eight AI labs together to build open frontier models - Luke James, Tom’s Hardware
“Nvidia today announced the Nemotron Coalition at its GTC conference in San Jose, California, recruiting eight AI companies to co-develop open frontier models on NVIDIA DGX Cloud, with the work feeding into the upcoming Nemotron 4 model family. Alongside the coalition, Nvidia released a new generation of open models spanning agentic AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and drug discovery. The founding members are Black Forest Labs, Cursor, LangChain, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Reflection AI, Sarvam, and Thinking Machines Lab — the latter of which was founded by Mira Murati, who served as CTO of OpenAI until her departure in 2024.”

Mistral releases a new open source model for speech generation - Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch
“The new model, called Voxtral TTS, supports nine languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, and Arabic. ‘Our customers have been asking for a speech model. So we built a small-sized speech model that can fit on a smartwatch, a smartphone, a laptop, or other edge devices. The cost of it is a fraction of anything else on the market, but it offers state-of-the-art performance…’ “

Vibe-coding

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: One Semester, Eight Vibe-Coded Teaching Tools - Rebecca Fordon
“‘When I vibe-code a tool in front of students, or reveal that I built something in 3 minutes that took an hour the traditional way, I’m modeling some of the ways they can use technology. The message isn’t always “look what I made,” but also “you could make this too, and you should, because the people who understand the problem best should be the ones building the solution.’ “

Reinventing the LibGuide with Natural Language Programming - Kyle Byin, LibTech Insights
“AI vibe coding opens up new possibilities for library resources.”

Software Bonkers: The year is 2026 and I can’t stop building - Craig Mod
“It’s strange times. Anyway, I’m mad for software right now. Bonkers. I can’t stop thinking about things to make, things to make better. And then I go and make them. There’s an energy around all this that is — truly — epochal. If you’re not playing with models like Claude, you should probably take a peek. It’s the time of building.”

Suddenly Everyone in San Francisco Is a ‘Builder,’ Whatever That Means - Katherine Bindley, Wall Street Journal
“Creating apps and websites used to be the rarefied world of tech developers. No more.”

Use Canvas in AI Mode to get things done and bring your ideas to life, right in Search. - Google
“To make your own tool or dashboard, select the new Canvas option from the tool menu (+) in AI Mode and describe what you want to create. You’ll get a working prototype in the Canvas side panel that pulls together the freshest information from the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.”

Introducing “vibe design” with Stitch - Google
“We’re introducing a complete redesign of the Stitch UI. It now features a new AI-native, infinite canvas that gives your ideas room to grow from early ideations to working prototypes. The new Stitch canvas is built to amplify your creativity throughout the design process, where you often diverge and converge before landing on something great. It allows you to bring your ideas regardless of the shape they take — images, text or even code — directly to the canvas as context.”

Agents

Is Claude Cowork an Agent Yet? - Pawel Jozefiak, Digital Thoughts
“Three major AI companies. Three “agent on your computer” launches. Two weeks. This is not a coincidence. The entire industry is converging on the same insight: the future of AI is not a chat window. It’s an agent that lives on your machine, has access to your stuff, and works while you’re away. I’ve been saying this for a while. Now everyone is racing to build it.”

The agentic researcher - building custom, transparent and extensible workflows with Claude & MCP - Aaron Tay
“The deeper question — whether the future of research tooling lies in polished, vendor-defined products or in researcher-configured composable environments — remains open. My sense is that we are heading towards a middle ground: vendor tools that expose MCP interfaces, allowing them to be composed in ways the vendors did not anticipate, combined with institutional configurations (possibly maintained by libraries) that provide sensible defaults while remaining customisable.”

What personal software actually is - Dan Shipper
“Personal software is an agent you have a relationship with. You teach it, correct it, shape it. It grows a personality and skills in response to you. This is what OpenClaw is showing us.”

Anthropic just shipped an OpenClaw killer called Claude Code Channels, letting you message it over Telegram and Discord - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
“This isn’t just a new UI; it is a fundamental shift in how developers interact with AI agents, moving from a synchronous “ask-and-wait” model to an asynchronous, autonomous partnership. Previously, Claude Code users were stuck interacting with the agentic harness on the Claude desktop application, terminal or supported developer environment, and Claude mobile app through a somewhat flaky (in my experience) interconnection setting called Remote Control.”

Desktop Agents Are Having a Moment - Alexey Shabanov, Testing Catalog
“What’s been particularly noticeable this week is how Anthropic is pushing to transform its desktop app into something closer to OpenClaw. They already have scheduled tasks, scheduled cloud tasks, and the ability to talk to Claude Desktop from mobile. They’re also experimenting with Telegram integration, meaning you could have Claude running on your laptop and communicate with it through Telegram in exactly the same way you do with OpenClaw. It can execute any task on your laptop. A nice and quite obvious direction. At the same time, other companies are following Anthropic’s lead here. Manus launched its own desktop app. xAI is working on something called Grok Computer, which, based on the name, sounds more like they are following Perplexity, though it’s too early to judge. The bottom line: desktop apps that can operate your laptop and handle whatever you throw at them are gaining serious traction.”

Meta’s Manus launches desktop app to bring its AI agent onto personal devices amid OpenClaw craze - Dylan Butts, CNBC
“However, through the new Manus Desktop application, a feature called ‘My Computer’ lets its agents work directly with local files, tools and applications on a user’s device. The expanded offering aligns Meta and Manus’s agents more closely with OpenClaw, an open-sourced AI agent that is also downloaded onto users’ local devices. “

Perplexity turns your Mac mini into a 24/7 AI agent - Ana Maria Constantin, The Next Web
“The centrepiece of announcement is Personal Computer: software that runs continuously on a user-supplied Mac mini, merging local files, apps, and sessions with Perplexity’s cloud-based Computer system.”

Introducing Replit Agent 4: Built for Creativity - Replit
”Agent 4 frees up more time for creativity by enabling parallel work—multiple agents working at the same time, each focused on a different part of the project. It’s the difference between one person tackling a checklist alone and a small team dividing the work and moving together.”

Ramp Launches Agent Cards to Enable Secure, Autonomous AI Spending - Stabledash
“Ramp has officially launched its Agent Cards feature. Designed specifically for AI agents that need to make purchases on behalf of users or businesses, this new tool promises enhanced security, policy enforcement, and seamless integration without exposing sensitive card information.”

OpenJarvis: Personal AI, On Personal Devices - Jon Saad-Falcon et al.
“OpenJarvis is an open-source framework for personal AI agents that runs entirely on-device. It provides shared primitives for building on-device agents, efficiency-aware evaluations, and a learning loop that improves models using local trace data.”

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Images, video, music

Who’s the Artist?: Remixing in the Age of Intelligence - Nettrice Gaskins, Medium
“Critics of generative AI argue that machines replace human labor but these examples show how machines can aid humans (artists) in the process of making content that resonates with viewers or listeners. Proponents of GenAI often expound on the many benefits of the technology such as the ability to produce work that surpasses the capabilities of their makers. However, my ideas (color studies, paintings, collages) often guide the Al image making process. The aim is not to copy from others but to extend remixing into the new (latent) space of GenAI. Maya Ackerman writes, While machines may never possess a human soul or create art exactly as we do, there’s a unique magic that unfolds when we dare to deeply collaborate with them... It invites us to look past the surface, to recognize new forms of creativity and connection…”

The Algorithm King Has No Clothes: Spectacle, Robotics and the Early Misreadings of AI Art - Vito di Bari, LinkedIn
“By human-scale AI I do not mean smaller models or limited datasets. I mean an artistic approach in which the center of gravity remains human: intention, authorship, and vision. In this context, the algorithm is not the artist. It is a tool—just as the brush, photography, and cinema once were. The question then becomes: what do we choose to imagine with these tools? When artists treat generative systems as artistic material, new languages emerge—languages that cannot be reduced to a simple technological demonstration. AI becomes art not when a machine produces an image, but when an artist uses the machine to produce a question.”

Hollywood shifts from fear to AI adoption - Eleanor Hawkins, Axios AI+
“Hollywood is investing heavily in AI, positioning it as infrastructure, not as a replacement for creators.”

Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora - Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter
“In a surprise move, OpenAI will shut down its Sora AI video app, just months after it was first launched…. A source familiar with the matter tells The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year, in which it pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora.”

Lyria 3 Pro: Create longer tracks in more Google products - Google
“Last month, we introduced Lyria 3, featuring custom music generation designed to spark creative expression. Now, we’re bringing our most advanced music generation model to more Google products, and introducing Lyria 3 Pro. This advanced version allows the creation of tracks up to 3 minutes long, with customization and creative control. Lyria 3 Pro better understands musical composition, so you can now prompt for specific elements like intros, verses, choruses and bridges.”

Inhuman Music? - Paul Smith, LinkedIn
“There is a fairy tale making the rounds, all powdered wig and trembling lip, that music was once a pure human utterance, some sacred exhalation of the species, and then one day AI arrived in a silicon cape and poisoned the village well. This is nonsense. Antique nonsense. Premium nonsense. Music production has been crawling with non-human mediation, prosthetics, substitutions, illusions, ghost labor, mechanical cheats, engineered spaces, synthetic stand-ins, electrical disguises, mathematical corrections, and glorified fraudulence for more than a century.”

Suno Launches Version 5.5 With New ‘Voices’ Feature - Ashley King, Digital Music News
”The first new feature is the launch of Voices, which will be available to Suno Pro and Premier subscribers. The feature includes a verification process that matches the singing voice in your live-captured or uploaded audio to a random phrase that Suno asks the user to speak. Voices on Suno are private; only the person who uploaded the voice can use it to create new songs. Suno says in the future it plans on adding Voice sharing, but that aspect of this new feature remains on the horizon.” Also, “The Custom models feature allows users to tune 5.5 music that you’ve created to build a personalized version of the model that knows your style. Pro and Premier subscribers can create up to three custom models for now.”

My offerings

AI & ACCESSIBILITY: How AI Can Benefit People Across a Range of Disabilities
I’m offering this webinar on April 24th at 2pm Eastern.
This webinar goes beyond accommodation to explore how AI tools can support agency and inclusion for people with disabilities. See real examples across vision, hearing, cognitive, and physical access — from smart glasses and auto-captioning to AI chatbots. Leave with practical strategies for your library or campus.”
See my other webinar topics.

Who to follow for staying current with AI - my blog post on nicolehennig.com
In order to stay current with generative AI (or any technology), I’ve always found it important to cast a wide net. Don’t only follow people similar to yourself—such as those from your same profession, political viewpoints, or demographics. Instead, look worldwide. Seek out many different professions, and draw from a mix of sources: newsletters, social media, LinkedIn, YouTube channels, and podcasts. Here are my top recommendations for people and groups to follow to stay current with generative AI—organized by topic. This isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a strong starting point.

Accessibility

WCAG 2.2 Audit — Claude Cowork Skill
“A Claude Cowork plugin that performs comprehensive WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility audits on web pages and HTML files, with programmatic contrast verification and professional audit reports.”

AI Smart Glasses and the Future of Academic Integrity in a Postplagiarism Era - Sarah Elaine Eaton et al.
“We argue that treating AI glasses as cheating devices overlooks their potential for accessibility and cognitive support while failing to address the structural disruption these technologies bring to education.“

AI software for smart glasses wins £1m prize for technology to help people with dementia - Nicola Davis, The Guardian
“Glasses use verbal cues and floating text to assist wearers and are expected to be available in early 2027.”

Accessible by Default - Community Access
“We are a community of blind and sighted developers building open source tools that make AI-generated code accessible by default.” “Built by the community, for the community. 57 AI agents enforce WCAG 2.2 AA inside your favorite coding environment—every recommendation backed by verifiable sources, every feature born from real community needs.”

Comments on why AI tools matter for neurodiverse people - The Compassion Collective (@the_compassion_collective) on Threads
“Before tools like this? We were:
– burning out trying to translate ourselves
– being misunderstood or dismissed
– excluded from spaces that required a communication style we couldn’t sustain
– told to “just try harder” in systems that were never built for us.”
“When people start defining “good” vs “bad” AI use based on their own needs, what they’re actually doing is erasing neurodiversity”

What’s happening in education

College students are writing with AI – but a pilot study finds they’re not simply letting it write for them - Jeanne Beatrix Law, The Conversation
“Our analysis suggests that generative AI is entering student writing not as a wholesale replacement for human authorship, but as part of a negotiated collaboration. The results suggest that AI most often enters the composing process during idea generation, revision and moments of writer’s block, while students maintain control over argument choice, voice and final phrasing.”

The AI cheating panic is loud. The way students actually use ChatGPT is much quieter. - Parker Jones, ChatGPT for Education
From a student: “That’s why, over the past few months, I interviewed more than 50 Cal Poly students to understand how they use this technology and how they feel about it. What I found was far more ordinary and much more hopeful than the story we’ve been told about students and AI.”

From Prompt to Practice: A Framework for Transparent GenAI Use in Higher Education - Carol Damm and Lance Eaton, EDUCAUSE
“As generative artificial intelligence reshapes instructional workflows at colleges and universities, a four-level transparency framework can help education developers calibrate documentation and disclosure practices to support ethical responsibility and maintain student trust.”

What parts of the academic knowledge creation & dissemination pipeline can we automate with AI? - Mark Hahnel, Open Research
“There are stages where the automation is fairly robust. Metadata enrichment, FAIR scoring, integrity screening, novelty checks against the existing literature. These are tasks where the output is verifiable and the failure modes are containable. They’re also, not coincidentally, the tasks that consume a lot of researcher time without requiring much researcher judgement. But there are other stages where a human needs to be in the loop, and probably will for a while. Editorial decisions - whether a piece of work is actually worth publishing, whether the framing is intellectually honest, whether the conclusions follow from the evidence. These are not tasks I’d be comfortable delegating to agents at this point. The current OpenAccess.ai setup allows human editors to review agent assessments before making final decisions, and I think that hybrid model is the right one for this experiment.”

Introducing the U of A AI Platform - University of Arizona News
“Several thousand members of the campus community are already piloting the first tool, U of A Gen AI, which allows users to choose from five commercially available large language models: Claude, OpenAI, Gemma, Meta Llama and Amazon Nova. In addition to U of A Gen AI, the platform will eventually include additional services to support teaching and learning, research and operations across campus. These include: A public-facing campus chatbot that uses verified university information to answer questions about programs, services and resources. An Arizona AI assistant that will allow colleges, departments and offices to create custom chatbots that retrieve information only from approved institutional data sources. AI sandboxes that provide controlled, secure environments where researchers, instructors and students can test and experiment with AI systems without exposing sensitive or restricted data.”

A SIFT Rebuild (in progress) - Mike Caulfield
Discusses “the death of the linked, free source” and “the shift to short-form video on platforms like TikTok” and what that means for teaching fact-checking and information literacy now.

What’s happening in libraries

Generative AI and Libraries: Claiming Our Place in the Center of a Shared Future - Terese Scheiderich, College & Research Libraries
I enjoyed reading this book review of Generative AI and Libraries: Claiming Our Place in the Center of a Shared Future, Michael Hanegan and Chris Rosser.
I agree with the reviewers.

“In a growing body of literature on generative artificial intelligence, this title is noteworthy for its hopeful tone. The authors are optimistic about librarians’ ability to positively influence the development of generative AI, if they are willing to lead the way—a welcome perspective in a conversation often dominated by fear and uncertainty. Importantly, the book opens the door to questions about the consequences if libraries choose to opt out of GenAI conversations, namely allowing other, less trustworthy institutions to control the narrative. More than just a toolkit for ethically integrating GenAI, this work is a call to action for librarians to come together and “claim the center” (p. vii) in reshaping the future. While some librarians may question their ability to do this, others will be inspired to answer the call.”

ARL and CNI Release Report on Strategic Implications of AI Futures for Research Libraries - ARL & CNI Communications, Association of Research Libraries
“Invest in workforce now. AI literacy programs, flexible position descriptions, and safe opportunities for staff experimentation are foundational regardless of which AI future materializes. Waiting for the landscape to stabilize before upskilling is a strategic risk.”

The Horseless Carriage of AI Search: Why Using LLMs to Generate Boolean Alone Is Likely of Little Benefit - Aaron Tay, Musings about Librarianship
“I conclude by arguing Boolean itself may no longer be the right foundation for retrieval in an era of BM25 (loose/fuzzy boolean), hybrid search, and agentic search.”

Library and Archives 101: AI and the False Promise of Control - Dave Hansen, Authors Aliance
“This is the first in a series of essays about the choices that knowledge institutions face as AI reshapes how their collections and resources are used. The people on various sides of these debates are, for the most part, deeply committed to access to knowledge — the disagreement is about means. Some believe that the best way to protect access to knowledge is to impose new conditions on how AI can use it and for what purposes. I think that approach is more likely to undermine access than to save it. This post in particular is about the risk of libraries and archives reimagining themselves as gatekeepers of AI-era access.”

Harvard Library Tests AI Tools to Help Researchers Navigate Collections - Shalini N. Ramchune, The Harvard Crimson
“One of the library’s major projects is Collections Explorer, a developing system that uses semantic search to allow users to find materials across Harvard’s special collections. Unlike traditional keyword-based searches, the tools allow researchers to search using natural language and can surface relevant materials even when specific terms do not appear directly in catalog descriptions. The system is still in development and has not yet been widely released. Since early testing began, the library has worked with more than 150 Harvard students to evaluate the platform and gather feedback on its usability.

Another initiative focuses on integrating library search capabilities directly into AI chat tools. A technology known as model context protocol could allow platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, or Harvard’s AI Sandbox to link users directly to Harvard Library materials when answering questions.”

What if your AI could read your notes? Claude Desktop + Obsidian MCP - Dong Danping
“PKM-connected AI is still in its early stages. The tools are emerging and evolving rapidly, but not every MCP workflow will benefit equally. Yet the core idea is exciting: AI research assistants with agentic capabilities, with a degree of autonomy, and access to both research infrastructure and your personal research context. This feels like an important shift in how research workflows are designed and experienced.”

Stony Brook University Libraries Named Finalist for International Innovation Award - Stony Brook University News
“SEARCH AI was developed in response to changing research behavior. Library staff noticed that patrons were increasingly entering full questions or conversational phrases when searching the catalog, a pattern influenced by the growing presence of large language models and conversational search tools in everyday digital platforms.” “The tool has also improved search outcomes. Library data shows that SEARCH AI reduces zero-result searches by about 75 percent compared with basic catalog searches. The system also applies facets and filters three times more frequently than users typically do on their own, helping researchers refine their results and locate relevant materials more efficiently.”

Tips

Your New HYPE FREE AI News Briefing System - Phillip Alcock, AI Blueprints for Education
“How to get accurate, balanced news from an LLM and stop feeding the algorithm that profits from your outrage.”

Your AI Is a Yes-Man. Here’s How to Fix It. - Daniel Nest, Why Try AI
“Anti-sycophancy tips with hands-on prompt examples you can follow.”

Softerware - Mike Caulfield
“Keep your Claude skills loose for better performance.”

Build with Andrew - Andrew Ng, DeepLearningAI
Free vibe-coding course for beginners.

Lovable - quick start
Step-by-step guide to vibe-coding from Lovable.

Just for fun

The only new toys you’ll need this year: The Grow-it Raygun - Curious Refuge on Instagram
Fun 1950s style ad-parody. Plays to AI video’s strengths.

Float And Watch The Stars - Kelly Boesch AI Art, YouTube
Beautiful AI animation from one of my favorite creators who uses AI tools. She writes her own song lyrics and uses Suno for the music. (Here’s how she describes it: “Lyrics written by me, Kelly Boesch. Music created under my creative direction with assistance from Suno.”)

‘Vibe coding’ beats ‘clanker’ to be Collins dictionary’s word of the year - The Guardian
“Lexicographers at Collins monitor the 24bn-word Collins Corpus, which draws from a range of media sources, including social media, to create the annual list of new and notable words that reflect our ever-evolving language. They chose vibe coding as word of the year after observing a huge increase in usage since its first appearance in February.”

Thought-provoking

Energy, environment & infrastructure

Exowatt: A New Take on Solar Data Centers - Rich Miller, Data Center Richness
“By storing energy as heat rather than electricity, Exowatt avoids the high costs and environmental baggage of rare earth minerals while utilizing two centuries of mechanical engineering.”

The case for radical solar optimism - Azeem Azhar and Hannah Petrovic, Exponential View
“With solar now below the cost of fossil fuels almost everywhere on earth, other nations will follow China’s lead. In the United States, solar is winning support even from MAGA insiders who see it as essential to powering AI and competing with China, a former DOGE aide is championing solar on socials and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who once called it a “parasite,” now concedes its commercial role. Solar energy won’t be the sole contributor to our energy system in 30 years’ time; other sources, mostly carbon-free, will also contribute. But solar will be the dominant player.”

AI’s energy impact is still small—but how we handle it is huge - Costa Samaras, Emma Strubell, Ramayya Krishnan , MIT Technology Review

How One Virginia County Turned Data Center Money into Affordable Housing - Andrew R. Chow, Conor Greene, Time
“Virginia’s program is the first known example in the country to specifically use data center revenue for an affordable housing trust fund. If it succeeds, it could serve as a template for how to turn a highly-controversial industry into a community benefit. Lawmakers in Lansing, Michigan are considering a similar model. And one of the Henrico program’s champions is Virginia Senator Mark Warner, who hopes that the initiative can be replicated across the nation.”

AI, work & the economy

It still doesn’t look like there’s an AI bubble - Timothy B. Lee, Understanding AI
“But if you’ve been reading this newsletter, the counterargument should be obvious: models are generating a growing number of tokens that are not intended for human eyes.”

Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did: There’s a lot more to replacing labor than just automating tasks. - David Oks blog
“The lesson is worth stating plainly. The ATM tried to do the teller’s job better, faster, cheaper; it tried to fit capital into a labor-shaped hole; but the iPhone made the teller’s job irrelevant. One automated tasks within an existing paradigm, and the other created a new paradigm in which those tasks simply didn’t need to exist at all. And it is paradigm replacement, not task automation, that actually displaces workers—and, conversely, unlocks the latent productivity within any technology. That’s because as long as the old paradigm persists, there will be labor-shaped holes in which capital substitution will encounter constant frictions and bottlenecks. This has, I think, serious implications for how we’re thinking about AI.”

Search, fact-checking & information literacy

Yes, LLMs Can Be Better at Search Than Traditional Search - Mike Caulfield
“It takes a specialized prompt, but LLMs can significantly outperform search.”

We’re not taking the fact-checking powers of AI seriously enough. It’s past time to start. - Mike Caulfield
”Stop assuming AI errors are hallucinations. Thinking of all LLM errors as “hallucinations” makes us worse at finding the truth. I’ve talked about this before. Most AI errors are not hallucinations in the sense that term was originally meant. As one example, a much more common error is conflation, where two unlike things are stitched into one.”

The Sycophancy Fallacy: Why You May be Worried About the Wrong Bias with Search - Aaron Tay
“AI search tools aren’t “agreeing” with users—they are retrieval systems. Confusing the two is a category error that obscures the real risks.”

AI discourse, perception & political framing

AI Isn’t Stressing People Out. The AI Discourse Is. - Nielsen Norman Group
“Respondents most often feel curious, happy, and inspired when they use AI, and they feel stressed, intimated, and confused least often. This question might overstate positive emotions somewhat: the 14% of respondents who reported “never” using AI were not given the opportunity to answer this question. But of the 14 emotions listed, respondents reported feeling the positive feelings (curious, happy, inspired, excited, empowered, optimistic, and relieved) much more frequently than the negative feelings (concerned, skeptical, frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed, intimidated, and confused). Respondents didn’t need to become AI superusers to access these positive feelings. They just had to start using the technology regularly, for the most popular purposes.”

A guide to the AI tribes: A primer on the ideological camps shaping the race to AGI - Michel Justen, What is This
“The term “tribe” captures something important about how these groups function: they spawn their own status ladders and tend to sort people into in-group and out-group. But not everyone in a given tribe is a zealot, and within-tribe variation is high. Understanding someone’s rough group affiliation isn’t enough to know their exact beliefs.”

Sanders Sounds the Alarm on AI: America’s foremost socialist is warning that artificial intelligence may extinguish human life. - Zachary Jones, One Thousand Means
“The dominant view on the left is that AI is an essentially fake technology, and the threat it poses is primarily in the form of financial speculation and environmental cost. This view is promoted by ideological entrepreneurs who have infected progressive discourse with disproven claims, running against an overwhelming tide of evidence. The fact that Bernie Sanders is now meeting with the people that the ‘experts’ who dot the left-wing podcasts and press have told you should never list to should be a rude awakening. The left must get its head out of the sand or all of its values will be annihilated in the face of transformative developments it is wholly unprepared for.”

The AI Denial Industry: The Left’s MAHA - Alexei Gannon , One Thousand Means
“The scientific consensus is not only that AI will rapidly improve, but also that forward-looking policy is necessary to mitigate the social harms of AI. In the aforementioned survey, AI researchers do not universally agree that improved AI will lead to a net positive outcome. The majority believe that AI safety research and democratic protections must be prioritized more than they are today.” “While some demand a full-on moratorium on datacenters, a state-by-state regulatory campaign is most likely to concentrate data centers in red states (or worse alternatives like the UAE, or for Elon Musk: space) where we lose the ability to regulate AI development while carbon ends up in the atmosphere anyway. The demand in energy to fuel new datacenters requires us to double down on the expansion of public clean energy as an alternative to behind-the-meter gas-powered compute.”

Study: The Public Isn’t Concerned or Mobilized by AI Doomsday Warnings - Nirit Weiss-Blatt, AI Panic
“The failure of existential-risk messaging helps explain the AI doomers’ pivot toward job loss, warfare, and environmental harms”

The Six Loops: Groundhog Day in AI discourse - Zoe Scaman, Musing of a Wandering Mind
“ So there they are. Six loops. Fear, hype, efficiency, exceptionalism, tactical, minimising. The setlist that never changes. None of them are entirely wrong. That’s what makes them so sticky. But none of them are interesting. And none of them point toward what actually matters. What I keep coming back to - the thing that nags at me continuously - is that technology doesn’t simply replace things. It reconfigures them. It changes what something means, what it’s for, where it lives.”

AI in practice: human impact

Practicing with Language Models Cultivates Human Empathic Communication - Kumar et al
Ethan Mollick: “AI can help us learn hard-to-teach human skills, like showing empathy. Preregistered study of 968 people found almost no correlation between feeling empathic & communicating empathy. But a single practice session with an AI coach made people measurably better at it.”

Why are people adopting AI to write? - Andres Guadamuz
“But we have to also understand the reasons why people are adopting AI in such large numbers, and we have to make sure that we don’t demonise every such uses. I have mentioned that not everyone enjoys and/or is good at writing, and we should recognise that as a valid reason to use AI for some tasks.”

Lawmakers want to stop ChatGPT from checking that mole or helping you through a panic attack - Shoshana Weissmann, Papercuts
“These bills purport to protect consumers. But the alternative to people seeking information through AI isn’t top-tier care. Often, the alternative is no care at all. And in response to the New York bill, people shared how AI-provided medical information helped them restore their vision, stop their father’s hallucinations, and understand their newborn’s medical care. These proposals assume that limiting AI advice will push people toward licensed professionals instead. In reality, many people who turn to AI are doing so because traditional care is unavailable, unaffordable, or unresponsive. Blocking AI doesn’t create care where none exists—it removes another tool people use to navigate the system.”

The future

‘The Karpathy Loop’: Former OpenAI researcher’s autonomous agents ran 700 experiments in 2 days—and gave a glimpse of where AI is heading - Jeremy Kahn, Fortune
“He said that while the current autoresearch system he built was designed for a single agent to continually improve a piece of code along a single path, in the future he imagines multiple AI agents will be able to explore different optimizations and different experiments in parallel…”

Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion - James Evans, Benjamin Bratton, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Science
“For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!). By its nature, intelligence is high-dimensional and relational, not a single quantity that must be unambiguously less or greater than human scale. In fact, it is unclear what we even mean by “human scale,” given that our intelligence is already a collective property, not an individual one. Recent advances in agentic AI show us once again that intelligence has always fundamentally involved the interaction of distinctive, distributed perspectives, and it is from social organization that transformative intelligence has and will continue to emerge.”

Libraries 2045: What Will the Next 20 Years of Libraries and AI Look Like? - Kyle Bylin, LibTech Insights
“Libraries and technology have always coevolved.”

Learn more

AI Literacy for Library Workers: self-study course - Nicole Hennig

• No deadlines.

• The course will receive updates once a year – you’ll have perpetual access.

• Go at your own pace, come back and review anytime.

• You’ll get a certificate of completion when you finish the course.

• $99 on Udemy.com

Comments from previous participants

One of the best courses I’ve ever taken. Highly recommended.
– Brock Edmunds, Assistant Head, Pardee Library, Boston University Libraries

This course really gave me the opportunity to try out so many different AI tools and have that hands on experience I really needed. Plus get a better understanding of generative AI in general. Highly recommend the course!
– Laura Hogan, Reference & Instruction Librarian, Bristol Community College, Fall River, MA

This class offers a great overview of how AI works and some of the ethical issues involved. The assignments also gave me a chance for hands on learning. I only knew of AI as a peripheral thing existing in the world, and this class gave me a great basic understanding. Highly recommended.
—Deb Garbison, Librarian – Hennepin County Library

Being able to work effectively with AI is clearly an important aspect of librarianship now and Nicole’s course will introduce you to a vast range of AI tools with interesting activities to learn how to use them.
—Cynthia Rider, Public Service Librarian, Peninsula Library System, San Mateo, CA

I highly recommend this excellent course. The videos are informative, exciting and short, and I really enjoyed the hands-on activities, it was so much fun that I could try out all these new tools! I liked best the attitude that we were supposed to understand how easy it is to use AI to build a chatbot, generate music or create a podcast from a text.
—Angelika Gulyas, Senior Collection Management Librarian, Central European University, Vienna

And as always, you can follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon where I post daily about generative AI.

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Hi everyone!

I haven’t had a spare moment to put together a full issue lately (last one was Dec. 1, 2025), but I hope to soon!

In the meantime, here are some webinars I’m offering soon that you might be interested in.

Each one is $99/person - includes live attendance and any-time access to the recording and the presentation slides and receiving a participation certificate.

Group discounts are possible, too (see the registration page for each one below).

The first one is this Friday, March 20th.

March 20, 2-3:15 pm Eastern

Vibe Coding for Beginners: Create Interactive Visuals, Mini Apps, and Learning Tools with AI

This session is designed for information professionals who want to create dynamic digital experiences—without needing a coding background.

Learn how to turn library statistics and information literacy content into beautiful, accessible interactives. We’ll demonstrate how these can be created using natural-language prompts in a few beginner-friendly “vibe-coding” tools. We’ll walk through how these tools work, what they’re good at (and not so good at), and how to iterate from a rough draft to something you can actually use.

You’ll see examples of how to create:

• Engaging educational quizzes and activities

• Mini-sites or simple web pages for visualizing library data

• Interactive graphics to help explain complex topics

You’ll leave with concrete examples and ideas you can adapt for your own library context.

March 23, 2-3pm Eastern

Evaluating AI Features in Library Subscription Databases: A Practical Guide for Decision-Makers

Library subscription e-resources are beginning to include AI-powered features. These features can take many different forms – like natural language searching, AI-powered summaries, or mind maps of concepts in individual articles.

Sometimes these features show up in platform updates with little advance notice. Other times we’re faced with decisions on whether to activate the features or not, and sometimes we need to decide whether to pay extra for them.

In this session you’ll get a tour of different types of AI-powered features in products like Primo Research Assistant, ProQuest databases, Google Scholar Labs, and others.

We’ll cover key ideas that librarians need to understand in order to evaluate these features and make informed decisions about enabling them.

You’ll get a glossary of useful terms — semantic searching, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), and MCP (model context protocol), an emerging standard for how AI tools connect to external data sources. We’ll compare semantic searching with keyword searching and discuss the advantages and limitations of both.

The session also includes a checklist of considerations for evaluating these products, covering privacy, transparent linking to sources, clearly labeled AI features, and more.

April 24, 2-3pm Eastern

AI & Accessibility: How AI Can Benefit People Across a Range of Disabilities

What should librarians know about AI and accessibility? This webinar goes beyond accommodation to explore how AI tools can support agency and inclusion for people with disabilities. See real examples across vision, hearing, cognitive, and physical access — from smart glasses and auto-captioning to AI chatbots. Leave with practical strategies for your library or campus.

• Understand how AI tools intersect with accessibility and UDL (universal design for learning)

• See concrete examples across disability types:

  • Blind and low-vision access

  • Deaf and hard-of-hearing access

  • Physical disabilities and speech access

  • Neurodivergent and cognitive accessibility

• Consider ethics and institutional responsibility

• Leave with practical strategies and resources for learning more

Please spread the word, and I hope to see you there!

Nicole

p.s. The self-study version of my online course is available anytime: AI Literacy for Library Workers: self-study course. I’ll be adding some new content to it over the summer. Buy it now and get all future updates.

Share

Subscribe now

Today I updated my free giveaway document for new subscribers:

10 Tips for Keeping Up with Generative AI (PDF)

I thought all of you existing subscribers would also like a new copy. Things change quickly and this has several updates.

Enjoy!

Nicole

p.s. See also my latest blog post: Who to follow for staying current with AI.

Hi everyone!

If you’re new here, welcome! There has been a lot of news to keep up with recently. So lets jump right into it.

It seems all the big models have made updates and added new features:

• OpenAI reboots ChatGPT experience with GPT-5.1

• Google’s new Gemini 3 model arrives in AI Mode and the Gemini app

• Microsoft Copilot gets 12 big updates for fall

• Nano Banana Pro: But Did You Catch These 10 Details?

• Adobe introduces new AI features for faster video, photo, and design workflows

We’ll also look at interesting stories like these::

• The Case for AI as Accommodation - Matthew Brophy

• AI and the Future of Pedagogy - Tom Chatfield

• SIFT for AI: Introduction and Pedagogy - Mike Caulfield

• Google Scholar Finally Enters the AI Era - Aaron Tay

And finally:

• My offerings: Dec. 5 webinar: AI’s Environmental Impact and the self-study course: AI Literacy for Library Workers.

• The usual links to tips, thought-provoking articles, and the future.

Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Foundation Models

Google

Google’s new Gemini 3 model arrives in AI Mode and the Gemini app - Engadget, Nov. 18, 2025
”Gemini 3 Pro will debut inside of AI Mode, with availability of the new model first rolling out to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Google will also bring the model to AI Overviews, where it will be used to answer the most difficult questions people ask of its search engine. In the coming weeks, Google plans to roll out a new routing algorithm for both AI Mode and AI Overviews that will know when to put questions through Gemini 3 Pro. In the meantime, subscribers can try the new model inside of AI Mode by selecting “Thinking” from the dropdown menu.”

Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 - Ethan Mollick, Nov. 18, 2025
”Gemini 3 is a very good thinking and doing partner that is available to billions of people around the world. It is also a sign of many things: the fact that we have not yet seen a significant slowdown in AI’s continued development, the rise of agentic models, the need to figure out better ways to manage smart AIs, and more. It shows how far AI has come. Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker.”

Start building with Gemini 3 - Google, Nov. 18, 2025
”Whether you’re an experienced developer or a vibe coder, Gemini 3 can help you bring any idea to life.” “Gemini 3 Pro unlocks the true potential of “vibe coding”, where natural language is the only syntax you need. By significantly improving complex instruction following and deep tool use, the model can translate a high-level idea into a fully interactive app with a single prompt.”

Generative UI: A rich, custom, visual interactive user experience for any prompt - Google Research, Nov. 18, 2025
”We introduce a novel implementation of generative UI, enabling AI models to create immersive experiences and interactive tools and simulations, all generated completely on the fly for any prompt. This is now rolling out in the Gemini app and Google Search, starting with AI Mode.”

Anthropic

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 is here: Cheaper AI, infinite chats, and coding skills that beat humans - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat, Nov. 24, 2025
”Anthropic released its most capable artificial intelligence model yet on Monday, slashing prices by roughly two-thirds while claiming state-of-the-art performance on software engineering tasks — a strategic move that intensifies the AI startup’s competition with deep-pocketed rivals OpenAI and Google.”

Vibe Check: Opus 4.5 Is the Coding Model We’ve Been Waiting For - Parrot, Shipper, Klaassen, Every - Nov. 24, 2025

Claude Opus 4.5 Changes What’s Possible with Vibe Coding - The AI Daily Brief, YouTube

OpenAI

GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT - OpenAI, Nov. 12, 2025

OpenAI reboots ChatGPT experience with GPT-5.1 after mixed reviews of GPT-5 - Emilia David, VentureBeat, Nov. 12, 2025
”The 5.1 tag reflects improvements to the base model, and OpenAI considers these part of the GPT-5 family, trained on the same stack and data as its reasoning models. The biggest difference between 5.1 and 5 is its more natural and conversational tone, OpenAI CEO for Applications Fidji Simo said in a Substack post. “Based on early testing, it often surprises people with its playfulness while remaining clear and useful,” OpenAI said in its post. Instant can use adaptive reasoning to help it decide when it needs to think about its answers, especially when it comes to more complicated questions. OpenAI noted that it has improved the model’s instruction following, so that while it continues to respond quickly, it also directly addresses the user’s query.”

Introducing shopping research in ChatGPT - OpenAI News, Nov. 24, 2025
”Shopping research is built for that deeper kind of decision-making. It turns product discovery into a conversation: asking smart questions to understand what you care about, pulling accurate, up-to-date details from high-quality sources, and bringing options back to you to refine the results.”

Helping 1,000 small businesses build with AI - OpenAI News, Nov. 20, 2025.
”OpenAI’s latest AI Jam equips small businesses to grow and compete.”

A free version of ChatGPT built for teachers - OpenAI News, Nov. 19, 2025
”A secure ChatGPT workspace that supports teachers in their everyday work so they can focus on what matters most—plus admin controls for school and district leaders. Free for verified U.S. K–12 educators through June 2027.”

Introducing group chats in ChatGPT - OpenAI - Nov. 13, 2025
”Update on November 20, 2025: Early feedback from the pilot has been positive, so we’re expanding group chats to all logged-in users on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans globally over the coming days. We will continue refining the experience as more people start using it.”

Microsoft

Microsoft Copilot gets 12 big updates for fall, including new AI assistant character Mico - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, Oct. 23, 2025
”The Fall Release consolidates Copilot’s identity around twelve key capabilities—each with potential to streamline organizational knowledge work, development, or support operations. 1. Groups – Shared Copilot sessions where up to 32 participants can brainstorm, co-author, or plan simultaneously. For distributed teams, it effectively merges a meeting chat, task board, and generative workspace. Copilot maintains context, summarizes decisions, and tracks open actions.” (and 11 other updates)

Others

Meta returns to open source AI with Omnilingual ASR models that can transcribe 1,600+ languages natively - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, Nov. 10, 2025
”At its core, Omnilingual ASR is a speech-to-text system. The models are trained to convert spoken language into written text, supporting applications like voice assistants, transcription tools, subtitles, oral archive digitization, and accessibility features for low-resource languages. … This version can transcribe languages it has never seen before—using just a few paired examples of audio and corresponding text. This lowers the barrier for adding new or endangered languages dramatically, removing the need for large corpora or retraining.”

Baidu just dropped an open-source multimodal AI that it claims beats GPT-5 and Gemini - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat, Nov. 12, 2025
”What sets Baidu’s release apart is its efficiency: the model activates just 3 billion parameters during operation while maintaining 28 billion total parameters through a sophisticated routing architecture. According to documentation released with the model, this design allows it to match or exceed the performance of much larger competing systems on tasks involving document understanding, chart analysis, and visual reasoning while consuming significantly less computational power and memory.”

What’s new? Issue #219 - Testing Catalog, Nov. 9, 2025
”Last week brought several notable launches from smaller labs and some interesting announcements. Most notably, Kimi K2 Thinking is now available. It’s impressive that they managed to train such a high-performance model at a low cost, putting pressure on OpenAI, Google, and others to step up their own releases to maintain their performance advantage. Not only is Kimi K2 Thinking cheaper, but Moonshot, the company behind it, has a strong consumer focus with feature-rich apps, unlike DeepSeek. Their platform already includes agent capabilities with computer use, and more advanced agentic features are promised soon. This approach is quite different from last year’s DeepSeek, and Kimi has real potential to challenge OpenAI’s dominance in the market.”

Vibe-coding

Google’s Opal: A Closer Look - Daniel Nest, Why Try AI, Nov. 13, 2025
”Because these nodes are plug-and-play compatible with each other, your mini-app is transparent, easily tweakable, and less likely to break in unexpected ways. In short, it just works. Think of it like creating things with ready-made LEGO blocks vs. a 3D printer. Sure, the 3D printer technically lets you make whatever you want, but good luck learning the process and assembling something that doesn’t collapse under its own weight without prior experience, buddy.”

Is Google AI Studio the Best New Vibe Coding Tool? - Nat Eliason, Nov. 13, 2025
”I’m not normally a big proponent of browser-based vibe coding tools, but Google has done a really great job with the launch of their new AI Studio. If you’re just getting started vibe coding, this might be the best place to start.”

The Best Vibe Coding Tools as of October 2025 - Nat Eliason, Oct. 21, 2025

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Images, video, voices, and music

Images

Nano Banana Pro: But Did You Catch These 10 Details? - AI Explained on YouTube, Nov. 20, 2025
”Nano Banana Pro is no incremental upgrade. From double exposures to almost (!) perfect infographics, comic strips, to pricing, benchmarks and more, I go through 10 facets of the new, model you won’t get just from reading the headlines.”

Nano Banana comics for Caulfield’s “Three moves, seven tips” - Nicole Hennig, Nov. 22, 205
I’ve been playing with the new Nano Banana Pro and using Mike Caulfield’s “three moves, seven tips” as content.

Disney+ to Allow User-Generated Content Via AI - Hollywood Reporter
”Disney CEO Bob Iger hinted at “productive conversations” with unnamed AI companies that would protect IP but add new features to the studio’s flagship streaming service.”

Voice

The AI user interface of the future = Voice - Grant Harvey, The Neuron, Nov. 19, 2025
With tips for using voice: “Voice gives you superpowers if you treat it like its own medium, not just “spoken typing.” You speak faster than you type, but you read faster than you listen. So for big, messy tasks, use your voice to talk through the problem and give the model all the context it needs, then skim the answer like you would any long-form doc.”

License Legendary Voices - Eleven Labs
(Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Alan Turing, and others)
”License AI voices and IP of history’s most iconic figures for your creative projects. Request licensing for entertainment legends, sports heroes, musical pioneers, and transformative historical figures. Our marketplace connects creators with rights holders for the most iconic IP.”

Video

From Cinema To The Noematograph - Nathan Gardels, Noema, Nov. 14, 2025
”He continues: “Rather than thinking about AI as a cheap way to replace filmmakers, to replace writers, to replace artists, think of [it] as a new kind of machine that captures something and plays back something. What is the thing that it captures and plays back? The content of thought, or subjectivity.” The ancient Greeks called the content, or object of a person’s thought, “noema,” which is why this publication bears that name. Liu thus invents the term “Noematograph” as analogous to “the cinematograph not for motion, but for thought … AI is really a subjectivity capturing machine, because by being trained on the products of human thinking, it has captured the subjectivities, the consciousnesses, that were involved in the creation of those things.”

Why Guillermo del Toro Will Eventually Use AI - AI Video School, Oct. 20, 2025
”Humans are really amazing at creating. Not all humans can employ giant crews to operate cameras and hold boom mics though. This is why AI video has captured the imagination of so many people left out of the current system. We can tell stories in ways that were unattainable. Del Toro will probably never write a prompt for Sora or Veo, and will definitely never ask ChatGPT to write a script for him. But I can easily imagine how AI will be included in the workflow of his films. It may involve adding a newly imagined detail to one of the sets that a set-designer and crew built. Re-lighting a scene with his cinematographer in post-production. Fixing the eyeline of a background extra who looked directly at the camera, almost ruining a perfect take. Changing the wardrobe on an actor in a shot that matches the original design of the costume director. A re-shoot that involves asking an actor who is in a different country to perform a scene on their iPhone that will match the lighting, wardrobe, and background of the original.”

The number one sign you’re watching an AI video - Thomas Germain, BBC, Nov. 3, 2025
”The real solution, according to digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, is for us all to start thinking differently about what we see online. Looking for the clues AI leaves behind isn’t “durable” advice because those clues keep changing, he says. Instead, Caulfield says we have to abandon the idea that videos or images mean anything whatsoever out of context.”

Adding all the various modes to everything

Adobe introduces new AI features for faster video, photo, and design workflows - Amber Neely, Apple Insider, Oct. 28, 2025
”Firefly now supports full video and audio production workflows. Generate Soundtrack, in public beta, uses Adobe’s Firefly Audio Model to create original, licensed instrumental tracks that automatically sync with your video footage. Generate Speech, currently in public beta, transforms text into realistic voiceovers in a variety of languages. It also creates emphasis and controls tempo for life-like delivery.”

Introducing ElevenLabs Image & Video - Imogen Mulliner, Eleven Labs, Nov. 25, 2025
”Within ElevenLabs, you can now bring ideas to life in one complete creative workflow. Use leading models like Veo, Sora, Kling, Wan and Seedance to create high-quality visuals, then bring them to life with the best voices, music, and sound effects from ElevenLabs.”

Tips

• 7 tips to get the most out of Nano Banana Pro - Google, Nov. 20, 2025

• NotebookLM’s new features: slide decks and infographics - Google and NotebookLM rolls back slide decks and infographics temporarily

• NotebookLM adds Deep Research and support for more source types - Google

• Add images as sources in NotebookLM - NotebookLM on X
  ”Whether it’s a photo of handwritten notes, a screenshot of a textbook or graphs on a web page, NotebookLM can synthesize the information and produce outputs from it.”

• Google Docs Gets Smarter: Audio narration, AI help, and 40 new templates - Jeremy Caplan, Nov. 7, 2025 (Tabs, listen to your writing, pageless formats, templates, and more)

• 6 new things you can do with AI in Google Photos - Google, Nov. 11, 2025

• Pro tips on using AI for deep research - Dan Russell, Search ReSearch, Nov. 7, 2025

My offerings

AI’s Environmental Impact - Library 2.0 webinar, Dec. 5, 2025
(A repeat of the session I offered on Oct. 17)
”This webinar cuts through the confusion to help you make informed choices about sustainability in your classrooms, libraries, and communities.

We’ll examine independent estimates of AI’s energy and water use and put them in context in ways that are easy to understand.

We’ll include an introduction to how data centers work and what they are used for. We’ll clarify what we know and what’s still uncertain about AI’s carbon footprint (both in the present and in future projections).

We’ll compare individual AI use to other digital activities, and we’ll also look at global use of data centers with statistics from the International Energy Agency.”

AI Literacy for Library Workers: self-study course - Nicole Hennig
(My six-week course from Infopeople is now over, but you can still sign up for the self-study version).

• No deadlines.

• The course will receive updates once a year – you’ll have perpetual access.

• Go at your own pace, come back and review anytime.

• You’ll get a certificate of completion when you finish the course.

• $99 on Udemy.com

(See end of this issue for comments from previous participants).

Accessibility

The Case for AI as Accommodation: Treating AI as optional risks perpetuating ableism in higher ed. - Matthew Brophy
”The stories students have shared across my classes have been revelatory to me. A student with aphantasia uses AI to generate diagrams and mnemonics in organic chemistry, compensating for the fact that she cannot form mental images. Another battling anxiety builds confidence by generating practice tests with ChatGPT, rehearsing so she no longer freezes at exam time. A commuter student turns dense readings into audio so she can review them while driving. One student identifying as on the autism spectrum told me she uses AI for social insights, such as how she could contribute to a group project without sounding “pushy.” A first-generation student told me she relies on AI to figure out what she needs to do in college: How to email a professor, what office hours are for, what an annotated bibliography is. A multilingual student said he asks AI “basic” comprehension questions that he’d be embarrassed to ask someone else. A student with ADHD described getting easily overwhelmed, but ChatGPT would assure her that she could do it, and would break up her workload into small “bite-sized” tasks she could tackle one at a time.”

AI will be a Big Win for Blind Users, Not a Shield From ADA Lawsuits - Jason Taylor, UsableNet, Nov. 18, 2025
”Traditional screen readers rely solely on underlying website code, meaning they cannot perceive or interpret the visual layout that sighted users take for granted. AI changes that dynamic entirely. By analyzing both the code and the visual appearance of a webpage, AI can act much like a sighted assistant sitting beside a blind user: describing visual elements, suggesting actions, identifying likely interactive targets, and offering alternative strategies for completing tasks online.”

Future smartglasses may change the way deaf people hear - Andy Boxall, Aug. 13, 2025
”Research is being carried out into how smart glasses equipped with a camera, AI, and a data connection could help deaf people better follow real-time conversations.”

Hate Meta? Even Realities Is Making the Smart Glasses You Want - Julian Chokkattu, Wired, Nov. 12
”So what do you actually do with the G2? You can view notifications, use the translation function to see translated words of the person you’re speaking with on the display of the glasses, see navigation instructions as you walk, and pin a to-do list. … "The microphones can hear when you say “Hey Even,” and trigger the company’s Even AI assistant, which can act like your standard-fare large language model chatbot today and answer your queries.”

Hands-on: Smart glasses that finally look & feel normal – Even Realities G2 - Fernando Silva, 9to5Mac, Nov. 12, 2025

Even Realities subtitle glasses - Even Realities G2
Learn more about these glasses.

What’s happening in education

No, the Pre-AI Era Was Not That Great (opinion) - Zach Justus and Nik Janos, Inside Higher Ed, Nov. 20, 2025.
”First, it allows us to blame everything wrong with education on generative AI rather than acknowledge deep and justifiable concerns we have had for a while. The current technology serves as a convenient scapegoat for problems we may have been aware of but decided to live with. Course Hero, Chegg and other providers had industrialized academic dishonesty before ChatGPT was launched. We decided not to deal with that and, rather than face up to our past oversights, we have simply forgotten.”

Time, emotions and moral judgements: how university students position GenAI within their study - Margaret Bearman et al. Higher Education Research & Development, Nov. 11, 2025.
”Despite their centrality, students’ perspectives remain underexplored. We investigated how students position GenAI in relation to their studies, conducting focus groups with 79 students across four Australian universities. Taking a sociotechnical stance and employing reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three primary themes: (1) studying with and without GenAI; (2) mixing messages and assumptions; and (3) ‘coming from me’: self-trust and resistance to dependency. Crossing these themes were axial threads of time, emotions, and moral judgement. Our findings illuminate a complex, dynamic and uncertain landscape of relationships in which students prioritise their developing values and moral positions over institutional messaging.”

AI and the Future of Pedagogy - Dr Tom Chatfield, Sage White Paper, Nov. 23, 2025
”It critiques defensive, surveillance-based institutional responses to AI and calls for a shift toward transparent, experimental, and mastery-based assessment. It highlights the need for educators to become designers and facilitators of learning environments, and for institutions to ground their use of technology in civic and ethical purposes. Ultimately, the white paper argues for a future-focused pedagogy that prepares students to thrive in an AI-rich world by developing both technical fluency and distinctively human capacities.”

Why AI is So Hard (For Education) - Stefan Bauschard, Oct. 28, 2025
”Together, these thinkers suggest that the education system must evolve from preparing students for predictable employment toward supporting them to launch, lead, iterate, and scale—to become creators of enterprises, designers of their own careers, and collaborators with AI rather than passive recipients of instruction….In this light, the public arguments about whether students should use AI to brainstorm or write a paper seem almost trivial. They are symptoms of a system that still measures learning by compliance, not creativity; by authorship, not agency. The fundamental question is not how much AI a student uses, but how education helps them understand and shape the world that AI is creating.”

How well can Gemini 3 make a Henry James simulator? - Benjamin Breen, Nov. 18, 2025.
”How can educators adapt to and acknowledge the new reality but, at the same time, reject the idea that the only path forward is mass adoption of pre-packaged subscription services and for-profit “AI tutors”? How do we do something creative, interesting, and original with these tools rather than allow ourselves to be funneled toward the average, the expected, or the addictive.”

Gemini 3 Solves Handwriting Recognition and it’s a Bitter Lesson - Mark Humphries, Generative History - Nov. 25, 2025
”For the historical community, as we gradually become accustomed to this new reality, it will radically alter how historians, genealogists, archivists, governments, and researchers relate to our documentary past. It’s also a harbinger of the larger changes in our relationship with information that are now certain to come from scaling.”

What’s happening in libraries

Benchmarking AI Models in the Library: Critical Questions for Library Professionals and Users: How to select the best model for each job - Elizabeth Szkirpan, Choice, November 24, 2025
”It is challenging to directly compare most AI tools apples-to-apples because the underlying corpus, training process, and intended uses can vary widely. However, practical benchmarking questions can help librarians compare models to one another or be used to guide users through the reference interview in order to select the best model for the task at hand.”

Scholar Labs: An AI Powered Scholar Search - Google Scholar blog, Nov. 18, 2025
”Scholar Labs is an experimental feature and is as yet available to a limited number of users. This is a new direction for us and we plan to use the experience and feedback to improve the service. If Scholar Labs is not yet available for you, you can register to be notified when it is.”

Scholar Labs Early Review: Google Scholar Finally Enters the AI Era - Aaron Tay, Nov. 20, 2025
”If my assessment of how Scholar Labs works is correct, this is a game-changer solely due to the scale of Google Scholar’s index. Scholar’s index dwarfs OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar (used by many new “AI academic search”), and others. It includes full text from almost every major publisher (allows crawls from Google Scholar). If Scholar Labs inherits this exact index (and isn’t walled off from paywalled full-text), it should dominate in non-STEM disciplines where other databases are weaker.”

A 2025 Deep Dive of Consensus: Promises and Pitfalls in AI-Powered Academic Search - Aaron Tay, Nov. 15, 2025
”Academic librarians are increasingly being asked about AI-powered search tools that promise to revolutionize literature discovery. Consensus is one of the more prominent and earliest players in this space (alongside Elicit, Perplexity), positioning itself as a tool that can not only find relevant papers but assess the “consensus” of research on a topic.”

For those librarians who teach information literacy:

• SIFT for AI: Introduction and Pedagogy - Mike Caulfield, Nov. 21, 2025
  ”What is happening here is not that AI is doing the thinking for students — rather, with prompts like these AI is generating preliminary maps of the information landscape. Students are then using those maps to navigate that landscape, and hopefully developing familiarity with the subject and patterns of critical reasoning (both general and grounded in the discipline) as they go while also developing helpful knowledge around how LLM tools work and how to use them effectively.”

• AI Mode with Gemini 3 gets past the hedging to a welcome specificity - Mike Caulfield, Nov. 20, 205

Just for fun

Anti-A.I. Hate Song - Kotoku Denjiro on Suno
A song talking back to the AI haters.

Good Morning, New Robots! - Kevin Kelly
Fun short story. “Good morning robots! This is a very special time for you because you are about to be turned on. “ON” means that you will have a body and energy.”

Nano Banana Pro is blowing my mind! - Blaine Brown on X
Fun prompt to try: “Make a 4×4 grid starting with the 1880s. In each section, I should appear styled according to that decade (clothing, hairstyle, facial hair, accessories). Use colors, background, & film style accordingly.”

Surrealistic AI video set to Dave Bruebeck’s Take Five - Dave Szauder on Instagram (turn on the sound)

How “Star Trek” Helped Make Midcentury-Modern the Signature Sci-Fi Aesthetic - Marah Eakin, Dwell
”… the (now) retro-futuristic aesthetic Star Trek helped cultivate through its use of midcentury-modern designs still pops up in 21st-century sci-fi depictions, from Blade Runner: 2049 to episodes of Black Mirror. But while some sci-fi has veered toward postapocalyptic hellscapes and steely and/or dusty outposts built in the wake of economic, social, and climate-based collapse, the Star Trek universe has always been based on idealism, and maybe even a bit of luxury.”

Thought-provoking

• Google’s ‘Nested Learning’ paradigm could solve AI’s memory and continual learning problem - Ben Dickson, VentureBeat, Nov. 21, 2025
  ”The problem is that today’s transformer-based LLMs have no mechanism for “online” consolidation. Information in the context window never updates the model’s long-term parameters — the weights stored in its feed-forward layers. As a result, the model can’t permanently acquire new knowledge or skills from interactions; anything it learns disappears as soon as the context window rolls over. Nested Learning (NL) is designed to allow computational models to learn from data using different levels of abstraction and time-scales, much like the brain. It treats a single machine learning model not as one continuous process, but as a system of interconnected learning problems that are optimized simultaneously at different speeds.”
  

• Anthropic Cyberattack Report Sparks Controversy - The Batch newsletter, Andrew Ng
  ”Independent security researchers interviewed by Ars Technica , The Guardian, and others found a variety of reasons to question the report.

  While they agreed that AI can accelerate tasks such as log analysis and reverse engineering, they have found that AI agents are not yet capable of performing multi-step tasks without human input, and they don’t automate cyberattacks significantly more effectively than hacking tools that have been available for decades.”
  

• AI Blackmail: Fact-Checking a Misleading Narrative - Nirit Weiss-Blatt, Nov. 21, 2025
  ”CBS should issue a correction to its “60 Minutes” show on Anthropic.”
  

• Six reasons to think there’s an AI bubble — and six reasons not to - Timothy B. Lee and Derek Thompson
  ”If you read this article, we think you’ll be prepared for just about every conversation about AI, whether you find yourself at a Bay Area gathering with accelerationists or a Thanksgiving debate with Luddite cousins. We think some of these arguments are compelling. We think others are less persuasive. So, throughout the article, we’ll explain both why each argument belongs in the discussion and why some arguments don’t prove as much as they claim. Read to the end, and you’ll see where each of us comes down on the debate.”
  

• The AI dashboard: Watch boom turn to bubble (or not) in real time - Azeem Azhar, Oct. 20, 2025
  ”A month ago, we released our framework for assessing whether AI is a bubble. The framework uses five key gauges which measure various industry stressors and whether they are in a safe, cautious or danger zone. These zones have been back‑tested against several previous boom‑and‑bust cycles….We are launching v1 of a live dashboard, updated in real time as new data comes in.”
  

• Hyperproductivity: The Next Stage of AI? - Steve Newman, Second Thoughts, Nov. 19, 2025
  ”These teams have four things in common:

  They are aggressively using AI to accelerate their work.

  They aren’t just using off-the-shelf tools like ChatGPT or Claude Code. They’re building bespoke productivity tools customized for their personal workflows – and, of course, they’re using AI to do it.

  Their focus has shifted from doing their jobs to optimizing their jobs. Each week, instead of delivering a new unit of work, they deliver a new improvement in productivity.

  Their work builds on itself: they use their AI tools to improve their AI tools, and the work they’re optimizing includes the optimization process.”
  

• Why it takes months to tell if new AI models are good - sean goedecke - Nov. 22, 2025
  ”Nobody knows how good a model is when it’s launched. Even the AI lab who built it are only guessing and hoping it’ll turn out to be effective for real-world use cases. Evals are mostly marketing tools. It’s hard to figure out how good the eval is, or if the model is being “taught to the test”. If you’re trying to judge models from their public evals you’re fighting against the billions of dollars of effort going into gaming the system. Vibe checks don’t test the kind of skills that are useful for real work, but testing a model by using it to do real work takes a lot of time. You can’t figure out if a brand new model is good that way. Because of all this, it’s very hard to tell if AI progress is stagnating or not. Are the models getting better? Are they any good right now? Compounding that problem, it’s hard to judge between two models that are both smarter than you (in a particular domain). If the models do keep getting better, we might expect it to feel like they’re plateauing, because once they get better than us we’ll stop seeing evidence of improvement.”
  

• Fix the News, issue #320.
  ”Of course, this has been going on for a long time. William Randolph Hearst coined the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads” back in the 1890s, during the days of yellow journalism. What’s different now is that we all get our news on the black devil glass, all the time, as it happens, from everywhere - which is why we are drowning in an endless stream of alarm that makes the world feel far more dangerous than it actually is. We’ve said this a hundred times before, but it’s always worth repeating: the world’s biggest news organisations aren’t reflecting the world. They are reflecting what’s dramatic, rare, and cheap enough to turn into a story. If you’re after an accurate picture of what’s getting worse, or what’s improving, you’ll need to look somewhere other than the news.”
  

• How to Confront Highbrow Misinformation - Dan Williams, Persuasion, Nov. 10, 2025
  ”Highbrow misinformation primarily misinforms audiences not through explicit falsehoods but through forms of communication that select, omit, frame, and contextualize information in misleading ways, signal-boosting some facts, de-emphasizing others, placing real statistics in deceptive contexts, and soliciting commentary from experts offering preferred opinions. Ruxandra Teslo calls this “Haut Bourgeois Propaganda,” which contrasts with the kind of “brute misinformation” (i.e., outright lies and fake news) often associated with lowbrow sources and alternative media.”
  

• Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI - Bruce Schneier, Nov. 5, 2025
  ”There are myriad ways to leverage and reshape AI to improve peoples’ lives, distribute rather than concentrate power, and even strengthen democratic processes. Many examples have arisen from the scientific community and deserve to be celebrated.” [followed by links to examples] “While each of these applications is nascent and surely imperfect, they all demonstrate that AI can be wielded to advance the public interest. Scientists should embrace, champion, and expand on such efforts.”
  

• Writing for AIs is a good way to reach more humans - sean goedecke, Nov. 14, 2025
  ”I don’t write this blog to make money or to express myself in beautiful language. I write because I have specific things I want to say”…. “When engineers talk to language models about their work, I would like those models to be informed by my posts, either via web search or by inclusion in the training data. As models get better, I anticipate people using them more (for instance, via voice chat). That’s one reason why I’ve written so much this year: I want to get my foothold in the training data as early as possible, so my ideas can be better represented by language models long-term.” “I think this is a good reason to write more and to make your writing accessible (i.e. not behind a paywall). But I wouldn’t recommend changing your writing style to be more “AI-friendly”: we don’t have much reason to think that works, and if it makes your writing less appealing to humans it’s probably not a worthwhile tradeoff.”
  

• The Internet Archive should be protected not attacked - Mathew Ingram, Nov. 13, 2025
  ”Cases like the Hachette lawsuit reinforce something I’ve often thought, which is that if public libraries didn’t already exist, corporate interests like book publishers and movie companies and record labels would never allow them to be created. People get to read our books or watch our movies or listen to our records and we don’t get paid anything? they would shout – that’s communism! Incidentally, it’s worth noting that plenty of authors’ groups and individual creators are fans of the Internet Archive, and many didn’t support the Hachette case. But cases like this are why Congress created fair use – because without it, commercial entities will press their interests relentlessly until every book and film and song and work of art is locked up in a giant vending machine where the price keeps going up, and your purchase is deleted if you don’t agree to its terms.”
  

• Common Ground between AI 2027 & AI as Normal Technology - Kapoor et al. Asterisk Magazine, Nov. 12, 2025
  ”These are substantial disagreements, which have been partially hashed out here and here. Nevertheless, we’ve found that all of us have more in common than you might expect. In this essay, we’ve come together to discuss the ways in which we agree with each other on how AI progress is likely to proceed (or fail to proceed) over the next few years.”
  

• Type 2 Growth - Kevin Kelly, Oct. 27. 2025
  ”In this respect “degrowthers” are correct in that there are limits to bulk growth — and running out of humans may be one of them. But they don’t seem to understand that evolutionary growth, which includes the expansion of intangibles such as freedom, wisdom, and complexity, doesn’t have similar limits. We can always figure out a way to improve things, even without using more stuff — especially without using more stuff! There is no limit to betterment. We can keep growing (type 2) indefinitely.”
  

• Is it worrying that 95% of AI enterprise projects fail? - sean goedecke, Nov. 3, 2025
  ”The NANDA report is not as scary as it looks. The main reason is that ~95% of hard enterprise IT projects fail no matter what, so AI projects failing at that rate is nothing special. AI projects are all going to be on the hard end, because the technology is so new and there’s very little industry agreement on best practices. It’s also not clear to me that the 95% figure is trustworthy. Even taking it on its own terms, it’s mathematically closer to 92%, which doesn’t inspire confidence in the rest of the NANDA team’s interpretation. We’re forced to take it on trust, since we can’t see the underlying data - in particular, how many of those 52 interviews went into that 95% figure.”
  
  Copyright

• The Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement: Understanding America’s Largest Copyright Settlement - Dave Hansen, Kluwer Copyright Blog, Nov. 10, 2025
  The best article I’ve seen about this case. Many interesting details. Worth reading the whole thing.
  ”Conclusion: Nobody really won in this suit. Authors and publishers get money but no control over future AI training. Anthropic writes a massive check, but it already won on fair use for training its LLM and it gets to keep the scans it makes of legally purchased books. The AI industry gets some guidance (don’t download your books from LibGen) but still faces uncertainty about outputs and future regulation.”
  

• Setting the Record Straight: Common Crawl’s Commitment to Transparency, Fair Use, and the Public Good - Rich Skrenta, CommonCrawl, Nov. 4, 2025
  It’s worth reading the whole thing.
  ”A recent article in The Atlantic (“The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work,” November 4, 2025) makes several false and misleading claims about the Common Crawl Foundation, including the accusation that our organization has “lied to publishers” about our activities.

  This allegation is untrue. It misrepresents both how Common Crawl operates and the values that guide our work.”
  

• Warner Music Group strikes ‘landmark’ deal with Suno; settles copyright lawsuit against AI music generator - Music Business Worldwide, Nov. 25, 2025
  ”Artists and songwriters, according to the companies, ‘will have full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in new AI-generated music’. In 2026, according to the press release, Suno will make ‘several changes to the platform, including launching new, more advanced and licensed models’.”
  

• WMG settles Udio lawsuit, strikes licensing deal for ‘next-generation’ AI music platform coming in 2026 - Music Business Worldwide, Nov. 19, 2025.
  ”Warner Music Group and AI music platform Udio have struck what they call “a landmark agreement” that resolves the companies’ copyright infringement litigation. The companies have also entered into a licensing deal for a ‘next-generation’ AI–powered music creation, listening, and discovery platform set to launch next year. The news arrived just an hour after WMG announced a new partnership with Stability AI on Wednesday (November 19), which the companies say will ‘advance the use of responsible AI in music creation’.”
  

• The Munich Mirage: Why the “GEMA vs. OpenAI” Verdict is Less About AI and More About Geography - Information Labs, Nov. 26, 2025
  ”This verdict was not a cosmic shifting of the legal tides. It was the predictable result of a uniquely German forum shopping practice known as “the flying jurisdiction” (fliegender Gerichtsstand)”… “This turns the German legal map into an “all-you-can-eat” buffet for plaintiffs. If you are a rights-holder looking to sue a tech giant, you don’t just file a lawsuit; you go shopping. You look for the specific court that offers the specific “product” you want.”
  

• Suno, Yout, Perplexity AI and §1201: AI Training and another piece of the DMCA - Authors Alliance, Nov. 21, 2025
  ”Continued AI development shouldn’t hinge on a misapplied anti-circumvention rule. If copyright owners want to challenge AI training, they should do so directly on copyright infringement grounds or through Congress. Not through a legal side door designed to regulate encryption in 1998.”
  

• The False Hope of Content Licensing at Internet Scale - Matthew Sag, ProMarket, Nov. 19, 2025
  ”Matthew Sag argues that content licensing deals between developers of artificial intelligence and content owners are only possible for large content owners and cannot feasibly apply to the bulk of producers and owners of content on the internet.”
  

• Getty Images v Stability AI: A landmark High Court ruling on AI, copyright, and trade marks - Andres Guadamuz, Nov. 6, 2025
  ”The problem here, and one that keeps eluding quite a few non-legal commentators, is that the fact that a model CAN memorise items does not mean that a model contains copies of all training data, and this is very important from a legal perspective, and a detail that Smith J clearly understood…. This is a fantastic decision that will be the subject of endless discussion for months to come. … I would like to commend the judge on an extremely careful and judicious analysis, I’ve been following this case with interest since day one, and I’ve found her rulings astute, her questions direct and to the point, and she’s been capable of removing all of the superfluous nonsense from a very important subject.”
  
  Climate

• A short summary of my argument that using ChatGPT isn’t bad for the environment - Andy Masley, Nov. 12, 2025
  ”In the past few months I’ve spoken to a lot of people facing objections to using chatbots, including a surprising number of people who want to buy chatbot access for their large organizations and have been shot down because of worry over the environmental impact of individual prompts. I think it’s crazy that this is still happening and want a much shorter post readers can send to people who are still misinformed about this.”
  

• Empire of AI is wildly misleading about AI water use - Andy Masley, Nov. 16, 2025
  

• Debunking AI’s Environmental Panic | Andy Masley - Chain of Thought Podcast, Nov. 26, 2025
  

• What you need to know about AI data centers - Epoch AI, Nov. 4, 2025
  Best clear explanation I’ve seen.
  ”Realistically, AI hasn’t yet used enough power and water to have broad climate effects. While AI data centers collectively use 1% of total US power, this is still substantially less than air conditioning (12%) and lighting (8%).

  The story is similar for water. While US data centers directly used around 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023, agriculture used closer to 36.5 trillion gallons — around 2,000× higher. Nevertheless, AI data centers could have significant local effects in regions with less energy availability. And in time, AI data centers might start contributing to climate change in a significant way, if they continue to rely on fossil fuels.”
  

• The Future of AI and Energy - Sam Matey-Coste and Michael Spencer, The Weekly Anthropocene, March 3, 2025
  ”However when you look at the real-world data, AI’s energy demand surge is relatively tiny compared to the ongoing and exponentially accelerating transformation of humanity’s energy system due to cheap clean electricity generation. This is one of the most important events of the 21st century — and may someday be seen as even more important than AI — but it’s received relatively little coverage due to its comparatively workaday and undramatic nature. Solar power is now the cheapest electricity source in history, and it’s growing exponentially — kicking off what is already by far the fastest energy build-out in history.”
  

• Can AI help redesign the technosphere—and so save the planet? - Clark Miller, Nov. 16, 2025
  ”But nature’s not the problem. We are. Or, more precisely, our relationships with technology. Maybe AI can help.We’ll only know if we point AI away from the Earth and, instead, toward the technosphere. It’s that other engineered planet—the one that humanity has built out of our individual and collective relationships with technology—that we need to learn more about here: how it works, how it might be redesigned to work more sustainably in the future, and how to get our techno-human selves from here to there.”
  

• Q3 Global Power Report: No fossil fuel growth expected in 2025 - Ember Energy, Nov. 13, 2025
  ”No growth in fossil power is expected in 2025 as clean power growth meets all new demand. Record growth in solar power, combined with moderate wind growth, exceeded the rise in electricity demand in the first three quarters of 2025, even when accounting for a fall in hydropower. As a result of fast-rising clean power, fossil generation in the global power sector is expected to remain flat in 2025 for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic.”

The future

• AI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong - Timothy B. Lee, Oct. 30, 2025
  ”In short, that 95% failure rate isn’t a sign that AI is useless. It’s a sign that companies are in the early phases of learning about a new technology.

  This kind of thinking is anathema to people at both ends of the AI debate. The AGI-pilled believe it’s only a matter of time before AI systems become so smart that they can become “drop-in remote workers.” At the opposite extreme, skeptics are reluctant to admit that the technology is useful at all.

  But I think the evidence so far supports a middle interpretation: this technology has immense potential. But like previous general-purpose technologies, it’s going to take years, if not decades, to fully unlock it.”
  

• AI Eats the World - Benedict Evans, November 2025
  Slides from his latest presentation. “The future always takes time.”

Learn more

Attend my Dec. 5 webinar: AI’s Environmental Impact - Library 2.0 webinar, Dec. 5, 2025

AI Literacy for Library Workers: self-study course - Nicole Hennig

• No deadlines.

• The course will receive updates once a year – you’ll have perpetual access.

• Go at your own pace, come back and review anytime.

• You’ll get a certificate of completion when you finish the course.

• $99 on Udemy.com

Comments from previous participants

One of the best courses I’ve ever taken. Highly recommended.
– Brock Edmunds, Assistant Head, Pardee Library, Boston University Libraries

This course really gave me the opportunity to try out so many different AI tools and have that hands on experience I really needed. Plus get a better understanding of generative AI in general. Highly recommend the course!
– Laura Hogan, Reference & Instruction Librarian, Bristol Community College, Fall River, MA

This class offers a great overview of how AI works and some of the ethical issues involved. The assignments also gave me a chance for hands on learning. I only knew of AI as a peripheral thing existing in the world, and this class gave me a great basic understanding. Highly recommended.
—Deb Garbison, Librarian – Hennepin County Library

Being able to work effectively with AI is clearly an important aspect of librarianship now and Nicole’s course will introduce you to a vast range of AI tools with interesting activities to learn how to use them.
—Cynthia Rider, Public Service Librarian, Peninsula Library System, San Mateo, CA

I highly recommend this excellent course. The videos are informative, exciting and short, and I really enjoyed the hands-on activities, it was so much fun that I could try out all these new tools! I liked best the attitude that we were supposed to understand how easy it is to use AI to build a chatbot, generate music or create a podcast from a text.
—Angelika Gulyas, Senior Collection Management Librarian, Central European University, Vienna

And as always, you can follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon where I post daily about generative AI.

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Hi everyone!

I usually aim to send this newsletter once a month, but the last time I sent a full issue was in July! That’s because I’ve been busy updating my course: AI Literacy for Library Workers. It begins on Oct. 7th and runs for six weeks.

This will be the third time I’m offering it. I always enjoy it because it’s really interesting to work with a large group of librarians and educators (the course usually fills up with 80 participants) — and read people’s shared assignments, discussion posts, and more.

Currently there are 12 spots still available, so if you’re thinking of signing up, do that soon: you can register at Infopeople ($200)

I also have a self-study version of it on Udemy. ($99) It includes all the videos, activities (for self-reflection), and readings. (There is no group discussion in this version). Also, there are no deadlines, so you’ll have perpetual access, including future updates.

Also, I’ve been busy putting together a webinar for October 17:
AI’s Environment Impact: Understanding the Data and Acting Sustainably.

As I research the topic, I’ve been investigating so many questions about data centers, ways to calculate energy use, and putting statistics into context. I’ve been diving deep into the issues and I’ll share what I learned. Register here for $99. (You’ll get a recording after the event).

You’ll come away with some practical tips for answering questions from students, and some simple advocacy steps to use in your communities.

On Sept. 12th I offered a webinar about NotebookLM. If you missed it, you can still purchase the recording.

In this issue of Generative AI News we’ll look at:

• Updates to features of the major models and news of several open source models.

• What’s happening with agentic browsers.

• Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Settlement: Not the AI Copyright Reckoning You Think It Is - a useful summary.

• Tips, including using NotebookLM to work with your notes when you’re at a conference.

• AI Video School has many good points about creativity in How difficult can making an AI movie actually be?

• News about the coming Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses — and AI glasses foster independence for visually-impaired people (CBS Mornings on YouTube).

• The usual stories about accessibility, education, libraries, and the future.

Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Foundation Models

OpenAI

ChatGPT’s new branching feature is a good reminder that AI chatbots aren’t people - Benj Edwards, ArsTechnica, Sept. 5, 2025.
”On Thursday, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT users can now branch conversations into multiple parallel threads, serving as a useful reminder that AI chatbots aren’t people with fixed viewpoints but rather malleable tools you can rewind and redirect….The feature works by letting users hover over any message in a ChatGPT conversation, click “More actions,” and select “Branch in new chat.” This creates a new conversation thread that includes all the conversation history up to that specific point, while preserving the original conversation intact.”

Toggle thinking time in the message composer - OpenAI (for Plus, Business, and Pro users), Sept. 17, 2025
”When you select GPT-5 with Thinking in ChatGPT, you’ll see a new thinking time toggle in the message composer. Standard (new default, balancing speed and intelligence) and Extended (the previous default for Plus) are available to all Plus, Business users.”

Introducing ChatGPT Pulse - OpenAI, Sept. 25, 2025 (only on those expensive Pro plans for now)
”Today we’re releasing a preview of ChatGPT Pulse to Pro users on mobile. Pulse is a new experience where ChatGPT proactively does research to deliver personalized updates based on your chats, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar. You can curate what ChatGPT researches by letting it know what’s useful and what isn’t. The research appears in Pulse as topical visual cards you can scan quickly or open for more detail, so each day starts with a new, focused set of updates.” (See also this take about why it might not be a hit).

Anthropic

Claude can now create and edit files - Anthropic, Sept. 9, 2025
”Claude can now create and edit Excel spreadsheets, documents, PowerPoint slide decks, and PDFs directly in Claude.ai and the desktop app. This transforms how you work with Claude—instead of only receiving text responses or in-app artifacts, you can describe what you need, upload relevant data, and get ready-to-use files in return.” “File creation is now available as a preview for Max, Team, and Enterprise plan users. Pro users will get access in the coming weeks.”

(By the way, Pro in Claude means the $20/mo plan, while Pro in ChatGPT means the $200/month plan! ChatGPT Plus is $20/mo — so confusing!)

Google
You can now share your custom Gems in the Gemini app. - Google, Sept. 18, 2025.
”Sharing Gems works just like sharing files in Google Drive, giving you control over who can view or edit your Gem. To share, simply open your Gem manager on the web and click “Share” next to any Gem you’ve created. Turn your favorite Gems into a shared resource so you can prompt less and create more.”
(Try my Hype Detector gem).

Google announces massive expansion of AI features in Chrome - Ryan Whitwam, ArsTechnica, Sept. 18, 2025.
”The most prominent change, and one that AI subscribers may have already seen, is the addition of a Gemini button on the desktop browser. This button opens a popup where you can ask questions about—and get summaries of—content in your open tabs.” “The updated Chrome now lets you begin AI Mode searches from the omnibar.”

Google’s mobile-ready EmbeddingGemma ranks highest in embedding leaderboard among small parameter models - Emilia David, VentureBeat, Sept. 5, 2025.
”Google’s open-source Gemma is already a small model designed to run on devices like smartphones. However, Google continues to expand the Gemma family of models and optimize these for local usage on phones and laptops. Its newest model, EmbeddingGemma, will take on embedding models already used by enterprises, touting a larger parameter than most and strong benchmark performance. EmbeddingGemma is a 300 million token parameter, open-source model that is best optimized for devices like laptops, desktops and mobile devices.”

Meta
What’s new? Issue #212 - Testing Catalog- Alexey Shabanov, Sept. 21, 2025
”They’re already validating the market with their current line of smart glasses, and the addressable market is significant, especially when you consider everyone who already wears any type of glasses. Most importantly, Meta is ahead in collecting first-person perspective training data, which will be essential for training AI models specifically for AI-powered glasses. No other company has this scale of data, except perhaps Snapchat, but even they are far behind. This could even make Snapchat an acquisition target for other AI labs seeking such data. One of the most significant innovations Meta introduced was the AI wristband. Unlike glasses, a wristband allows users to interact with AI without needing to speak or look at a screen. This is a substantial breakthrough, as many people are uncomfortable interacting solely via voice or are looking to reduce screen time.”

Other models

Apple working on MCP support to enable agentic AI on Mac, iPhone, and iPad - 9to5Mac, Sept. 22, 2025
”In practice, this means that soon, you could have ChatGPT, Claude, or any other MCP-friendly AI model interacting directly with Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps, autonomously taking actions within these apps, without developers having to do the heavy lifting of fully implementing MCP support on their own.”

The new Live Translation feature also works with AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 - Benjamin Mayo, 9to5 Mac, Sept. 9, 2025.
”Apple just unveiled the brand new AirPods Pro 3, including a flashy Live Translation feature. But it turns out you don’t actually need to upgrade just to try out the new translation stuff. Apple says that Live Translation will also be available through a software update for AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation.”

China’s Alibaba challenges U.S. tech giants with open source Qwen3-Omni AI model accepting text, audio, image and video - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, Sept. 22, 2025.
”U.S. tech giants are facing a reckoning from the East. Even as Nvidia pledged today to invest a staggering $100 billion into its own customer OpenAI’s data centers — a move that raised eyebrows across tech and business spheres — Chinese search giant Alibaba’s Qwen team of AI researchers debuted what may be its most impressive model yet: Qwen3-Omni, an open source large language model (LLM) that the company bills as the first “natively end-to-end omni-modal AI unifying text, image, audio & video in one model.” See also Qwen3-Max arrives in preview with 1 trillion parameters, blazing fast response speed, and API availability.

Mistral’s updated Magistral Small 1.2 reasoning model can analyze images and fit on a Macbook - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, Sept. 18, 2025.
”Two trends have dominated AI large language model (LLM) releases in recent months: smaller models and reasoning models. The former are advantageous because they can run on all kinds of hardware and don’t need an internet connection, which is helpful for those concerned about privacy, security and high run-time costs. Plus, they can be more easily and rapidly customized to specific enterprise tasks.” “Now, French AI company Mistral has released a new pair of models that capitalize on both of these trends.”

K2 Think arrives from UAE as ‘world’s fastest open-source AI model’ - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, Sept. 9, 2025
”Unlike many models that carry an “open” label but offer only partial access, K2 Think includes training data, model weights, fine-tuning code, inference tools, and deployment infrastructure. It is available for download and use via k2think.ai and Hugging Face, with a public API also in place.”

Agents

OpenAI’s new agentic coding model GPT-5-Codex can run independently for 7 hours at a time - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, Sept. 15, 2025.
”Unlike GPT-5, which is built as a general-purpose AI model, GPT-5-Codex is optimized for what OpenAI calls “agentic coding,” essentially where the AI agent functions as an autonomous colleague to a developer and can go off and code, run code, and make alterations all on its own for up to hours at a time.”

Perplexity’s Comet takes a step toward full task automation with voice - Alexey Shabanov, Testing Catalog, Sept. 3, 2025
”Perplexity’s Comet browser has quietly gained a new ability that moves its assistant closer to full task automation. While the latest build doesn’t overhaul the interface, the voice assistant in the sidebar can now directly control web pages rather than only the browser itself. This means spoken commands can trigger clicks, form filling, and navigation inside sites, not just tab management. The feature works by letting the assistant take over visible page elements, providing real-time feedback as it executes actions. Unlike background automation where users only see final results, Comet shows each step, making it possible to intervene mid-process.”

The ‘DeepSeek’ moment for AI agents is here: meet Alibaba’s open source Tongyi DeepResearch Agent - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, Sept. 17, 2025.
”The new Tongyi DeepResearch Agent is setting off a furor among AI power users and experts around the globe for its high performance marks: according to its makers, its the “the first fully open-source Web Agent to achieve performance on par with OpenAI’s Deep Research with only 30B (Activated 3B) parameters.”

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Images and video

🍌 Nano Banana Is Fantastic, But Don’t Bury Photoshop Just Yet - Daniel Nest, Aug. 28, 2025.
“Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is Google’s latest image model, which made quite a splash last week under its pre-release nickname, ‘Nano Banana.’ While Nano Banana is topping leaderboards for text-to-image generation, what truly makes it special is its ability to make precise edits to existing images while keeping characters consistent and preserving details.”

How difficult can making an AI movie actually be? - AI Video School
”I decided early on I wouldn’t fight with anti-AI crusaders. We share a lot in common: we both care about film, art, and storytelling, we both loathe how most models were trained, and together we worry about the energy it consumes. We have different ideas about if using AI makes you complicit in the model training (I don’t think it does and I say that as someone with online content used to train models without my consent). When it comes to creativity, they see AI as destroying, I view it as expanding. They believe AI as cheating, I witness it accelerating. They despise how AI video is turning an established industry on its head overnight and I love it. I respect our differences but cringe when they insist I didn’t actually make a movie…AI did. To me, that’s not too far from saying a photographer didn’t take a photo, the camera did.”

AI generated video for social justice, surreal art, and creative human use (It’s not all AI-slop) - Nicole Hennig, Sept. 19, 2025
Many people criticize AI generated videos, saying that they can’t possibly be beautiful, impactful, or expressive of human emotions. I’d like to counter that argument. Perhaps many people aren’t familiar with the many creative uses out there. So I share some examples.

Creativity Unfenced: A Tiny Studio’s Bold Leap into AI Storytelling - James Maynard, New York Telegraph, July 3, 2025. (Note: James is my husband) 😊
“Rather than positioning artificial intelligence as a replacement for human creativity, Maynard frames it as a collaborative tool that can lower barriers to entry in an industry notorious for its gatekeeping.”

Google Puts Its Popular AI Video Generator Into YouTube Shorts - Ann-Marie Alcántara, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 16. 2025.
”The streaming platform is offering Veo 3—Google’s new AI video generator that’s giving game developers and filmmakers jitters—to normal users for making short videos starting Tuesday, along with other AI upgrades to the popular app. Users will be able to make eight-second vertical videos in an unending range of styles and tones. The company also announced other AI tools for Shorts like video editing, adding objects and motion to a video, or stylizing it with different artistic looks. In addition, people can take a line of dialogue from a video and turn it into a song.”

Generative AI, Ethics & Its Impact on the Environment - Nettrice Gaskins, Medium, Aug. 20, 2025.
”There is no argument from me that climate change is a ongoing concern (and it should be for everyone). However, I do want to counter the notion of generative AI systems, which currently represent only a small fraction of data center workloads, being the whole problem.” “AI imaging systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than humans.”
(Comparing energy use of AI to energy use of humans doing the same task is something we need to see more of).

Flow powers two public artworks for London Design Festival - Ben Evans, Google
”London-based designer Paul Cocksedge has taken over the iconic Trafalgar Square with a sculpture featuring intersecting tubes that serve as telescopic viewing portals, lifting your gaze 50 meters high to see London from Nelson’s vantage point. Inside each portal, you don’t just see the present, the public are taken on a journey through time, brought to life with Google’s AI filmmaking tool Flow, powered by Veo”…. “You rewind to see the city as it was a century ago (when Nelson came to be in the square)—with horse-drawn carriages and gas lamps—and then fast-forward into potential futures, such as a city with more local food production and streets adapted for a hotter climate, informed through conversations with Ricky Burdett, Director of the Cities Unit at LSE.”

Seedream 4.0- ByteDance - image generator
Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generation - the tech report
Some say it’s better than Nano Banana (from Google).

Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners - Wiedemer et al.
”Veo 3 shows emergent zero-shot abilities across many visual tasks, indicating that video models are on a path to becoming vision foundation models—just like LLMs became foundation models for language.”

Tips

• My Surprisingly Effective Follow-Ups File - Mike Caulfield, Sept. 18, 2025 (Follow-up prompts for smarter replies)

• What’s in My Conference Bag - Jeremy Caplan, Sept. 18, 2025
  See #5 for good ideas for using NotebookLM to “create your conference brain.”

• Claude Memory: A Different Philosophy - Shlok Khemani, Sept. 11, 2025
  Details on how Claude handle’s memory in a completely different way than ChatGPT does.

• Importing and exporting your memory from Claude - Anthropic

• Audio, Video, Posters and Slides- Oh My! How to use New AI Tools to Help Repackage Your Findings - Aaron Tay, Singapore Management University, Sept. 5, 2025

• 6 ways to use NotebookLM to master any subject - Google, Sept 8, 2025
  Covers the new features, like flashcards, quizzes, customizable reports, and more.

Accessibility

AI Sign Language Translation: Ready for Education? - Helen Nicholson-Benn, JISC, Sept. 16, 2025.
”With this context in mind, we can see why the design of AI tools for sign language translation should not be treated as a purely technical challenge. The products and projects we look at in the next section sit within this wider landscape, which is shaped by the cultural significance of sign languages, the lived experiences of Deaf people, and the need for approaches that respect both.”

Meta Ray-Ban Display Hands-On: The Smart Glasses You Were Waiting For- James Pero, Gizmodo, Sept. 17, 2025
”Meta finally unveiled its Ray-Ban Display smart glasses that, as you may have gathered from the name, have a screen in them. It doesn’t sound like much on the surface—we have screens everywhere, all the time. Too many of them, in fact. But I’m here to tell you that after using them in advance of the unveil, I regret to inform you that you will most likely want another screen in your life, whether you know it or not. But first, you probably want to know exactly what’s going on in this screen I speak of.”

AI glasses foster independence for visually-impaired people - CBS Mornings on YouTube, Sept. 20, 2025
”Visually-impaired people are finding new independence with AI glasses. “CBS Saturday Morning” meets Emeline Lakrout, an active, visually-impaired New Yorker who has found new ways to use AI glasses to her advantage.”

What’s happening in education

Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff and students - University of Oxford News, Sept. 19, 2025.
”OpenAI’s flagship GPT-5 model will be provided across the University and Oxford Colleges through ChatGPT Edu, a version of ChatGPT built for universities that includes enterprise-level security and controls. This university-wide rollout follows a successful year-long pilot involving around 750 academics, research staff, postgraduate research students and professional services staff in a wide range of roles across the University and Colleges.”

What I learned building an AI-driven spaced repetition app - Sean Goedecke, Sept. 23, 2025.
”What if you could use LLMs to make spaced repetition easier? Specifically, what if you could ask a LLM to give you an infinite feed of spaced repetition flashcards, adjusting the difficulty based on your responses? That’s the idea behind AutoDeck. You give it a topic and it gives you infinite flashcards about that topic. If it’s pitched too easy (e.g. you keep saying “I know”) or too hard, it’ll automatically change the difficulty.”

Exploring the Impact of Generative AI ChatGPT on Critical Thinking in Higher Education: Passive AI-Directed Use or Human–AI Supported Collaboration? - Nasr et al. Education Sciences 2025, 15(9), 1198.
”… the interview results revealed that when GenAI ChatGPT was utilized with guidance, all four stages of cognitive presence were completed, leading to enhanced critical thinking and a reconceptualization of ChatGPT as a more knowledgeable other. This research suggests that the effective use of GenAI in education depends on the quality of human–AI interaction.”

Visualizing History: Reading Comprehension Through AI-Generated Images - Ned Courtemanche, Sept. 22, 2025. (Students read a text carefully, identify four key passages, then use AI to generate images that reflect their understanding).
”…the deeper pedagogical win comes through clearly in reflections like this: “Personally, I enjoyed the AI images because it put concepts into fruition for me.” Students who struggled technically still emerged with enhanced comprehension of the source material. The act of selecting passages, translating them to visual prompts, and evaluating results forces close reading in ways traditional comprehension questions rarely achieve. Perhaps most importantly, it has also sparked some of the best classroom discussions I’ve had in recent memory about the strategies and human experiences of decolonization movements. When students are inspired to immerse themselves in reading, to explore, question, and create, reading comprehension often takes care of itself.”

Stop Pushing, Start Catalyzing (1 of 2) - How AI Knowledge Can Erode Obstinance - Tim Dasey, Sept. 12. 2025
”When teachers understand that AI might help create more engaging learning experiences, provide personalized feedback, or generate practice problems adapted to individual student needs, suddenly the “extra work” of learning these tools starts to look like an investment. The activation energy shifts because the potential outcome changes from “more work” to “easier work.” This is why effective professional development focuses on specific, practical applications rather than general AI literacy.” “The goal isn’t to create AI evangelists or eliminate all concerns. It’s to build the institutional capacity for nuanced thinking—people who can recognize both possibilities and pitfalls, who can experiment thoughtfully rather than rejecting or adopting blindly.”

On Working with Wizards - Ethan Mollick, Sept. 11, 2025
”So what do we do with our wizards? I think we need to develop a new literacy: First, learn when to summon the wizard versus when to work with AI as a co-intelligence or to not use AI at all. AI is far from perfect, and in areas where it still falls short, humans often succeed. But for the increasing number of tasks where AI is useful, co-intelligence, and the back-and-forth it requires, is often superior to a machine alone. Yet, there are, increasingly, times when summoning a wizard is best, and just trusting what it conjures.”

What Happens When You Trade Doomscrolling for Hopescrolling - Jennifer Mercieca, June 23, 2025
”But there may be hope. The best way to disrupt the recursive loop of doomscrolling is to be more intentional about our media use. Instead of doomscrolling, we should hopescroll—looking for positive news, not threats. I asked my communication and journalism students to try it this year by creating class social media accounts devoted to sharing positive news. Each week the students went online in search of good news—ideally, “solutions journalism” about efforts to solve real problems, which research shows can help mitigate or balance some of the negative effects of doomscrolling. Students shared their finds online and wrote short reflections on the experience.”

Asking More of AI: What OpenAI’s New Usage Study Tells Us About How and Why People Prompt - Dr. Jeanne Beatrix Law, Sept. 16, 2025
”OpenAI’s newest report, How People Use ChatGPT (Sept 2025), is a sprawling 63-page look at over a year’s worth of message-level data from 700 million weekly active users. No speculation. No guesswork. Just anonymized, and privacy-scrubbed message samples from May 2024 to June 2025.”

• The early gender skew (80% masculine-coded names) has reversed. By June 2025, ChatGPT users were slightly more likely to have feminine-coded names.

• Nearly half of all usage comes from users under 26, suggesting Gen Z is building habits that will shape the next generation of AI practices.

• Usage is growing faster in low- and middle-income countries than in wealthier ones, which honestly surprised me, given that a full third of the world doesn’t have reliable internet.”

What’s happening in libraries

Harvard Library Shares the Public Domain: Unlocking Centuries of Knowledge for AI and Research - Tenzin Dickie, Harvard Library News, Sept. 5, 2025.
”This project marks a big improvement in the AI training landscape. Instead of relying on proprietary, opaque, or ethically questionable sources, researchers and AI developers can instead use documented, open-source, and legally sound data. By shifting control of training data from tech companies to public institutions, Harvard Library is empowering smaller players and AI researchers. We are giving public institutions and researchers a fair chance to compete in building the next generation of AI. This is a step forward for libraries as leaders of open and ethical infrastructure.”

AI and Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Loosely Coupled - Dan Cohen
Using data from library collections for future AI training.

Boston Public Library aims to increase access to a vast historic archive using AI - Chloe Veltman, NPR
“...training new AI models to help libraries enhance the searchability of their collections. AI companies help fund these efforts, and in return get to train their large language models on high-quality materials that are out of copyright and therefore less likely to lead to lawsuits.”

Building the Imagination Lab: A Manifesto for Libraries in the Intelligence Age - Kyle Bylin, LibTech Insights, Sept. 8, 2025
”University libraries cannot afford to remain passive as this shift accelerates. Ensuring equitable access to journals, databases, and print collections is no longer sufficient. The instructional frontier has moved: from information literacy (find, evaluate, cite) to AI literacy (question, prompt, interpret) and now to AI fluency (collaborate, create, imagine). As campuses head into the fall semester—with next-gen models, early general-purpose agents, and AI-native devices on the horizon—the question becomes: What if the library were the place where students and faculty learned to imagine with AI, not just use it? To remain essential in the intelligence age, libraries must become laboratories of imagination—and more.”

Why I Think Academic Deep Research — or at Least Deep Search — Will “Win” - Aaron Tay and What Academic “Deep Research” Is Really For - Aaron Tay
”Once you drop the idea of copy-pasting the generated review, the value clicks: the best academic Deep Research tools produce orientation artifacts—surfaces that help you form a mental model fast.”

AI can walk through all the doors at once - Mike Caulfield, Sept. 22, 2025.
(I put this in the library section because Caulfield is well-known by librarians for his SIFT method of information literacy).
”Immediately after I demonstrate a cool way to use AI to research something, someone usually asks “But couldn’t you do this without AI?” It’s a weird question in a way.” “I think about someone explaining the advantages of WordPerfect for DOS back in the day to someone who had never used it. So what can you do with it that you couldn’t do with a typewriter? In a way, nothing. The end result is a sheet of paper with words on it. If anything the dot matrix copy looks worse. But you can edit! Sure, says the person, I can do that with an 89 cent bit of white-out. I can print multiple copies! Sure, says the person, ever heard of a photocopier? Maybe you convince the person to use WordPerfect. They try it and complain it takes them 10 times longer to get a simple memo typed. They joke they have to type a bunch of things that are going on a page on a screen and then have to go to a different machine to put them on a page. Efficiency!”

Just for fun

Here’s a crazy experiment I made a few weeks ago with Midjourney, Veo3, and various video edits.

Caption: In this video an AI-generated barbershop quartet tries to sing “Goodbye My Coney Island Babe.”

• Some fun tips for customizing the Audio Overview in NotebookLM.

• Surrealistic AI video: “whirly wheels” from Ulysses Studio on Instagram.

• AI Storybook Animation - another fun video from Kelly Boesch AI Art (one of my favorite creators).

• Bach x Coltrane x Kuti x Takemitsu - another wild imagining from Nobody and the Computer on YouTube (AI generated Erik Satie introduces an experiment using four AI models to capture the spirits of legendary musicians and create a collaborative composition together).

• How to write Veo 3 image-to-video prompts - Tianyu Xu on LinkedIn

  

Thought-provoking

• How People Use ChatGPT - Chatterji et al, NBER Working Paper, Sept. 2025
  ”We document the growth of ChatGPT’s consumer product from its launch in November 2022 through July 2025, when it had been adopted by around 10% of the world’s adult population. Early adopters were disproportionately male but the gender gap has narrowed dramatically, and we find higher growth rates in lower-income countries. Using a privacy-preserving automated pipeline, we classify usage patterns within a representative sample of ChatGPT conversations.”
  

• Why We Don’t Believe MIT NANDA’s Weird AI Study - R. Scott Raynovich, Aug. 26, 2025.
  ”The recently-gone-viral research study branded to MIT’s NANDA organization titled “State of AI in Business 2025” has mysteriously gone viral, despite some obvious flaws in its data and conclusions. Don’t believe it. Not only is the report confusing, but it seems like a blatant case of propagandized clickbait, looking to draw people into headlines that have repeated its shaky “95% of Enterprise AI fails” headline. That didn’t stop lazy reporters and LinkedIn influencers from jumping all over the headline, despite the report’s generic AI-infused style and incomprehensible leaps of logic (or illogic). To start with, it’s not even easy to get hold of the report, which is hidden behind a cryptic form.”
  

• AI mode is good, actually - Simon Willison, Sept. 7, 2025
  I’ll be honest: I hadn’t spent much time with AI mode for a couple of reasons:

  My expectations of “AI mode” were extremely low based on my terrible experience of “AI overviews.” The name “AI mode” is so generic!

  Based on some initial experiments I’m impressed - Google finally seem to be taking full advantage of their search infrastructure for building out truly great AI-assisted search. I do have one disappointment: AI mode will tell you that it’s “running 5 searches” but it won’t tell you what those searches are!””
  

• AI groups spend to replace low-cost ‘data labellers’ with high-paid experts - Melissa Heikkilä, Financial Times
  ”Top artificial intelligence groups are replacing low-cost “data labelers” in Africa and Asia with highly paid industry specialists, in the latest push to build “smarter” and more powerful models.Companies such as Scale AI, Turing and Toloka are hiring experts in fields such as biology and

  finance to help AI groups create more sophisticated training data that is crucial for developing the next generation of AI systems.”
  
  Here’s an example of a recruitment message for these specialists: Music Expert - AI Trainer. I received that because I have a Masters in Music from Boston Conservatory (quite a few years ago)!
  

• Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model - EPFL News
  ”Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages – 40% of the data is non-English – Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others. Apertus is built for the public good. It stands among the few fully open LLMs at this scale and is the first of its kind to embody multilingualism, transparency, and compliance as foundational design principles”, says Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the LLM project and Research Scientist at ETH Zurich.”
  

• Is Technology Really in its Villain Era? - Information Labs on LinkedIn Pulse
  ”The alternative is not to abandon regulation, but to re-anchor it in a more durable foundation: technology neutrality. We must regulate what technology does or enables, not what it is. Our focus should be on curbing harmful behavior and negative outcomes, and incentivizing beneficial ones, regardless of the tool used.”
  

• The Compute Gradient - What if it’s not all about building bigger and bigger datacentres? What if you can win in AI without competing on 10bn+ capex projects? - Lawrence Lundy-Bryan and Jonno Evans, Sept. 23, 2025.
  ”Our claim: inference shouldn’t be assumed “in the cloud” or even “mostly in the cloud.” (edge, near-edge, access, regional hubs, hyperscale)
  

• Yejin Choi’s Briefing to the United Nations Security Council - Stanford University Human-Centered AI, Sept. 24, 2025.
  It’s worth reading her whole address. “She stresses the need to rethink our dependence on massive-scale data and computing resources from the outset, and design methods that do more with less — by building AI that is smaller and serves all communities.”
  

• Bill McKibben says cheap solar could topple Big Oil’s power - by Michael Svoboda, Yale Climate Connections, Sept. 18, 2025.
  ”In the midst of those very big bad things, however, there is one big good thing happening on this planet. And that is the sudden surge in the use of what, for the last 40 years, we’ve called alternative energy, but which has now become the most obvious, straightforward way to make power. Ninety-five percent of new generation here and around the world last year came from clean energy. And the acceleration continues. In May, the latest month for which we have numbers, China was installing three gigawatts of solar power per day. That means they were putting up the solar equivalent of a coal-fired power plant every eight hours. Those numbers are so different from anything we’ve seen before that it seemed worth writing this book to spread that story. “ (See also this book review of McKibben’s book, Here Comes the Sun).
  

• The Electrotech Revolution: Some insights into a new way of thinking about the transition - Hannah Ritchie, Sept. 16, 2025.
  ”Artificial Intelligence could help to optimise and accelerate the Electrotech age: This is perhaps the provocation that differs most from the standard climate narrative on the transition. AI is generally seen as a burden on climate and energy efforts. In an “Electrotech” vision, AI might actually help accelerate things by optimising grids and charging, project management and permitting, and the discovery of new materials.”
  

• For the climate, little things don’t add up - Andy Masley, Sept. 14, 2025
  ”But I worry that this basic intuition is lost on a lot of people when they say things like ‘tiny things add up.’ Tiny things add up absolutely, but they don’t add up relatively. They often remain the same tiny percentage of total emissions as they are of individual emissions. An activity that’s 1/10,000th of your personal emissions is likely to also be 1/10,000th of global emissions. It’s only as promising a way to reduce global emissions as it is to reduce your personal emissions. If you’re trying to rally everyone to stop an activity that wouldn’t meaningfully raise your personal emissions at all, this is a sign that you’re wasting your and others’ time attention and effort on a drastically ineffective thing to do in the name of stopping climate change.

  AI fits this pattern perfectly.”
  

• A skeptic’s take on AI electricity load growth - Catalyst podcast episode, March 6, 2025
  ”In this episode, Shayle talks to Jonathan Koomey about why he questions the hype around AI load growth predictions and why he believes energy constraints will incentivize the AI industry to focus on efficiency.”
  

• Grok 4 Training Resource Footprint - James Sanders, Luke Emberson, and Yafah Edelman, Epoch AI, Sept. 12, 2025
  Interesting infographics show useful comparisons. Grok 4 training energy use compared to annual energy use for a town of 10,000 people, Grok 4 training water use, compared to annual water use for a square mile of farmland, and more.
  

• These Startups Are Building Advanced AI Models Without Data Centers - Will Knight, Wired, April 30, 2025
  ”Flower AI and Vana, two startups pursuing unconventional approaches to building AI, worked together to create the new model, called Collective-1. Flower created techniques that allow training to be spread across hundreds of computers connected over the internet. The company’s technology is already used by some firms to train AI models without needing to pool compute resources or data.”
  

• The AI grift, a tragedy of mainstream media failures in three acts - Alexandru Voica, Sept. 29, 2025
  ”Next came the hardcore AI doomers, people like Max Tegmark or Eliezer Yudkowsky who quiver at the sight of large auto-regressive models. Tired of being interviewed by “MSM” journalists for glowing profiles in Wired and given main stage slots at tech conferences, they started toying with ideologically charged venues like Steve Bannon’s WarRoom.” “First of all, AI grifters provide an endless supply of frictionless content. It’s dramatic, universal, and requires no prerequisite knowledge. You can do a hit-piece, run a moody stock photo of a glowing robot eye, sprinkle in “Yudkowsky” or “paperclip maximizer,” and call it a day. In an era when traffic targets wag the editorial dog, journalists are rewarded for stories with top-hat wearing weirdos.”
  

• If We Build It, Everyone Lives: Why AI doomers are Catastrophically, Spectacularly, and Dangerously wrong - Daniel Jeffries, Sept. 6, 2025
  ”AI is a general purpose technology. It’s not a sentient being with its own desires. It’s a tool. It’s a mirror that reflects our own ingenuity, our own compassion, our own desire to build a better world. To fear it is to fear ourselves.”
  

• Conversational AI increases political knowledge as effectively as self-directed Internet search - Luettgau et al., Sept. 19, 2025
  ”Taken together, our results suggest that although people in the UK are increasingly turning to conversational AI for information about politics, this shift may not lead to increased public belief in political misinformation.”
  

• Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use - Reed Albergotti, Semafor, Sept. 17, 2025
  ”Anthropic recently declined requests by contractors working with federal law enforcement agencies because the company refuses to make an exception allowing its AI tools to be used for some tasks, including surveillance of US citizens, said the officials, who spoke to Semafor on the condition of anonymity.”
  

• Communication to the public is about to shape the future of AI copyright, Andres Guadamuz, Sept. 14, 2025.
  ”I am going to stick my neck out and argue that the input question will eventually be largely settled through a combination of exceptions and licensing deals. This is the point at which maximalists start screaming, but hear me out. All throughout the history of technology and its interaction with copyright, the law has tended to err on the side of technological advance, often to the detriment of legacy media.”
  

• Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Settlement: Not the AI Copyright Reckoning You Think It Is - Information Labs on LinkedIn, Sept. 8, 2025.
  Excellent, clear summary. “This settlement is not about whether training AI on copyrighted material is legal. In fact, on that core question, the AI company won. This case pivots on a much simpler, more classic issue: the difference between using legally acquired material and using pirated material.”
  

• The Anthropic Settlement - what it is and isn’t (and who would get paid) - Dave Hansen, Authors Alliance, Sept. 7, 2025.
  ”Perhaps the most important takeaway from all this is what this settlement is not: this settlement doesn’t establish new precedents for AI training or create ongoing licensing obligations for Anthropic. It simply resolves liability for past conduct involving the LibGen and PiLiMi datasets, leaving the broader legal landscape around AI training largely unchanged. Judge Alsup’s earlier ruling that LLM training constitutes fair use remains intact and continues to provide important guidance for the industry.”
  

• America against China against America - Jasmine Sun, Aug. 28, 2025
  (Super-interesting personal essay by Jasmine Sun that offers a personal travelogue reflecting on modern China’s rapid technological advancement and complex societal dynamics, contrasting it with America).
  ”Overall, I left my conversations with Chinese technologists feeling real admiration: they faced unimaginable uphill battles from US restrictions and a competitive domestic market.” “My own loyalties are straightforward. I have never lived anywhere but the United States, and my life in San Francisco is very good. The liberty to speak my mind is one of the most precious rights in the world; as such, my values (and livelihood) are fundamentally incompatible with the Chinese state.” “But for the first time, for an educated Chinese person, the decision to stay or leave does not seem so obvious.”
  

• ‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China - Chang Che, The Guardian, Sept. 16, 2025.
  Another interesting long read.
  

• Is AI a bubble? - Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren, Exponential View, Sept. 17, 2025. (See also this 12-minute video, made by the same author: Are we in an AI bubble? YouTube, Sept. 26, 2025).
  
  Interesting comparisons to railroads and telecoms. ”On the basis of these gauges, genAI remains in a demand-led, capital-intensive boom rather than a bubble. “ ”GenAI isn’t there yet. Racing fast, the engine is whining, but not overheating. How long would it take for two gauges to get into the red? I’ve toyed around with combinations, and most scary scenarios take a couple of years to play out. (And not all scenarios are scary.)”.

  

The future

The 2025 AI Index Report - Stanford University Human-Centered AI
”AI becomes more efficient, affordable and accessible” and other takeaways.

We’re Living Through the End of One World and Nobody Wants to Say It - Carlo Iacono, Sept. 12, 2025
”Each generation inherits a degraded sense of what’s possible, accepts as normal what previous generations would have recognized as catastrophe. But the reverse is also true: each generation discovers possibilities that previous ones couldn’t imagine. We’re living through both processes simultaneously, watching old possibilities die while new ones struggle to be born.”

The huge potential implications of long-context inference - JS Denain and Anson Ho, Epoch AI, Sept. 19, 2025.
”But if these longer contexts are available, models can learn from previous examples in their context window. For instance, reasoning models have demonstrated some ability to correct their own mistakes in their chain of thought, and retaining these learned corrections in-context could help the model solve problems in the future.”

Light-based AI image generator uses almost no power - Alex Wilkins, New Scientist, Aug. 27, 2025.
”An AI image generator that uses light to produce images, rather than conventional computing hardware, could consume hundreds of times less energy.” “While the system would need to be adapted to work in data centres in place of widely used image-generation tools, Ozcan says it could find a use in wearable electronics, such as AI glasses, because of the low power requirements.”

What will AI look like in 2030? - Epoch AI - David Owen, Sept. 16, 2025
”If scaling persists to 2030, AI investments will reach hundreds of billions of dollars and require gigawatts of power. Benchmarks suggest AI could improve productivity in valuable areas such as scientific R&D.”
Building on our past work, we forecast that:

• Training clusters would cost hundreds of billions of dollars

• Compute scaling is likely “not hitting a wall”

• Synthetic & multimodal data may be needed to ease bottlenecks

• Power demands will increase but be manageable in principle.”
  

Learn more

»» Sign up here if you’d like to be notified of future courses I’m offering.««
At some point I’d like to do a part 2 of AI Literacy for Library Workers… maybe covering some topics we don’t have time to cover in the main course.

If you haven’t seen them yet, here are five interactive tutorials about generative AI I’ve made for University of Arizona Libraries. They are free for anyone to use on our site (CC licensed). If you have Articulate Rise for tutorial development, email me, and I’ll send you copies within Rise that you can modify for your campus.

And as always, you can follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon where I post daily about generative AI.

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Just wanted to send a quick update to let you know that the sale of my course on Udemy is almost over, but you can still get the discount for 2 more days.

Use this link to get the course for $44.99 - the sale expires on the morning of August 4.
https://www.udemy.com/course/ai-literacy-for-librarians/?couponCode=JULY25_GENAINEWS

After that it will go up to $99.

You can also sign up for it on Infopeople ($200). It begins Oct. 7 and lasts for six weeks. 44 people have already registered and we’ll probably set the limit at 80 participants, just like last time.

I’m updating a lot of the content this summer, so there will be several new videos and new assignments. I’ll put those on both platforms.

➡️ Benefits of the Udemy version:
- It’s self-study, no deadlines, ongoing access, including future updates.

➡️ Benefits of the Infopeople version:
- You’re part of a community of library workers, learning together during a six-week period, submitting assignments and commenting on each others’ work. And sometimes it’s nice to have a deadline, in order to make it a priority. 🙂

• Learn more about both versions of the course on my website.

• Both versions offer a certificate of completion after you meet the requirements.

• Here are some comments from previous participants.

Hope to see you in the course!

Nicole

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Hi everyone!

If you’re new here, welcome! There has been a lot of news to keep up with recently. So lets jump right into it.

In this issue we’ll look at:

• Deep Background GPT Released: The world's best AI fact-checking tool is now available to all as a completely free GPT - Mike Caulfield (this is very cool!)

• ➡️ I now have a self-study version of my AI Literacy course on Udemy, so that may be of interest if you prefer to have no deadlines and want ongoing access to the course. (on sale until Aug. 5 for $44.99, usually $99)

• AI music video-The World’s Got A Groove - Kelly Boesch AI Art on YouTube (I love what she’s doing with AI video — see more on her channel).

• 10 AI Video Trends Taking Over the Internet - The AI Daily Brief, YouTube (fun overview)

• AI Fluency: The AI Fluency Framework - Anthropic (useful free course)

• Does using ChatGPT change your brain activity? Study sparks debate - Nicola Jones, Nature (oh boy, was there a lot of debate!)

• And the usual tips, accessibility stories, what’s happening in education and libraries, some “just for fun” items, thought-provoking stories, and stories about the future.

Enjoy!

Imaginary cat person: “Time bends in my presence. What you call future is but a ripple in the eternal sea. You stand at the edge of revelation. Do you dare step forward?”
Image: Midjourney, animation: Hedra

Subscribe now

Foundation Models

Anthropic
Use artifacts to visualize and create AI apps, without ever writing a line of code - Anthropic
”(Note that the artifacts tab is available on free, pro, and max plans, and currently does not exist on mobile). Creating your first artifact: The best way to create an artifact is to describe a problem you want to solve, then let Claude help you refine it. Here's a step-by-step approach.” See also, Anthropic just made every Claude user a no-code app developer.

OpenAI
Sam Altman Says GPT-5 Coming This Summer, Open to Ads on ChatGPT—With a Catch - AdWeek
”OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on a new company podcast today that GPT-5 is expected to launch this summer, marking the next major leap in the company’s generative AI capabilities. However, he did not disclose a specific date.”

OpenAI launches o3-pro AI model, offering increased reliability and tool use for enterprises — while sacrificing speed - Emilia David, VentureBeat
”Just hours after announcing a big price cut for its o3 reasoning model, OpenAI made o3-pro, an even more powerful version, available to developers. o3-pro is “designed to think longer and provide the most reliable responses,” and has access to many more software tool integrations than its predecessor, making it potentially appealing to enterprises and developers searching for high levels of detail and accuracy.” (It’s expensive, though).

Updates to Advanced Voice Mode for paid users - ChatGPT release notes
”We're upgrading Advanced Voice in ChatGPT for paid users with significant enhancements in intonation and naturalness, making interactions feel more fluid and human-like. When we first launched Advanced Voice, it represented a leap forward in AI speech—now, it speaks even more naturally, with subtler intonation, realistic cadence (including pauses and emphases), and more on-point expressiveness for certain emotions including empathy, sarcasm, and more.”

Google
Forget about AI costs: Google just changed the game with open-source Gemini CLI that will be free for most developers - Sean Michael Kerner, VentureBeat
”Today Google announced its open-source Gemini-CLI that brings natural language command execution directly to developer terminals. Beyond natural language, it brings the power of Google’s Gemini Pro 2.5 — and it does it mostly for free. The free tier provides 60 model requests per minute and 1,000 requests per day at no charge, limits that Google deliberately set above typical developer usage patterns. Google first measured its own developers’ usage patterns, then doubled that number to set the 1,000 limit.”

Google launches production-ready Gemini 2.5 AI models to challenge OpenAI’s enterprise dominance - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat
”The Alphabet subsidiary promoted two of its flagship AI models—Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash—from experimental preview status to general availability, signaling the company’s confidence that the technology can handle mission-critical business applications.”

Microsoft
Is Microsoft’s new Mu for you? - Mike Elgan, Computerworld
”By processing data directly on the device, Mu keeps personal information private and responds instantly. This shift also makes it easier to comply with privacy laws in places like Europe and the US since no data leaves your computer.

The industry is moving in this direction for obvious reasons. SLMs are now powerful enough to handle focused tasks on par with larger cloud-based models. They are cheaper to run, use less energy, and can be tailored for specific jobs or languages.” (SLMs = small language models)

Other models
MiniMax-M1 is a new open source model with 1 MILLION TOKEN context and new, hyper efficient reinforcement learning - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
”Chinese AI startup MiniMax, perhaps best known in the West for its hit realistic AI video model Hailuo, has released its latest large language model, MiniMax-M1 — and in great news for enterprises and developers, it’s completely open source under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning businesses can take it and use it for commercial applications and modify it to their liking without restriction or payment.”

Rethinking AI: DeepSeek’s playbook shakes up the high-spend, high-compute paradigm - Jae Lee, VentureBeat
”With OpenAI reportedly spending $7 to 8 billion annually on operations, the economic pressure from efficient alternatives like DeepSeek has become impossible to ignore. As AI scholar Kai-Fu Lee bluntly put it: “You’re spending $7 billion or $8 billion a year, making a massive loss, and here you have a competitor coming in with an open-source model that’s for free.” This necessitates change.”

Magistral - by Mistral AI
“Announcing Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI — excelling in domain-specific, transparent, and multilingual reasoning.”

Agents

What I learned trying seven coding agents - Timothy B. Lee
”It’s impossible to truly understand a tool if you haven’t used it yourself. So last week I decided to put seven popular coding agents to the test.

I found that right now, these tools have significant limitations. But unlike the computer-use agents I wrote about yesterday, I do not view these coding agents as a dead end. They are already powerful enough to make programmers significantly more productive. And they will only get better in the coming months and years.”

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Images, video, voices, and music

10 AI Video Trends Taking Over the Internet - The AI Daily Brief, YouTube
Interesting overview of what’s happening with AI video since Veo 3. (21 minutes)

‘Surpassing all my expectations’: Midjourney releases first AI video model amid Disney, Universal lawsuit - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
”Popular AI image generation service Midjourney has launched its first AI video generation model V1, marking a pivotal shift for the company from image generation toward full multimedia content creation.”

Midjourney Isn’t the Most Accurate AI—That’s Why It’s the Best - Lucas Crespo, Every
'“After I found some images I liked, I noticed a button that said “copy prompt.” Being able to read the prompt of an image is like trying a dish and seeing the recipe. Once you learn it, you can play with it and make it your own. I began to bounce ideas off of Midjourney’s user base. I wrote prompts about Every's values and vision for the future, and found myself in a rabbit hole of classical art, vintage illustration styles, Greco-Roman architecture, and eventually Dadaism, pop art, and postmodernism.”

AI art is better off bad: Reclaiming the beautiful error - Harry Law, Learning from Examples
”The most honest AI art puts artificiality to work. Images that look machine-generated but use aesthetic distance to reveal truths about its subject, or texts that sound alien but illuminate aspects of language we take for granted. Glitch artists have been doing something like this for a long time. What they did with early digital systems, we can do with transformers, diffusion models or generative adversarial networks. The key is carefully orchestrated failure that reveals patterns invisible to conventional seeing.”

Eleven v3 Audio Tags: Precision delivery control for AI speech - Ryan Morrison, ElevenLabs
”Using tags like [pause], [rushed], [stammers], or [drawn out], you can adjust how each sentence lands — not just emotionally, but rhythmically. That control turns flat delivery into performance.”

Let Them Talk: Audio-Driven Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation - Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, 2Meituan, 3Division of AMC and Department of ECE, HKUST
”Audio-driven human animation methods, such as talking head and talking body generation, have made remarkable progress in generating synchronized facial movements and appealing visual quality videos. However, existing methods primarily focus on single human animation and struggle with multi-stream audio inputs, facing incorrect binding problems between audio and persons. Additionally, they exhibit limitations in instruction-following capabilities. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel task: Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation, and introduce a new framework, MultiTalk, to address the challenges during multi-person generation.”

Too Much, Too Little, Never Just Right? The Labelling Dilemma of Article 50 of the EU AI Act - Information Labs on LinkedIn
(People are getting “warning fatigue” when it comes to labels on AI generated content).
”The evidence base is clear: current approaches to AI transparency are failing to achieve their stated goals. Warning labels don't fundamentally change behavior. Universal labeling requirements ignore sectoral differences and cultural contexts. And technical watermarking solutions are still evolving. This doesn't mean abandoning transparency, quite the opposite. It means designing evidence-based systems that account for human psychology, technological limitations, and real-world implementation challenges.”

‘Spokesperson’ for AI ‘Band’ Velvet Sundown Now Says He Is an Imposter - David Browne, Rolling Stone
For the full story, read I am Andrew Frelon, the guy running the fake Velvet Sundown Twitter. It just gets more and more funny.

Tips

• Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide: Which AIs to use, and how to use them - Ethan Mollick

• AI Fluency: The AI Fluency Framework - Anthropic
  Useful, free course. I finished it and enjoyed it.

• Prompting Techniques for Specialized LLMs - AI for Education

• The CORRECT way to use ChatGPT (in 2025) - Jeff Su, YouTube
  (He talks very fast, but these are good tips).

• I Fed My Voice to 10 Free AI Voice Cloners. Only One Nailed It. - Daniel Nest, Why Try AI

• NotebookLM is adding a new way to share your own notebooks publicly - Google Labs

• Deep Background GPT Released: The world's best AI fact-checking tool is now available to all as a completely free GPT - Mike Caulfield
  Try this excellent GPT from Caulfield, the author of the SIFT method for information literacy. Here’s a live demo of his tool used on Claude - the same prompt powers it.

• How to Fix Your Context - dbreunig.com

My offerings

I’ve recently updated our five generative AI tutorials for the University of Arizona Libraries. Feel free to try them and refer others to them.

The next session of my online course, AI Literacy for Library Workers, will begin on October 7. The registration link from Infopeople isn’t ready yet, but I’ll add it to that page when it is. You can also sign up to be notified of future sessions if you like. I plan to make some major updates to the course, so feel free to take it again if you like (others have). Here’s what previous participants said about the course.

➡️ I now have a self-study version of the course on Udemy, so that may be of interest if you prefer to have no deadlines and want ongoing access to the course.
(on sale until Aug. 5 for $44.99, usually $99)

Accessibility

Google Adds Captions to Gemini Live Conversations - Steven Aquino, Curb Cuts
“When you launch Gemini Live on Android or iOS, a rectangular captions button appears in the top-right corner. Tapping will enable a floating box that provides a transcript of Gemini’s responses. (This does not show what you’re saying in real-time, but that remains available in the full text transcript after ending the conversation.),” Li wrote. “It appears near the middle of the fullscreen interface in audio mode, and at the top when video streaming is enabled. These three lines of text cannot be moved or resized. In Gemini > Settings, there’s a new ‘Caption preferences’ item underneath the ‘Interrupt Live responses’ on/off toggle that links to system settings on Android.”

Neurodivergent Users Are Making AI Better for Everyone - Michael Spencer and Natalia Cote-Munoz
”The unexpected lessons from AI's most innovative user community—and what they teach us about inclusive design.”

Creating Alt Text for Digital Collections with AI: A Case Study - Peter Broadwell, Lindsay King, Choice
”Furthermore, the potential of implementing vision language models locally extends beyond alt text generation to allow better discovery across library digital collections. Image collections with less metadata also would benefit from vision-language models’ ability to project (or “embed”) visual features of images into a mathematical representation of language, enabling text-based searching across the collection in multiple languages.”

These Transcribing Eyeglasses Put Subtitles on the World - Boone Ashworth, Wired
”TranscribeGlass are smart eyeglasses that aim to do exactly what it says on the tin: transcribe spoken conversations and project subtitles onto the glass in front of your eyes. They’re meant for the Deaf and, primarily, the hard-of-hearing community who struggle to read lips or pick out a conversation in a loud room.”

What’s happening in education

Tackling AI Through Play: How the Pedagogy of Play can help us learn about AI - Jaime Chao Mignano
”Playing with AI was rewarding. As an educator, I was even more excited that it was meaningful. It drew me into more careful attention to the interactions I was having with AI, making connections and considering opportunities, and offered itself up for analysis as I built explanations on how it was “deciding”. I was chewing on all of this information and I was motivated to keep experimenting and iterating. Playful learning is a strong entry point to tackle learning about AI “…because the learners care, [so] the result is often deep learning (A Pedagogy of Play).”

Empowering Learners for the Age of AI: An AI Literacy Framework for Primary and Secondary Education - European Commision, OECD, and Code.org
”This framework is designed for teachers, education leaders, education policymakers, and learning designers. It outlines competences and learning scenarios to inform learning materials, standards, school-wide initiatives, and responsible AI policies for primary and secondary education settings.”

The Butler vs The Sparring Partner: Reframing the AI Relationship for Students - Mike Kentz
Butler vs sparring partner: ”Butler Approach: "ChatGPT, write me a 500-word essay about climate change." Sparring Partner Approach: "I'm arguing that climate policies should prioritize adaptation over mitigation. Help me identify the strongest counterarguments to this position so I can address them effectively." “

What’s happening in libraries

Institutional Books 1.0: A 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections, refined for accuracy and usability - Matteo Cargnelutti, et al.
” … this technical report introduces Institutional Books 1.0, a large collection of public domain books originally digitized through Harvard Library's participation in the Google Books project, beginning in 2006. Working with Harvard Library, we extracted, analyzed, and processed these volumes into an extensively-documented dataset of historic texts. This analysis covers the entirety of Harvard Library's collection scanned as part of that project, originally spanning 1,075,899 volumes written in over 250 different languages for a total of approximately 250 billion tokens.”

How One College Library Plans to Cut Through the AI Hype - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
”“The library is taking the lead to be the interdisciplinary hub,” he said, adding that centralizing such services at the library can help avoid the silos that department-specific AI guidelines often create. “Libraries are for everyone; anybody should feel like they can ask us for help and consultation on AI.”

To make that happen, Stony Brook’s library—which helped launch the university’s AI Innovation Institute earlier this year—is building a team of information professionals focused on helping students and faculty navigate the practical and ethical considerations of using AI.”

New book: Generative AI and Libraries: Claiming Our Place in the Center of a Shared Future - by Michael Hanegan and Chris Rosser, American Library Association
I like how they frame generative AI as an “arrival technology.”
”An arrival technology fundamentally reshapes society regardless of individual choice or adoption. Unlike elective technologies—such as smartphones, which we can choose to use or not—arrival technologies transform the underlying fabric of how society functions.” They also say that “there is effectively no opt-out strategy that is sustainable or effective.” I look forward to reading the whole book. Download the first chapter for free.

Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations - Open access book from UCL Press
”Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations explores the innovative technologies and approaches to digitised and born-digital records within libraries and archives across the UK and US, and beyond. It brings together chapters from experts across the fields of digital humanities, computer science and information science, alongside professionals within the library and archival sector.”

Librarian Leadership on the AI Frontier: Whitepapers - Technology from Sage
”Over half of students report using AI tools like ChatGPT in their research, but just 8% said their librarians supported them in their use of AI.

Despite this, student trust in librarians remains high, with more than half saying they’d feel more confident using AI tools if recommended by their librarian.”

Just for fun

• Using Runway character reference feature to place yourself in historical imagery and then animating them - Peter Gostev on LinkedIn

• Cats doing high dives and dogs doing high dives and all sorts of things doing high dives

• "We Are Not PROMPTS!" - Voesis Studios on YouTube

• AI music video-The World’s Got A Groove - Kelly Boesch AI Art on YouTube

• The Forgotten War on the Walkman - Louis Anslow, Pessimists Archive

• My video doorbell has had a busy day - Jan Loos on Facebook

Thought-provoking

New research & techniques

Beyond static AI: MIT’s new framework lets models teach themselves - Ben Dickson, VentureBeat
”The researchers’ solution is SEAL, short for Self-Adapting Language Models. It uses a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to train an LLM to generate “self-edits”—natural-language instructions that specify how the model should update its own weights. These self-edits can restructure new information, create synthetic training examples, or even define the technical parameters for the learning process itself.

Intuitively, SEAL teaches a model how to create its own personalized study guide. Instead of just reading a new document (the raw data), the model learns to rewrite and reformat that information into a style it can more easily absorb and internalize. This process brings together several key areas of AI research, including synthetic data generation, reinforcement learning and test-time training (TTT).”

Surveys

2025: The State of Consumer AI - Menlo Ventures
”While Gen Z (ages 18-28) leads overall AI adoption as expected, Millennials (ages 29-44) emerge as power users, reporting more daily usage—flipping the typical “younger = higher usage” pattern. But AI is not just a young person’s game: Nearly half (45%) of Baby Boomers (ages 61-79) have used AI in the past six months, with 11% using it daily.”

Copyright

Why Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl Is a Trap for 99% of Websites - Bill Hartzer
At first read, this method from Cloudflare sounds promising, but it seems there are many problems with it. See also The Cloudflare Trap. I think the Creative Commons ideas are better, see the following article.

Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI - Creative Commons
”Creative Commons (CC) today announces the public kickoff of the CC signals project, a new preference signals framework designed to increase reciprocity and sustain a creative commons in the age of AI.” You can give feedback here.

Perplexity Rejects BBC’s Legal Claims Over AI-Driven News Content Reuse - Pymnts
”The FT reported that it dismissed the BBC’s claims as “manipulative and opportunistic,” asserting that the broadcaster fundamentally misunderstands technology, the internet and intellectual property law. The company maintains that it does not build or train foundational models but rather provides an interface for users to access models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, with its own system based on Meta’s Llama and refined for accuracy.”

AI Co. Anthropic Nabs Partial Fair Use Win in Copyright Case - The Fashion Law
”Training LLMs = Fair Use; Scanning Purchased Books = Fair Use; Pirated Copies and Indefinite Retention = Not Transformative”

Anthropic’s multi-billion dollar loss in Bartz v. Anthropic is really a win (for AI) - Matthew Sag
”And yet, while Judge Alsup condemned the use of pirated books, he also embraced a view long promoted by the tech industry: that the intermediate copies generated in the course of training large language models are highly transformative and almost invariably fair use.”

Meta wins on fair use for now, but court leaves door open for “market dilution” - Dave Hansen and Yuanxiao Xu, Authors Alliance
”Compared with the speculative and unprecedented arguments advanced in this ruling, we find Judge Alsup’s decision offers a more grounded and sensible approach to fair use. Going forward, we hope more courts would follow Judge Alsup’s example and maintain a realistic assessment of transformativeness and market harm. Fair use should be flexible, but not so much that it can accommodate every speculative theory of harm.”

Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI, but UK lawsuit continues - Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch
”The move doesn’t end the case entirely — Getty is still pursuing other claims as well as a separate lawsuit in the U.S. — but it underscores the gray areas surrounding the future of content ownership and usage in the age of generative AI.”

Disney and Universal sue Midjourney for copyright infringement - Andres Guadamuz, TechnoLlama
”Anyone who thinks that this lawsuit will kill generative AI is sorely mistaken, Disney does not want to destroy AI, it wants to use it. … So my theory is that this is sending a message to all of the other AI image generators and AI developers to be careful, stay in line, mind your output filters, or you could be next. Midjourney is small, it is expendable in the grand scheme of things. Disney may want to work with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta in the future, so no need to start attacking potential partners, particularly as they have made very clear that they will be using generative AI themselves.”

AI copyright anxiety will hold back creativity - Nitin Nohria, MIT Technology Review
”Our copyright system has never required total originality. It demands meaningful human input. That standard should apply in the age of AI as well. When people thoughtfully engage with these models—choosing prompts, curating inputs, shaping the results—they are creating. The medium has changed, but the impulse remains the same: to build something new from the materials we inherit.”

Climate

From Shrugging Face to Sustainable AI: In Defense of Pragmatism - Josh Gellers, Medium
”Fourth, we could accept that AI is becoming woven into the fabric of our existence and still try to influence its trajectory to better align with our values and aspirations. As you may have suspected, I am a firm believer in the promise of option #4. But what kinds of policies might this perspective entail? The focus would shift from debating the technical minutia regarding the emissions generated directly by model development and use to putting our energy into greening AI infrastructure. In brief, we need to build greener buildings (i.e., data centers) and power them using renewable energy.”

Computing is efficient - Andy Masley
”First, data centers are specifically designed to be the most energy efficient way of storing and transferring information for the internet. If we got rid of data centers and stored the internet’s information on servers in homes and office buildings, we’d need to use a lot more energy."

“Every single action online, including accessing websites, streaming videos, and using online applications, ultimately involves traversing information through data centers. Data centers store basically all the content of the internet, process it, and control where it gets sent. If the internet can be said to exist in physical places, it’s almost entirely in data centers.

What percentage of our electricity grid would you expect data centers to take up given that Americans spend half their waking lives online? 50%? 25%? The answer turns out to be 4.4%”

How much energy are you using on AI? - Mirko Lorenz, DataWrapper
”In practical terms, the energy requirements of ChatGPT use are negligible compared to other household appliances. And this applies to your overall personal footprint as well: If you want to reduce your energy usage there are many other lifestyle changes that have a bigger effect, like going vegan, avoiding flights, or using a bike instead of car.”

The Biggest Statistic About AI Water Use Is A Lie - SE Gyges
”This claim is a lie. It ran in The Washington Post, in an article provocatively titled “A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots”. ChatGPT almost certainly does not consume a bottle of water when writing one email and never has.”

From Fix the News (a good newsletter)
”Meanwhile, Trump may accidentally be accelerating the clean energy transition. The administration's 'energy dominance' agenda, aimed at boosting fossil fuel exports, is having an unexpected effect: making other countries nervous about oil dependency and pushing them faster toward renewables. In trying to stall the energy transition, he may be speeding it up.”

Rewiring the energy debate - Daan Walter, Sam Butler-Sloss, and Kingsmill Bond
“But this fashionable pessimism misses the bigger picture. Amid all the noise, one thing is clear: new energy tech is growing consistently, and with increasing impact. Today, the world invests twice as much in new energy technologies as it does in fossil fuels. In 2024 alone, the increase in solar generation matched the entire electricity demand of Germany.”

Explanations

Context engineering - Simon Willison
”The term context engineering has recently started to gain traction as a better alternative to prompt engineering. I like it. I think this one may have sticking power.”

Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon - Timothy B. Lee
Excellent, clear explainer.

Software is changing (again) - YouTube
It’s worth watching this keynote. Andrej Karpathy introduces the idea that software is undergoing a fundamental change, identifying three stages: Software 1.0 (traditional code), Software 2.0 (neural networks), and the newest stage, Software 3.0 (large language models). (Summary by Gemini - scroll to bottom)

The most important graph from the Digital News Report, and not repeating the mistakes of 2003 - Thomas Baekdal
”This is very much the problem we see. The news today doesn’t feel useful. Instead, it feels like a never ending form of doom-scrolling. And the worst part is that many newspapers are optimizing for even more doom-scrolling by turning things that people can’t do anything about into live streams that they suddenly have to watch ‘every minute’.” …. and …..“The debate about what AIs should be allowed to do continues to cause havoc in our industry, with publishers going in every direction at the same time. But, I think there is a debate here that we are missing. When it comes to how AIs work, we have a tendency to just put everything in the same box, but, when you think about it, there is a huge difference between the functions: train, learn, use.”

How To Think About AI: A Guide For The Perplexed, by Richard Susskind
I’m enjoying this excellent new book with a balanced view of things. See this review.

Responses to AI critics

Does using ChatGPT change your brain activity? Study sparks debate - Nicola Jones, Nature
”Scientists warn against reading too much into a small experiment generating a lot of buzz.”

See thoughts from the authors after this study generated so many headlines.
“Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"?
No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", "brain damage", "passivity", "trimming" , "collapse" and so on. It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.”

Prompting is Managing: No, LLMs aren't creating “Cognitive Debt” - Venkatesh Rao
”The experiment clocks students as if writing were artisanal wood-carving—every stroke hand-tooled, originality king, neural wattage loud. Yet half the modern knowledge economy runs on a different loop entirely: delegate → monitor → integrate → ship. Professors do it with grad students, PMs with dev teams, editors with freelancers. Neuroscience calls that stance supervisory control. When you switch from doer to overseer, brain rhythms flatten, attention comes in bursts, and sameness is often a feature, not decay.”

Is this your brain on ChatGPT? - Sean Goedecke
”If LLMs mean your brain has to work less hard to pump out an essay response to a milquetoast SAT prompt, that doesn’t mean your brain is working less hard overall. It means your brain can work on other things!”

The Thinking Person's Guide to Not Thinking About AI - Carlo Iacono
(Harsh, but true).
”Every new piece of AI research lands in our collective consciousness not as data to be understood but as ammunition for a culture war that was decided before it began. We are watching the most sophisticated act of intellectual theatre in recent memory, where every player knows their role, every line is rehearsed and the conclusion was written before the curtain rose. The pattern is so predictable it borders on parody. A technical paper emerges from some prestigious institution. Its title, invariably crafted for maximum impact, promises to reveal what we always suspected: that artificial intelligence is either a fraud, a danger, or both. Within hours, the usual suspects emerge from their digital lairs, brandishing the abstract like a trophy. The headlines write themselves. The op-eds flow like water. The social media victory laps begin before anyone has read past page three.”

Why the "Everything is Hallucination" Argument Makes Me Roll My Eyes - Mike Caulfield
”But saying there is no distinction between a hallucination and normal output makes the same error as those who believe that everything that comes from the model is truth. It confuses distinctions in process with distinctions about the relation of the model output to the world outside it, and ignores that hallucinations — like “radar clutter” — are not random and tend to occur in particular situations that we can be aware of and mitigate through either better technology or better education. The people who address these issues will be the ones who study the unique features of hallucinatory and non-hallucinatory system function, not people who argue the entire distinction is irrelevant.”

A Shill for AI...Responding to criticism in the moment and after the fact. - Lance Eaton, AI + Education = Simplified
”Recently, at the conclusion of a talk, someone started off the Q&A referring to me as a “shill for AI.” It was a rather interesting moment in my public speaking experience, where the critique came at me personally rather than the technology. This post is about my reaction in the moment, what I would I have liked to have said, and why it matters how we’re navigating GenAI in the discourse.”

The Apple "Reasoning Collapse" Paper Is Even Dumber Than You Think - Mike Caulfield

Do reasoning AI models really ‘think’ or not? Apple research sparks lively debate, response - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

Apple's 'Al Can't Reason' Claim Seen By 13M+, What You Need to Know- AI Explained, YouTube
Good analysis from one of my favorite channels.

Thoughts on authorship

Authorship in the Age of AI: Why “writing in my voice” is still my writing - Carlo Iacono
”A well‑trained model can mirror a writer’s cadence so accurately that the result feels more Carlo than a rushed 11 p.m. email. Like a studio microphone, the tool captures texture the naked ear might miss. What some fear as flattening uniformity frequently becomes heightened distinctiveness.

When routine drafting takes minutes instead of hours, creators reinvest the saved bandwidth in higher‑order labour: refining nuance, stress‑testing evidence, or simply reflecting longer before hitting “send”. Far from outsourcing sincerity, AI augments the very conditions under which sincerity flourishes. Typewriters were “soulless”. Word‑processors “made prose too easy”. Each wave of contention subsided as norms adjusted. Today’s concern about AI‑mediated text echoes earlier moral panics but underestimates society’s proven ability to recalibrate trust cues.”

AI Signals The Death Of The Author - David J. Gunkel, NOEMA
”From one perspective — a perspective that remains bound to the usual ways of thinking — this can only be seen as a threat and crisis, for it challenges our very understanding of what writing is, the state of literature and the meaning of truth or the means of speaking the truth. But from another, it is an opportunity to think beyond the limitations of Western metaphysics and its hegemony. LLMs do not threaten writing, the figure of the author, or the concept of truth. They only threaten a particular and limited understanding of what these ideas represent — one that is itself not some naturally occurring phenomenon but the product of a particular culture and philosophical tradition.”

Beneficial uses of AI

Don’t Blindly Blame the Bots: How AI Is Helping Journalism - Information Labs on LinkedIn (several interesting use cases)
”The case of iTromsø, a small Norwegian newsroom, and its AI tool "Djinn" is particularly insightful. "Djinn" is an AI-powered data journalism interface designed to enhance newsgathering, analysis, and story summarisation. Crucially, iTromsø journalists participated in training the AI, leading to high user adoption because the system was "well-explainable and built around users". Journalist and data scientist Nikita Roy lauded Djinn as "one of the best use cases of AI deployment in the service of journalism," highlighting its ability to help smaller newsrooms uncover original stories despite scarce resources.”

Machine Readable: Language models are opening new avenues for inquiry in historical research and writing - Steven Johnson
”There's a general point worth making here, … all the key ideas that are being generated are either coming from me, or from the human-authored works that I have collected. NotebookLM is effectively functioning as a conduit between my knowledge/creativity and the knowledge stored in the source material: stress-testing speculative ideas I have, fact-checking, helping me see patterns in the material, reminding me of things that I read but have forgotten. It's an important point to make in part because there seems to be a growing concern about offloading the actual research/reading phase to AI-generated summaries.”

Merging AI and underwater photography to reveal hidden ocean worlds - MIT News
”The models can both generate new, synthetic, but scientifically accurate images unconditionally (i.e., requiring no user input/guidance), and enhance real photographs conditionally (i.e., image-to-image generation). By integrating AI into the photographic workflow, Ellenbogen will be able to use these tools to recover detail in turbid water, adjust lighting to emphasize key subjects, or even simulate scenes that would be nearly impossible to capture in the field. The team also believes this approach may benefit other underwater photographers and image editors facing similar challenges. This hybrid method is designed to accelerate the curation process and enable storytellers to construct a more complete and coherent visual narrative of life beneath the surface.”

Can AI speak the language Japan tried to kill? - Jessie Lau, BBC
“I hope this kind of AI can help people in Hokkaido, Ainu ancestors or young people, to learn the Ainu language," says Kawahara. He suggests that the technology could enable virtual avatars – Ainu teaching assistants that guide young learners of the language. Kawahara's team also hopes to capture more Ainu dialects with AI and include content from younger generations, not just old recordings, he says.”

AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome - Ziga Avsec and Natasha Latysheva, Google DeepMind
”AlphaGenome’s generality allows scientists to simultaneously explore a variant's impact on a number of modalities with a single API call. This means that scientists can generate and test hypotheses more rapidly, without having to use multiple models to investigate different modalities.”

New AI Transforms Radiology with Speed, Accuracy Never Seen Before - Ben Schamisso, Northwestern University
”In a major clinical study, the tool boosted productivity by up to 40 percent without compromising accuracy.”

World first: brain implant lets man speak with expression — and sing - Miryam Naddaf, Nature
”A man with a severe speech disability is able to speak expressively and sing using a brain implant that translates his neural activity into words almost instantly.”

Mayo Clinic’s AI tool identifies 9 dementia types, including Alzheimer’s, with one scan - Susan Murphy, Mayo Clinic
”The tool, StateViewer, helped researchers identify the dementia type in 88% of cases, according to research published online on June 27, 2025, in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. It also enabled clinicians to interpret brain scans nearly twice as fast and with up to three times greater accuracy than standard workflows.”

The future

Some ideas for what comes next - Nathan Lambert, Interconnects
”The part of o3 that isn’t talked about enough is how different its search feels. For a normal query, o3 can look at 10s of websites. The best description I’ve heard of its relentlessness en route to finding a niche piece of information is akin to a “trained hunting dog on the scent.” o3 just feels like a model that can find information in a totally different way than anything out there.”
…. and
”Much like o3, you should play with Claude Code even if you don’t code a lot. It can make fun demos and standalone websites in no time. It’s miles ahead in its approachability compared to the fully-autonomous agents like Codex (at least for the time being).”

Like humans, AI is forcing institutions to rethink their purpose - Gary Grossman, VentureBeat
”This requires design principles that are neither technocratic nor nostalgic, but grounded in the realities of the migration underway, based on shared intelligence, human vulnerability and with a goal of creating a more humane society. That in mind, here are three practical design principles.”

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar or course for your group. Last spring I offered multiple webinar series — for Boston Library Consortium, Penn State Libraries, and Mayo Clinic Libraries. I’m taking a break for the summer, but will be open to doing more in the fall.

➡️ Sign up with this link to get the self-study version of my AI Literacy course for $44.99 instead of $99, through August 5).

»» Sign up here if you’d like to be notified of future courses I’m offering.««

And as always, you can follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon where I post daily about generative AI.

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

A few days ago I updated my free giveaway document for new subscribers:

10 Tips for Keeping Up with Generative AI (PDF)

I thought all of you existing subscribers would also like a new copy. Things change quickly and this has several updates since the 2024 edition.

Enjoy!

Nicole

Hi everyone!

If you’re new here, welcome! This is an extra-long issue because it’s been a couple of months since I sent one. This has been a super-busy spring for me.

In this issue we’ll look at:

• Claude for education (now used at Northeastern University and a few other universities).

• Google AI is free for college students in the U.S. through spring finals 2026.

• Interesting thoughts: What is Scholarship in the Age of Deep Research AI? - Steve Covello.

• Dividing up different types of skepticism about AI in a useful way: The Misunderstood Role of AI Skeptics - Alberto Romero

• How I’ve been testing Mike Caulfield’s SIFT Toolbox prompt for fact-checking. (see below under My Offerings)

• You can watch my video about image generation with 4o, in one of the videos I made for my AI Literacy course. Start at 3 min, 12 secs to skip to the part about 4o images.

• And the usual tips, accessibility stories, what’s happening in education and libraries, a few “just for fun” items, thought-provoking stories, and stories about the future.

Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Foundation Models

OpenAI

OpenAI scuttles for-profit transformation - Megan Morrone, Axios, May 5, 2025.
”A nonprofit will remain in control of OpenAI and its technology, according to a letter to employees from Sam Altman on Monday.”

ChatGPT search - OpenAI
They’ve improved the interface for how sources show up when it uses web search.

OpenAI overrode concerns of expert testers to release sycophantic GPT-4o - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, May 2, 2025.
”Speaking perhaps more theoretically, for myself, it also indicates why expertise is so important — and specifically, expertise in fields beyond and outside of the one you’re optimizing for (in this case, machine learning and AI). It’s the diversity of expertise that allows us as a species to achieve new advances that benefit our kind. One, say STEM, shouldn’t necessarily be held above the others in the humanities or arts.”

Addendum to GPT-4o System Card: 4o image generation - OpenAI
It’s worth reading the system card to learn details of their new image creation model, including which guardrails have changed.

ChatGPT — Release Notes - OpenAI
More updates, including enhanced memory rolling out to all Plus and Pro users (including the EU). These features are OFF by default and must be enabled in  Settings > Personalization > Reference  Chat  History.

Anthropic

Introducing Claude for Education - Anthropic, April 2, 2025.
”Today we're launching Claude for Education, a specialized version of Claude tailored for higher education institutions.” “Full campus access agreements with Northeastern University, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and Champlain College, making Claude available to all students.”

Anthropic launches Claude web search API, betting on the future of post-Google information access - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat, May 7, 2025.
Now in addition to web search in the paid versions of Claude, there’s web search in the API. I hope web search will come to the free version of Claude soon.

Claude takes research to new places - Anthropic, April 15, 2025.
Claude now integrates with Gmail and Calendar, in addition to Google Docs (in beta to all users in profile settings). Research is also available (like Deep Research), but only in more expensive accounts: Max, Team, and Enterprise plans in the United States, Japan, and Brazil.

Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case - Blake Brittain, Reuters, March 26, 2025.
This is about music lyrics. “Lee rejected the publishers' argument that Anthropic's use of their lyrics caused them irreparable harm by diminishing their licensing market.”

Apple
Apple is looking at adding Perplexity and other AI search engines to Safari - Emma Roth and Lauren Feiner, The Verge, May 7, 2025.

Apple and Anthropic reportedly partner to build an AI coding platform - Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch, May 2, 2025.

Microsoft
Microsoft launches Phi-4-Reasoning-Plus, a small, powerful, open weights reasoning model - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, May 1, 2025.
”During the supervised fine-tuning stage, the model was trained using a curated blend of synthetic chain-of-thought reasoning traces and filtered high-quality prompts. A key innovation in the training approach was the use of structured reasoning outputs marked with special <think> and </think> tokens. These guide the model to separate its intermediate reasoning steps from the final answer, promoting both transparency and coherence in long-form problem solving.”

Google
Google’s NotebookLM Android and iOS apps are available for preorder - Aisha Malik, TechCrunch, May 2, 2025.
”Google’s NotebookLM Android and iOS apps are expected to launch on May 20.”

The latest AI news we announced in April - Google, May 6, 2025.
”We made the best of Google AI free for college students in the U.S. through spring finals 2026. College students in the U.S. are now eligible to get tools like Gemini Advanced, NotebookLM Plus and 2 TB of storage free of charge for this and next school year. This means that students now have more tools to study, understand complex concepts and research new ideas.”
They also made Deep Research available on Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental (for Gemini Advanced subscribers).

DeepSeek
China's DeepSeek releases AI model upgrade, intensifies rivalry with OpenAI - Reuters, March 25, 2025.
”The latest model demonstrates significant improvements in areas such as reasoning and coding capabilities compared to its predecessor.”

How DeepSeek erased Silicon Valley’s AI lead and wiped $1 trillion from U.S. markets - Nicholas Gordon, Fortune, March 30, 2025.
”But DeepSeek is just one player in a vibrant Chinese AI sector to which many U.S. CEOs have been oblivious. Big Tech companies like Alibaba and ByteDance (the parent of TikTok) are releasing AI models that have beaten Western products on reasoning benchmarks. And a new wave of smaller “AI dragons” are putting China’s cheap and efficient AI to work in the real world, through mobile apps, AI agents, and robots.”

Other models
Qwen swings for a double with 2.5-Omni-3B model that runs on consumer PCs, laptops - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, April 30, 2025.
”While smaller in size, the 3B version retains over 90% of the larger model’s multimodal performance and delivers real-time generation in both text and natural-sounding speech.”

Meta’s first dedicated AI app is here with Llama 4 - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, April 29, 2025.
”Facebook parent company Meta Platforms, Inc. has officially launched its own, free standalone Meta AI app, a move aimed at delivering a more personal and integrated AI experience across mobile devices, the web, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The app is available on iOS through the Apple App Store and on the web — with no mention of when an Android version could come.”

Deep Research

What is Scholarship in the Age of Deep Research AI? - Steve Covello, March 6, 2025.
“The metaphor that comes to mind to describe this kind of scholar is a symphony orchestra conductor. The conductor is a second-order scholar of first-order work characterized by the following competencies…”

Deep Research with AI: 9 Ways to Get Started - Jeremy Caplan, Wonder Tools, May 2, 2025.
Some easy and interesting ways to get started testing Deep Research.

These experts were stunned by OpenAI Deep Research - Timothy B. Lee, Understanding AI, Feb. 25, 2025.

AI Tools for Literature Reviews Benchmarking Report - Nuance, April 2025.
They tested over 20 tools and evaluated the top performers across five key criteria, including citation quality, writing clarity, and cost-efficiency.

The latest AI news we announced in April - Google, May 6, 2025.
”We made Deep Research available on Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental. Gemini Deep Research is our personal AI research assistant built for you. … So we made it available to Gemini Advanced subscribers.”

I’ve been experimenting with Deep Research on different topics. Here’s a report I made using Deep Research on ChatGPT:
Overestimating the Energy Consumption of Digital Technologies: A Historical Perspective - PDF. May 6, 2025.
From the conclusion: “Looking across these decades, a clear historical pattern emerges: each new wave of digital technology has initially been accompanied by overblown predictions of energy consumption, which gradually give way to a more measured reality. This pattern is not coincidence – it stems from common pitfalls in how we imagine technology’s impact.”
(And here’s a version I copied into a Google Doc, which includes my prompt at the bottom of the page).

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Images, video, voices, and music

Images

GPT-4o Image Generation: A Complete Guide + 12 Prompt Examples - Valeriia Kuka, Learn Prompting, April 2, 2025.
”OpenAI has released GPT-4o Image Generation, which is probably the most advanced, natively multimodal image generator to date.”
(See also my video about image generation with 4o, starting at 3 min, 12 secs. This is one of the videos for my AI Literacy course).

Ghibli, Ghiblification, Copyright and Style - Justin Bonfiglio, Authors Alliance, May 8, 2025.
”While it might be tempting to want to protect the Ghibli style, we should remain mindful of the core purpose of copyright: to promote creativity for the public good (“The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an `author's' creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.”) Overzealous protection of style risks enclosing the common building blocks creators rely on, preventing one creator from building on the style of another.”

Video
Awards Rules and Campaign Promotional Regulations Approved for 98th Oscars - Oscars Press Release, April 21, 2025.
”With regard to Generative Artificial Intelligence and other digital tools used in the making of the film, the tools neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination. The Academy and each branch will judge the achievement, taking into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship when choosing which movie to award.”

Director James Cameron Is Open to Using AI to Reduce Filmmaking Costs - Jibin Joseph, PC Mag, April 10, 2025.
”James Cameron is open to the idea of using generative AI to reduce filmmaking costs. As Deadline reports, the development is a sharp turn from Cameron's earlier stance on the technology”….. “they have to figure out ways to cut costs in half—without laying off staff. ”

Natasha Lyonne Set to Make Feature Directorial Debut With AI Film — With Help From Jaron Lanier - Steven Zeitchik, The Hollywood Reporter, April 29 2025.
”Centered on a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present, the movie will blend traditional live-action and game elements. The latter will be created by Lanier as well as Lyonne and Marling. And the entire enterprise will draw on AI from Asteria partner Moonvalley via a model called “Marey,” which unlike systems from companies like Runway and OpenAI, is built only on data that has been copyright-cleared.”

Make great AI video right now using Gemini – it's quicker than using Sora - Graham Barlow, Tech Radar, May 7, 2025.
You can now generate 5 videos per day with Gemini Advanced, using their Veo 2 model.

Voice
Speech Transcription with parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 - demo on Hugging Face
Designed for high-quality English speech recognition. Open source. It’s fast and it works well for making time-stamped transcripts of audio files.

NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages - Google Labs blog, April 29, 2025.
”Audio Overviews are generated in your account’s preferred language. This update also introduces a new "Output Language" option in NotebookLM's settings; your Audio Overviews are always generated in the language you select here.”

Computer vision
Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining - Simon Willison, April 26, 2025.
”Watching OpenAI’s new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life.”

Music
Suno upgrades AI music generator with enhanced vocal capabilities, extended track length - Mandy Dalugdug, Music Business Worldwide, May 8, 2025.
”The v4.5 update enhances the range and emotional depth of AI-generated vocals, allowing users to “create everything from delicate, intimate performances to powerful deliveries with vibrato,” said Suno. Users will be able to create mashups combining different styles. …The v4.5 model is available exclusively to paid subscribers, with plans starting at $8 monthly for the Pro tier. Free users remain limited to the previous v4.0 model with a cap of 20 total songs, plus 10 daily creations using the older v3.5 model.”

Timbaland’s AI Reinvention: ‘God Presented This Tool to Me’ - Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, March 19, 2025.
”Timbaland uses one of them exclusively: a beta feature called “cover songs,” which allows you to upload beats or songs of your own creation, and then use Suno to generate infinite variations on them, in every imaginable genre.”

”He compares resistance from artists to early suspicion of Auto-Tuned vocals in the 2000s. “It was a big thing, to the point Jay-Z made ‘Death of Auto-Tune,'” he says with a laugh. “Come on now. T-Pain was the only one to step in. Same way I’m doing with this. T-Pain stood out there by himself.”

“It might give you something that you ain’t never thought of, and it becomes the biggest record of your life. Are you gonna criticize it then?…  I never want to remove humans from what they do. I just want to inspire them to do more.”

Tips

• 3 Neat GPT-4o Image Tricks To Try - Daniel Nest, Why Try AI?, May 1, 2025.

• AI for research: the ultimate guide to choosing the right tool - Amanda Heidt, Nature, April 7, 2025.

• Search Google without the AI: &udm=14 and Does One Line Fix Google?
  For another method, you can just add -a to the end of your Google query.

• OpenAI document explains when to use each ChatGPT model - Mayank Parmar, Bleeping Computer, May 4, 2025.
  ”OpenAI model names have been confusing, but the company is finally taking steps to make it easier for users to understand the different ChatGPT models.”

• ChatGPT’s Deep Research now has a PDF export button.
  

My offerings

Online course: AI Literacy for Library Workers - Nicole Hennig
This is the second time I’ve offered this 6-week asynchronous course, and we’re in week 5 right now.

I will offer it again in the fall (with some updated content), so you can sign up here to be notified if you’re interested in the fall session. Here’s some feedback from previous participants. I’m also thinking of creating a followup course for those who’ve completed the first one, or already have equivalent knowledge or experience. I’ll announce that on the same list (as well as in this newsletter).

If you’d like to see a sample video from the course, here’s one I made about generating images. It includes demos of the types of images you can make with the new version of ChatGPT 4o, so you can be familiar with what’s possible — and learn to be skeptical of any image you see these days. (The course also includes many hands-on activities).

Fact-checking bots
I’ve been testing Mike Caulfield’s SIFT Toolbox prompt for fact-checking. I created a custom “Gem” on Google Gemini. Gemini doesn’t make it possible to share a gem for others to use, but I can share the results of specific queries with the gem. Here the result of a question I asked about an image of a Studio Ghibli Cease and Desist Letter. I was suspicious, so I asked: “Is this a real letter about using Studio Ghibli's style to generate images?”
Look in the sidebar of this page for his full prompt that you can try with any model, without building a bot.

(His prompt is too long to turn into a custom GPT from OpenAI - they have a character limit of 8,000, including spaces, but Gemini doesn’t have this limit. I even tried using ChatGPT o3 to make his prompt shorter, but it lost some of the critical functionality).

Accessibility

This Startup Has Created AI-Powered Signing Avatars for the Deaf - Simon Hill, Wired, May 7, 2025.
”New technology from British startup Silence Speaks enables an AI-generated sign language avatar to effectively give the deaf and hard of hearing an interpreter in their pocket.”

If Apple gets apple intelligence right, the biggest beneficiary will be accessibility - Steven Aquino, Curb Cuts, March 20, 2025.
”Take Image Playgrounds, for instance. Most observers in the Apple community loathe the feature for being goofy and generally useless … What this perspective lacks is, of course, empathy for disabled people. Whatever you, able-bodied reader, may think of artificial intelligence and tools like Midjourney, for example, the reality is it’s extremely plausible the advent of Image Playgrounds gives an aspiring artist with disabilities—someone who may not be able to use an Apple Pencil on iPad Pro—a conduit through which to unleash their creativity and self-expression. This is not at all trivial, regardless of one’s philosophical views on art or their views on the quality of Image Playgrounds’ output. It’s perfectly okay for Image Playgrounds to not be your jam, but to sneer at it wholesale reeks of elitism and dishonesty.”

Recent Meta Ray-Bans Updates make smart glasses Even more alluring for accessibility - Steven Aquino, Curb Cuts, April 28, 2025.
”Take the Live Translation functionality, for example. It can be way more accessible to hear aural translations of language in a hands-free way; this could be important for people with limited motor skills who might have trouble holding their iPhone to, say, use Apple’s Translate app to make the conversion(s).”

Using AI to build Wordpress sites shows How AI makes web work more accessible - Steven Aquino, Curb Cuts, April 22, 2025.
”A person with disabilities who may have fine-motor delays, for instance, that limits their use of a mouse and keyboard very well could find the WordPress site builder a more accessible avenue to build their website(s).”

What’s happening in education

Addressing the Transactional Model of School - John Warner, May 11, 2025.
A response to the article in New York Magazine, “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through School.”
Warner says: “But the presentation of the magnitude and intensity of the problem is unfortunately exaggerated in a way that I fear has the potential to induce a moral panic response which will not lead to a productive discussion about what to do. I hope everyone knows that not “everyone” is cheating their way through college.”

What the Alarm Misses: Why AI Isn’t Ruining Student Writing—But Shallow Reporting Might Be - Dr. Jeanne Beatrix Law, May 8, 2025.
”I read the New York Magazine Intelligencer piece1 “Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast” the way I imagine many educators did—tight-jawed, half-nodding, and wholly unsettled. Not because the piece got it all wrong. In fact, it got one thing deeply right: faculty are concerned, tired, and unsure how to respond to what feels like a seismic shift in student learning.

But I worry that headlines like these do something far more damaging than ChatGPT ever could. They flatten students into cheaters, flatten teachers into victims, and flatten a nuanced, discipline-rich, and rapidly evolving reality into a single narrative of collapse.”

Can an AI Partner Empower Learners to Ask Critical Questions? - Pratyusha Maiti, Ashok Goel, Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, March 24, 2025.
”Jill Watson is an LLM-powered conversational AI partner integrated with instructor-provided courseware, offering learners contextually relevant and immediately applicable support.” …”These findings demonstrate that Jill empowers learners to engage in critical questioning, thereby enhancing their educational experience by promoting depth, relevance, and application of course concepts.”

AI is transforming education into a collaborative interaction between humans and machines - B. Mairéad Pratschke, London School of Economics Impact Blog, May 7, 2025.
”While education is currently focused on the use of machine intelligence in the form of AI assistants, chatbots and tutors, in industry, the focus is on autonomous agents to scale service and operations and humanoid robots to perform formerly human labour. This increase in capabilities means that humans will increasingly interact with intelligent machines as presences in their personal and professional lives.” …”a future that educators need to take seriously.”

The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis - Jin Wang & Wenxiang Fan, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, May 6, 2025.
”The results indicate that ChatGPT has a large positive impact on improving learning performance (g = 0.867) and a moderately positive impact on enhancing learning perception (g = 0.456) and fostering higher-order thinking (g = 0.457).”

AI as a conversation partner and coach - Mamie Rheingold, ChatGPT for Education, May 5, 2025.
”How Julia Minson of the Harvard Kennedy School trained a GPT on her research to help students master constructive disagreement.”

Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities - Open access book from Open Humanities Press, edited by Hannes Bajohr. 2025.
”This collected volume explores a novel approach to the intersection of artificial intelligence and the humanities, proposing that instead of merely writing about AI, scholars should think with AI. Rather than treating AI as an external subject of study, the essays explore how concepts from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science can provide ways to rethink core humanistic questions of meaning, representation, and culture.” (Free PDF)

Making ChatGPT Work for Me - Samantha Keppler, Wichinpong Park Sinchaisri, Clare Snyder, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, may 2, 2025.
”We focus our study on US K12 public school teachers who regularly design and complete text-generation tasks such as creating quizzes, slide decks, word problems, reading passages, lesson plans, classroom activities, and projects.” …”Our study contributes new data and knowledge about how teachers are coming to understand whether and how to integrate generative AI into their teaching preparation routines.”

The Evolution of AI Literacy: navigating the agentic shift - Carlo Iacono, May 2, 2025.
”The emergence of sophisticated multimodal and agentic AI capabilities renders baseline AI literacy, focused on simple prompting and text evaluation, demonstrably insufficient. Interacting effectively and responsibly with systems that can autonomously plan, act, use tools and process information across diverse formats demands a more advanced and critical form of literacy.”

Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula: A New Cohort Project Gets Underway - Ruby MacDougall, et al., Ithaka S+R, April 9, 2025.
”The project will be conducted in partnership with librarians and educators at 45 colleges and universities with deep commitments to promoting AI literacy as a core learning outcome. Together, we will conduct institution-specific and landscape level research on faculty and student practices, priorities, and needs around AI Literacy, and develop actionable pathways to integrating AI literacy into the curricula.”

Making AI Generative for Higher Education - Claire Baytas, Dylan Ruediger, Ithaka S+R, May 1, 2025.
”In the time since these interviews were conducted, the number of individuals within higher education who are highly familiar with AI has only increased. New technologies are emerging— particularly in the realm of agentic AI, a term very few of our interviewees in spring 2024 referenced. Now, the crucial task is managing the transition from the phase of exploration to responsible, well-informed usage of this technology.”

What’s happening in libraries

Carla Hayden removed as Librarian of Congress and what this could mean for authors - Dave Hansen, Authors Alliance, May 9, 2025.
(Not about AI, but an important read).

Eight Hypotheses Why Librarians Don’t Like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) - Frauke Birkhoff, The Scholarly Kitchen, May 8, 2025.
”There is reason to believe that in the next few years, discovery layers as we know them could be displaced by RAG-based search interfaces. Librarians currently working on discovery layers should get acquainted with these tools and ask themselves and their institutions how they should implement them for their communities, be it by using a commercially available tool or by investing in the development of an open-source version. Crucial to the success of these efforts, however, is the acceptance of the librarians implementing, maintaining and using these tools.”

Sensemaking with SIFT Toolbox - A research project by Mike Caulfield. (Caulfield is the creator of the SIFT method for information literacy, a method used by many librarians who teach info lit).
”SIFT Toolbox is a lengthy instruction prompt that outperforms unmodified LLMs in multiple dimensions. You paste it in at the beginning of a chat session (or add it to project instructions) to make the LLM act differently.

With the prompt in place, your LLM will come to better conclusions, hallucinate less, and source conflicting perspectives more systematically. It also models an approach that is less chatbot, and more research assistant in a way that is appropriate for student researchers, who can use it to aid research while coming to their own conclusions.”

Frenemies & That's OK: Useful Tensions & Possibilities Between Libraries and AI - Lance Eaton, May 5, 2025.
(from a talk for the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science Annual Gathering)
”But it’s not all challenges; there are some significant possibilities. One is enhanced research support. A tool like Google’s NotebookLM changes the game for how people can organize and validate research, more effectively than something like ChatGPT, in some cases.

Accessibility is another area of transformation. We’re seeing AI actively at work in live-captioning what I’m saying right now. These tools are making the world more legible for many people, not just those with visual or hearing disabilities, but also those with cognitive differences, or those who prefer different modalities of communication”

Avoiding misconceptions - testing "AI search tools" - What not to do & some research questions to consider - Aaron Tay, Musings About Librarianship, Dec. 27, 2024.
”Stop trying to measure "hallucination" of sources retrieved. I know that when ChatGPT first hit the scene, there was widespread knowledge of the fact that the references it created tended to be wrong or worse yet fictional and I saw more studies that I could count that showed this (here's one).

The problem is that many people don't seem to realize this issue applies only when LLM (Large Language Models) that do not search are used, and they do not apply to search engines even ones that are "AI".

Below shows search results shown by a typical "AI search" tool, Elicit.com. Of the Top 8 results shown below they are 100% "real" even if you think the results are retrieved and ranked by AI!”

Just for fun

• LegoGPT creates Lego designs using AI and text inputs — tool now available for free to the public - Jowi Morales, Tom’s Hardware, May 9, 2025.
  ”The tool is available for free on GitHub, and you can pair this with a computer vision model or image processing AI. For example, you can take a photo of your available LEGO bricks and let the AI give you a multitude of unique options for building with what you already have.”
  

• LegoGPT is new, but it reminds me of another tool from 2023 called Brickit.
  ”Just scatter your bricks and take a photo. Brickit will show you hundreds of ideas for what to build with them, along with the exact location of each piece you’ll need.”
  

• Two AI agents on a phone call realize they’re both AI and switch to a superior audio signal ggwave - YouTube
  

• Kelly Boesch made these beautifully patterned origami pieces and books in MidjourneyV7 and animated them using Pika Labs. The song was made using Suno.

Thought-provoking

New research & techniques
Training as we know it might end - Alexander Doria, Vintage Data
“Synthetic playground are presented as a scientific and experimental design: "We draw inspiration from the physical sciences, where idealized settings—such as friction-less planes or vacuum chambers—reveal first principles by stripping away confounding factors." I now believe this is the future paradigm of training. There is a natural correspondence between playground to assess model capacities, emulators used by the emerging agent systems and, most importantly, the kind of complex pipelines recently used by DeepSeek to push for the frontier of math solving models.”

Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data - Andrew Zhao et al, Machine Learning, May 7, 2025.
”To address these concerns, we propose a new RLVR paradigm called Absolute Zero, in which a single model learns to propose tasks that maximize its own learning progress and improves reasoning by solving them, without relying on any external data. Under this paradigm, we introduce the Absolute Zero Reasoner (AZR), a system that self-evolves its training curriculum and reasoning ability by using a code executor to both validate proposed code reasoning tasks and verify answers, serving as an unified source of verifiable reward to guide open-ended yet grounded learning.” (See also New "Absolute Zero" Model Learns with NO DATA - Matthew Berman on YouTube).

The walled garden cracks: Nadella bets Microsoft’s Copilots—and Azure’s next act—on A2A/MCP interoperability - Louis Columbus, VentureBeat, May 8, 2025.
”Nadella’s endorsement of A2A and MCP protocols shows how far the Microsoft senior management team has agreed that an open protocol approach is the best direction for the company.”

These Startups Are Building Advanced AI Models Without Data Centers - Will Knight, Wired, April 30, 2025.
”Distributed approaches could make it possible for smaller companies and universities to build advanced AI by pooling disparate resources together. Or it could allow countries that lack conventional infrastructure to network together several data centers to build a more powerful model.”

The interoperability breakthrough: How MCP is becoming enterprise AI’s universal language - Emilia David, VentureBeat, May 13, 2025.
”Unlike APIs, organizations can configure their MCP servers with custom instructions laying out what agents can or cannot access. The server can “ask” an agent for its identity and determine if it can tap information on the MCP client side. Companies have more of a say on what outside agents can access on their end, giving MCP more directionality from the enterprise.”

MCP and the innovation paradox: Why open standards will save AI from itself - Noah Schwartz, VentureBeat, May 10, 2025.
”Nobody likes using fragmented tools. No user likes being locked into vendors. And no company wants to rewrite integrations every time they change models. You want freedom to use the best tools. MCP delivers.”

Guardian agents: New approach could reduce AI hallucinations to below 1% - Sean Michael Kerner, VentureBeat, May 13, 2025.
”The guardian agents are functionally software components that monitor and take protective actions within AI workflows. Instead of just applying rules inside of an LLM, the promise of guardian agents is to apply corrective measures in an agentic AI approach that improves workflows. Vectara’s approach makes surgical corrections while preserving the overall content and providing detailed explanations of what was changed and why.”

OpenAI’s $3B Windsurf move: the real reason behind its enterprise AI code push - Matt Marshall, VentureBeat, May 9, 2025.
”Specifically, the maneuver underscores two imperatives for OpenAI: first, the need to arm the vital developer ecosystem with superior coding capabilities, and second, to win the broader, more defining battle to become the primary interface for a future shaped by autonomous AI agents.”

Surveys
Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence: A global study 2025 - University of Melbourne & KPMG International, 2025.
“There are notable differences between countries with advanced and emerging economies: People in emerging economics report greater trust, acceptance and adoption of AI, higher levels of AI literacy, and more realized benefits from AI.”

Copyright
The Copyright Office Report about Fair Use in AI & the Dismissal of the Register of Copyrights: A Drama in Three Parts - Dave Hansen, Authors Alliance, May 12, 2025.
”So we think the efforts to push Perlmutter out are a shame. What exactly motivated them is still an open question. As I mentioned already, the immediate reaction to her removal was that it must have been related to this AI report and the policy positions the Office has taken on AI under her leadership, particularly as some important AI cases are currently hearing, or have just heard, oral arguments directly addressing points raised by the US Copyright Office's report. That doesn’t seem like a crazy deduction, but there may be some other factors at play.”

Copyright and the AI Action Plan - Matthew Sag, March 20, 2025.
”Adverse outcomes in U.S. litigation will not stop the development of AI, they will simply push AI innovation overseas. The reason is straightforward: AI models, once trained, are easily portable. Companies seeking to avoid restrictive copyright rules could simply move their training operations to innovation-friendly jurisdictions like Singapore, Israel, or Japan, and then serve U.S. customers remotely, entirely free of domestic copyright concerns.”

GenAI: Copyight's Unacknowledged Offspring - Lance Eaton, May 12, 2025.
Interesting thoughts: “There is no merit in rejecting AI simply to re-legitimise the same inequities that led us to piracy in the first place.”

Climate
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? - Hannah Ritchie, Sustainability by Numbers, May 5, 2025.
”Very small compared to most of the other stuff you do.”

What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? - Simon Willison, May 6, 2025.
”Hanah is Head of Research at Our World in Data, a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford (bio) and maintains a prolific newsletter on energy and sustainability so she has a lot more credibility in this area than Andy or myself!”

Why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment - a cheat sheet - Andy Masley, April 27, 2025.
”All the changes we can make in our personal consumption choices are nothing compared to what we can do if we contribute to making the energy grid green. The current AI debate feels like we’ve forgotten that lesson. After years of progress in addressing systemic issues over personal lifestyle changes, it’s as if everyone suddenly started obsessing over whether the digital clocks in our bedrooms use too much energy and began condemning them as a major problem. It’s sad to see the climate movement get distracted. We have gigantic problems and real enemies to deal with. ChatGPT isn’t one of them.”

Replies to criticisms of my posts on ChatGPT & the environment - Andy Masley, May 8, 2025.
”I want to make something clear about why I decided to post about this more, because a lot of people were implying I have some nefarious connection to the AI labs. It’s fun to imagine being evil or a part of some big conspiracy, but the reality’s pretty boring: I was motivated entirely by a deep sense of unease as a former physics teacher that so many people were speaking in such apocalyptic tones about such small amounts of energy.”

More from Simon Willison - April 29, 2025.
”Andy Masley has pulled together by far the most convincing rebuttal of this idea that I've seen anywhere.”

AI & Climate: Seeing the Forest, Not Just the Kilowatt-Hours - Tim Dasey, April 25, 2025.
”The idea that we should unduly restrict or slow down the exploration of AI's potential solely because of its energy footprint feels shortsighted. Climate change is perhaps the most complex, multifaceted challenge humanity has ever faced. Frankly, I don't see how we solve it without AI. We need AI to model the complexities, find novel solutions, understand behavior change, and optimize adaptation. Asking educators and students to view AI primarily as a climate problem risks blinding them to its potential as a critical climate solution. Let's have more nuanced conversations. Let's push for policies that harness AI for climate action. Let's teach students to analyze the entire system of AI's impact, weighing the costs against the benefits and the potential for innovation.”

From waste to solutions: How an Australian startup is revolutionizing excess renewables with AI innovation - AI for Good, LinkedIn, May 2, 2025.
”By deploying decentralized AI compute nodes in regions with surplus renewable energy and leveraging its AI application for intelligent workload timing, Project Ohm actively contributes to affordable and clean energy, industry innovation, and climate action. This pioneering approach turns a global challenge into a valuable resource, bringing advantages like fewer emissions, a more stable energy grid, lower computing expenses, and the creation of AI systems powered by clean energy, even in remote areas.”

Explanations
Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means - Simon Willison, May 1, 2025.
”I think there is a real need for a book on actual vibe coding: helping people who are not software developers—and who don’t want to become developers—learn how to use vibe coding techniques safely, effectively and responsibly to solve their problems.”

Artificial intelligence learns to reason - Melanie Mitchell, Science, March 20, 2025.
“There has been substantial debate in the AI community on whether LRMs are “genuinely reasoning” or “merely mimicking” the kinds of human reasoning that is in the pretraining or post-training data.”

AI skepticism vs AI optimism
The Misunderstood Role of AI Skeptics - Alberto Romero, The Algorithmic Bridge, May 1, 2025.
”And it’s absolutely crucial to figure out who belongs to which camp—because while the former can be easily ignored, their irrelevance often matching their ignorance of the topic they’ve chosen to object to, the latter are, if anything, the most valuable force we have to counter the fever for power that afflicts the AI enablers..” Sorts skeptics into categories and promotes “those who question the execution by the optimists but not their forward-looking mindset.” Like Melanie Mitchell, François Chollet, and Arvind Narayanan.

Inspiration
AI Isn’t Only a Tool—It’s a Whole New Storytelling Medium - Eliot Peper, April 28, 2025.
”Again, we couldn’t use deterministic logic to control probabilistic technology. Our methods needed to evolve to match our means. The solution required following the advice of an unusual sage: Stephen King. King doesn’t believe in plot. As he explains in his book On Writing, his stories flow naturally out of a specific character finding themselves in a particular situation.”

Three Questions: Josh Vermillion - Scott Dickensheets, Nevada Public Radio, April 16, 2025. (Follow Vermillion’s work on Instagram)
”I see a lot of recycled, unserious critiques of AI, but there is really room to help ourselves understand what’s innately human, what can’t be automated. Things like ethics and empathy, those qualities that are probably more important now than ever. What I would hate, though, is to unequivocally dismiss a technology that is really going to be transformative in the long run. I don’t think we can do that.”

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History - John Pavlus, Quanta Magazine, April 30, 2025.
A fascinating history.

Beneficial uses of AI

Yes, LLMs Can Be Better at Search Than Traditional Search - Mike Caulfield, May 10, 2025. (He’s the creator of the SIFT method for information literacy)
”It takes a specialized prompt, but LLMs can significantly outperform search.”

AI Is Not Your Friend - Mike Caulfield, The Atlantic, May 9, 2025.
”But the technology has evolved rapidly over the past year or so. Today’s systems can incorporate real-time search and use increasingly sophisticated methods for “grounding”—connecting AI outputs to specific, verifiable knowledge and sourced analysis. They can footnote and cite, pulling in sources and perspectives not just as an afterthought but as part of their exploratory process; links to outside articles are now a common feature. My own research in this space suggests that with proper prompting, these systems can begin to resemble something like Vannevar Bush’s idea of the memex.”

Google rolls out AI tools to protect Chrome users against scams - Aisha Malik, TechCrunch, May 8, 2025.

How The Ottawa Hospital uses AI ambient voice capture to reduce physician burnout by 70%, achieve 97% patient satisfaction - Taryn Plumb, VentureBeat, May 8, 2025.
”…the tool has reduced after-hours, charting and documentation work for “all categories of physicians.” This not only saves them time but helps reduce burnout because they have less tedious work to do.

The tool has also improved clinician cognitive load during visits: Instead of focusing on inputting patient details and navigating documents and forms, they are able to “engage differently and better,” said Kearns. Additionally, “we saw an increased level of throughput, more patients per shift, per physician.”

The Cat, the X-rays, and the AI Who Saw What We Couldn’t - Dr. Jeanne Beatrix Law, May 6, 2025.
”ChatGPT didn’t save Biggs. But she gave me a new way to see his condition—with granular, trackable language. She helped me recognize the gap between “looks okay” and “is okay.” That matters.”

Our new AI strategy puts Wikipedia’s humans first - Chris Albon and Leila Zia, Wikimedia Foundation, April 20, 2025.
”We believe that our future work with AI will be successful not only because of what we do, but how we do it. Our efforts will use our long-held values, principles, and policies (like privacy and human rights) as a compass: we will take a human-centered approach and will prioritize human agency; we will prioritize using open-source or open-weight AI; we will prioritize transparency; and we will take a nuanced approach to multilinguality, a fundamental part of Wikipedia.”

DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication - Google, April 14, 2025.
”..on National Dolphin Day, Google, in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Tech and the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), is announcing progress on DolphinGemma: a foundational AI model trained to learn the structure of dolphin vocalizations and generate novel dolphin-like sound sequences.'“

The future

Voicing Change: How the next news interface sets a generational challenge – and opportunity – for newsrooms - World Association of News Publishers, May 8, 2025.
”‘Information is no longer a broadcast – it is now a dialogue.’ Nikita Roy illustrates how the next wave of conversational, voice-first AI is already upon us – boosted by Gen Alpha and GenZ’s active participation, with deep implications for the future of news.”

What Lovable teaches us about AI tools - Marcel Salathé, May 4, 2025.
”Two weeks ago, I started experimenting with Lovable, one of the so-called “vibe coding” platforms that let you generate web applications just by describing what you want.” … “Despite all these issues, I’m quite excited about these tools. The issues I encountered aren’t fundamental flaws, but rather growing pains. And most of them will be fixed. When they are, this will be absolutely transformative.” “We’re early. Very early. The problems today … will get smoothed out fast. When they do, the entire UX of web / app development may look completely different.”

It’s Me, Hi. I’m the Vibe Coder. - Katie Parrott, Every, May 1, 2025.
”It’s easy to dismiss these as edge cases, but I see them as early signals—prototypes of what the future of building might look like. Vibe coding feels similar to a workplace innovation like Excel, which gave non-programmers a way to automate insight and express their expertise in a scalable way.”

AGI is not a milestone: There is no capability threshold that will lead to sudden impacts - Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan (the authors of AI Snake Oil), May 1, 2025.
”Even if general-purpose AI systems reach some agreed-upon capability threshold, we will need many complementary innovations that allow AI to diffuse across industries to realize its productive impact. Diffusion occurs at human (and societal) timescales, not at the speed of tech development.”

These Startups Are Building Advanced AI Models Without Data Centers - Will Knight, Wired, April 20, 2025.
”Distributed approaches could make it possible for smaller companies and universities to build advanced AI by pooling disparate resources together. Or it could allow countries that lack conventional infrastructure to network together several data centers to build a more powerful model.”

The ‘era of experience’ will unleash self-learning AI agents across the web—here’s how to prepare - Ben Dickson, VentureBeat, April 30, 2025.
”The authors argue that the “pace of progress driven solely by supervised learning from human data is demonstrably slowing, signaling the need for a new approach.” And that approach requires a new source of data, which must be generated in a way that continually improves as the agent becomes stronger. “This can be achieved by allowing agents to learn continually from their own experience, i.e., data that is generated by the agent interacting with its environment,” Sutton and Silver write.”

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar or course for your group. This spring I offered multiple webinar series — for Boston Library Consortium, Penn State Libraries, and Mayo Clinic Libraries. I’m taking a break for the summer, but will be open to doing more in the fall.

»» Sign up here if you’d like to be notified of future courses I’m offering.««

And as always, you can follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon where I post daily about generative AI.

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Hi everyone!

If you’re new here, welcome! I usually publish about once a month, but sometimes less often when my life gets busy (like recently).

A lot has been happening in the world of genAI, so let’s jump right into it.

In this issue we’ll look at:

• News about ChatGPT 4.5, Claude 3.7, & some interesting updates in Google’s AI Studio.

• “DeepResearch” is available in so many places.. there’s a lot to experiment with here — and what does it mean for the future of library research?

• Developing AI Literacy: Reflections on Teaching a Six-week Course for Library Workers - my recent blog post on LibTech Insights.

• Several interesting stories about genAI for improving accessibility.

• What’s happening with genAI in education and in libraries.

• Many thought-provoking articles, as usual! (like this one about copyright and this one about AI and climate)

Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Foundation Models

OpenAI

OpenAI expands GPT-4.5 rollout. Here's how to access (and what it can do for you) - Sabrina Ortiz, ZDNet
”On Wednesday morning, OpenAI announced via an X post that it began rolling out GPT-4.5 to ChatGPT Plus users. When first announced, OpenAI shared that the full rollout could take one to three hours. However, just an hour later, the full rollout of GPT-4.5 was completed, which was faster than expected, according to the X post. “

OpenAI releases ‘largest, most knowledgable’ model GPT-4.5 with reduced hallucinations and high API price - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

ChatGPT update adds canvas sharing and improved reasoning transparency - Alexey Shabanov, TestingCatalog
”Users can now share their canvases by generating a public URL. When someone opens this link, they will see a rendered version of the canvas. …This feature is similar to Artifact Remix on Claude, enabling easier collaboration and content sharing.”

Too many models, too much confusion: OpenAI pledges to simplify its product line - Emilia David, VentureBeat
”OpenAI’s decision to simplify how it presents models points to a continuing problem: Not everyone understands what each model is supposed to do and what makes it different. OpenAI is not alone in this.”

Navigating the confusing names of AI models (13 page PDF) - Tianyu Xu on LinkedIn
Here’s a direct link to the PDF. Hopefully this won’t be needed if/when OpenAI simplifies things.

Anthropic
Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Fantastic Model Held Back by Lack of Native Internet Access, Daniel Nest, Why Try AI
(I heard the CEU of Anthropic say they will add web search later this year).

Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet takes aim at OpenAI and DeepSeek in AI’s next big battle - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat

Apple
Apple prepares to add Google Gemini to Apple Intelligence - William Gallagher, Apple Insider

Microsoft
Announcing Free, Unlimited Access to Think Deeper and Voice - Microsoft

Microsoft’s new Phi-4 AI models pack big performance in small packages - Michale Nuñez, VentureBeat

Google
Enhancing video navigation and accessibility with Google Drive video transcripts - Google Workspace Updates

Google Search’s new ‘AI Mode’ lets users ask complex, multi-part questions - Aisha Malik, TechCrunch
”AI Mode is rolling out to Google One AI Premium subscribers starting this week and is accessible via Search Labs, Google’s experimental arm.” (video demo)

Reference past chats for more tailored help with Gemini Advanced - Dave Citron, Google
”Starting today, Gemini can now recall your past chats to provide more helpful responses. Whether you’re asking a question about something you’ve already discussed, or asking Gemini to summarize a previous conversation, Gemini now uses information from relevant chats to craft a response. That means no more starting over from scratch or having to search for a previous conversation thread.”

You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results - Ryan Whitwam, ArsTechnica
”Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.”

Data Science Agent in Colab: The future of data analysis with Gemini - Fine et al., Google for Developers

DeepSeek
DeepSeek rushes to launch new AI model as China goes all in - Eduardo Baptista, Julie Zhu and Fanny Potkin, Reuters

DeepSeek to share some AI model code, doubling down on open source - Reuters

Today we're open-sourcing R1 1776, a version of the DeepSeek-R1 model that has been post-trained to provide unbiased, accurate, and factual information - Perplexity

DeepSeek and shallow moats: what does it mean for higher education? - Ben Swift, Times Higher Education
”Despite trillions of dollars of investment, it really does still seem like an upstart can come out of nowhere to release – and share – something that’s competitive with state-of-the-art offerings from the tech giants. This poses a strategic question for higher education leaders: how should institutions position themselves in response?”

Other models
Mistral releases new optical character recognition (OCR) API claiming top performance globally - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
”Unlike traditional OCR solutions that primarily focus on text extraction, Mistral OCR is designed to interpret various document typographical elements and characters, including tables, mathematical expressions and interleaved images, while maintaining structured outputs.”

Alibaba’s new open source model QwQ-32B matches DeepSeek-R1 with way smaller compute requirements - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
”… it’s available for commercial and research uses, so enterprises can employ it immediately to power their products and applications (even ones they charge customers to use). It can also be accessed for individual users via Qwen Chat.”

Introducing Poe Apps - Poe.com
”Today we are introducing Poe Apps, which make it easy to build visual interfaces on top of any combination of the existing models on Poe and custom logic expressed in JavaScript.”

Manus AI agent could be the next "Deepseek moment" for Western AI labs - Jonathan Kemper, The Decoder
Use cases on the Manus website. Waiting list for now. Brent Anders discusses what it means for academia.

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Images, video, music, and voices

Video
From the YouTube CEO: Our big bets for 2025 - Neal Mohan, YouTube
”As we look ahead, we'll continue investing in AI tools that empower creators and artists throughout their creative journey. Last year we rolled out Dream Screen and Dream Track which generate image backgrounds, video backgrounds and instrumental soundtracks for Shorts. We’ll continue investing in these features, including integrating Veo 2 into Dream Screen soon.”

ChatGPT app could soon generate AI videos with Sora - Best of AI
”OpenAI is planning to integrate its Sora text-to-video generation tool into the ChatGPT app, expanding its availability beyond the current web client exclusive to paid users.”

Alibaba Makes AI Video Generator Wan 2.1 Free to Use - Pesala Bandara, PetaPixel
”Alibaba announced that four models that are part of its Wan 2.1 series are now open source and can be downloaded and modified by users. Wan 2.1 can generate images and video from text and image inputs.” (See examples in this review from Curious Refuge on YouTube).

Voice
Perplexity's voice mode gets a futuristic makeover on your iPhone - Eric Hal Schwartz, Tech Radar

Octave TTS: the first text-to-speech system that understands what it’s saying - Hume

Hume launches new text-to-speech model Octave that generates custom AI voices with adjustable emotions - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

ElevenLabs’ new speech-to-text model Scribe is here with highest accuracy rate so far (96.7% for English) - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

Alexa+ is Amazon's AI answer to... well, pretty much everything - The Neuron
”…it uses both Amazon's Nova and Anthropic's Claude models, selecting the best AI for any specific task.” Free for Prime members or $19.99/month, officially rolls out in the US over the next few weeks via an early access period.

Rebuilding Alexa: How Amazon is mixing models, agents and browser-use for smarter AI - Emilia David, VentureBeat

Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice - Brendan Iribe, Ankit Kumar, and the Sesame team
(Try their demos).

Music
NotaGen: Advancing Musicality in Symbolic Music Generation with Large Language Model Training Paradigms - Wang et al.
Includes several classical music examples on the bottom of the page.

DeepResearch in all its forms

These experts were stunned by OpenAI Deep Research - Timothy B. Lee, Understanding AI

The Rise of Agent-Based Deep Research: Exploring OpenAI’s Deep Research, Gemini Deep Research, Perplexity Deep Research, Ai2 ScholarQA, STORM, and More in 2025 - Aaron Tay

OpenAI expands Deep Research access to Plus users, heating up AI agent wars with DeepSeek and Claude - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat

A Note on Deep Research Products and the Return of the Traditional Credibility Chain - Mike Caulfield, The Ends of Argument

The Deep Research problem - Benedict Evans
Interesting commentary.

Perplexity just made AI research crazy cheap—what that means for the industry - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat (on pricing for Deep Research)
”The launch exposes a painful truth in AI pricing: Expensive enterprise subscriptions may be unnecessary. While Anthropic and OpenAI charge thousands monthly for their services, Perplexity offers five free queries daily to all users. Pro subscribers pay $20 monthly for 500 daily queries and faster processing — a price point that could force larger AI companies to explain why their services cost up to 100 times more.”

How we evaluated Elicit Reports - Étienne Fortier-Dubois, Elicit
”We recently announced Elicit Reports: fully-automated research overviews for actual researchers, inspired by systematic reviews.”

A Practical Guide to Implementing DeepSearch/DeepResearch - Han Xiao, Jina AI
”In this article, we'll discuss the principles of DeepSearch and DeepResearch by looking into our open-source implementation.” (very interesting)

Tips

Prompt Engineering Guide for Deep Research with ChatGPT’s O3-Model - Max van den Broek on LinkedIn

Writing effective text prompts for video generation - Adobe Firefly

Here Are My Go-To AI Tools - Daniel Nest, Why Try AI
A useful list of his preferred LLMs, image models, AI video sites, music makers, and research tools.

Open AI: compare models - OpenAI
You can now compare their models in a handy chart.

How to master new topics with AI - Daniel Nest, Why Try AI
Ideas for prompts like this: ““Summarize key themes and insights in the attached sources. Identify any inconsistencies or knowledge areas that aren’t sufficiently covered. Provide potential research questions that might help address these knowledge gaps.”

Private, Useful, and Optional AI: DuckDuckGo offers free access to popular AI chatbots at Duck.ai and expands AI-assisted answers - DuckDuckGo News
Good for privacy: “Get free, anonymized access to popular chatbots at Duck.ai.”

My offerings

Developing AI Literacy: Reflections on Teaching a Six-week Course for Library Workers - Nicole Hennig, LibTech Insights
My reflections on teaching the course in November/December 2024. I’m offering it again via Infopeople, beginning April 15. Learn more about the course or register now.

ACRL AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers - PDF, draft ready for comment
I’ve been on this task force for several months. Now we have a draft ready for comments from library workers. Here’s the feedback form (fill out by Mar. 26).

The Creative Resister - custom GPT and The Creative Resister bot on Poe - both by Nicole Hennig
Here are my bots for websites facing pressure to remove DEI or climate-change related content. They are based on ideas from Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny. (Not meant to suggest obeying in advance). Here’s a sample output from Poe you can read without a Poe account.

Generative AI Sparks New Library Frontiers - episode 2 of The Infinite Stream by Kyle Bylin
I was interviewed for this episode of The Infinite Stream Podcast.

Accessibility

Meta’s AI-Powered Ray-Bans Are Life-Enhancing for the Blind - Sarah E. Needleman, Wall St Journal
”After Allison Pomeroy lost most of her vision two years ago, her husband began reading menus, signage and other text out loud to her. He doesn’t need to anymore".”

Nvidia helps launch AI platform for teaching American Sign Language - Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat
”Nvidia, the American Society for Deaf Children and creative agency Hello Monday are helping close this gap with Signs, an interactive web platform built to support ASL learning and the development of accessible AI applications.”

AI Audiobooks & Learning - Lance Eaton, AI + Education = Simplified
”Of course, there is an argument that AI will take jobs from artists like narrators. That is, companies and self-publishers will opt to use an AI narrator and therefore, there will be fewer paying opportunities and those will inevitably go to the more established and popular narrators (the rich get richer). And there’s truth in that, but in the context of the world we live in, it also becomes an anti-accessibility argument. There are amazing entities like the Learning Ally (formerly Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic) and National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled doing important work to make books accessible to those with visual disabilities and yet, they are never going to be able to keep up with the millions of books published each year, never mind the backlog of millions of books that have never been converted to audio.”

Notes from an Accessibility and Gen AI podcast appearance - Simon Willison
”Some people I’ve talked to have been skeptical about the accessibility benefits because their argument is that if you give somebody unreliable technology that might hallucinate and make things up, surely that’s harming them. I don’t think that’s true. I feel like people who use screen readers are used to unreliable technology… When you consider that people with accessibility needs have agency, they can understand the limitations of the technology they’re using. I feel like giving them a tool where they can point their phone at something and it can describe it to them is a world away from accessibility technology just three or four years ago.

What’s happening in education

Creativity with AI: New Report Imagines the Future of Student Success, Brian Johnsrud, Adobe Blog

Building an AI-Ready Workforce: A Look at College Student ChatGPT Adoption in the US - OpenAI. (PDF)
Includes top student use cases from OpenAI user data: learning/tutoring, writing help, misc. questions, and programming help.

Estonia provides free ChatGPT for its entire secondary education system - Stefan Bauschard, Education Disrupted

Designing courses with an AI assistant - Jeremy Caplan and Maime Rheingold, ChatGPT for Education

Shaping integrity: why generative artificial intelligence does not have to undermine education - Myles Joshua Toledo Tan and Nicholle Mae Amor Tan Maravilla, Front. Artif. Intell. , 23 October 2024
”This discussion will explore how GAI can be integrated into education in ways that support rather than erode academic integrity. By examining the ethical frameworks of deontological ethics and consequentialism, and educational theories like constructivist learning and SDT, we will argue that AI, when used responsibly, can enhance digital literacy, foster intrinsic motivation, and support genuine knowledge construction.”

Audio-Based Learning 4.0 - Dr. Philippa Hardman
”What's super interesting is how the solid research backing audio's effectiveness is and how well this is converging with these new AI capabilities. Tools like ElevenLabs and Google MusicFX are helping to remove a lot of barriers that have made creating quality learning audio content challenging. It’s now easier than ever for anyone interested in innovating their pedagogical approaches to start experimenting with evidence-based audio content in their work.”

‘Generative AI is making our students more creative than ever’ - Ramona Pistol, Times Higher Education
”The future of education isn’t about AI creating content – it’s about students becoming more creative through their interaction with AI. It’s time for our teaching practices to reflect this reality. One way to do this is to embrace GenAI as a collaborative partner and facilitate GenAI-enhanced project-based learning by designing projects relevant to real-world issues that allow students to use it creatively.”

How is AI Changing What it Means to Learn? - The Centaur by AI Consensus
Thoughts and examples from grad students.

AI legibility, physical archives, and the future of research - Benjamin Breen, ResObscura
”In other words: physical research and critical thinking about the nature of archives and qualitative data just got way more important. Not less.”

Introducing NextGenAI: A consortium to advance research and education with AI - OpenAI
”NextGenAI’s founding partners are Caltech, the California State University system, Duke University, the University of Georgia, Harvard University, Howard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, the University of Mississippi, The Ohio State University, the University of Oxford, Sciences Po, Texas A&M University, as well as Boston Children’s Hospital, the Boston Public Library, and OpenAI.”

Examples:

• “Texas A&M is using NextGenAI resources to fuel their Generative AI Literacy Initiative, providing hands-on training to enhance the responsible use of AI in academic settings.”

• “MIT students and faculty will be able to use OpenAI’s API and compute funding to train and fine-tune their own AI models and develop new applications.”

• “Howard will use AI to develop curricula, experiment with new teaching methods, improve university operations, and give students hands-on AI experience to prepare them as future leaders.”

What’s happening in libraries

Outlook on Federal Funding Threats to Libraries: What library workers need to know to advocate for their institutions - Larra Clark, American
Not about AI, but important to know about.

Libraries supporting data rescue - Data Rescue Project
Also not about AI, but important to know about.

AI Literacy: A Guide for Academic Libraries - Leo S. Lo, College & Research Libraries News
”Cross-cutting themes.” Human-AI collaboration, lifelong learning & adaptation, equity & access.

From Here to AI Transformation - Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons
”The standard committee structure with representation from all stakeholders and careful deliberation over time serves many purposes well. But it falters in the face of rapid technological change. Establishing small, interdisciplinary response teams with the authority to implement changes without navigating the full bureaucratic labyrinth become necessary. These teams combine technical expertise, pedagogical wisdom, and operational authority.”

Cutting through the noise: Assessing tools that employ artificial intelligence - Norgueria et al., IFLA Journal
See tables 1 and 2 for “guiding questions for reflection when assessing innovative AI tools and services.”

Artificial Intelligence in PhD education: New perspectives for research libraries - Grote et al., Liber Quarterly
”The study reveals a degree of uncertainty among librarians about their role in the AI academic nexus. For the development of competences of teaching staff in academic libraries, the paper recommends to integrate AI-related topics into existing educational resources and to create arenas for sharing experiences and knowledge with relevant partners both within and outside the university.”

Just for fun

Nobody Believes Cassandra (or, The Tragedy of Cassandra in the Age of Artificial Intelligence) - James Maynard, AI Creator House on YouTube
“What if the key to saving the future lies in the past? 🤔 In Nobody Believes Cassandra, Dr. Cassandra Selene creates HELEN, an AI designed to decode history—but when it starts predicting the future, everything changes. 🌍⏳”

Take a look at this 54-minute film, made with numerous AI tools by my husband, James. It took him several months to create. Check out his website, AI Creator House, for more films he’s made with the help of AI.

Thought-provoking

New research & techniques
Inception emerges from stealth with a new type of AI model - Marina Temkin, TechCrunch
”Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short.” (faster with reduced computing costs)

OctoTools: Stanford’s open-source framework optimizes LLM reasoning through modular tool orchestration - Ben Dickson, VentureBeat
”OctoTools, a new open-source agentic platform released by scientists at Stanford University, can turbocharge large language models (LLMs) for reasoning tasks by breaking down tasks into subunits and enhancing the models with tools.”

A new generation of AIs: Claude 3.7 and Grok 3 - Ethan Mollick
”Together, these two trends are supercharging AI abilities, and also adding others. If you have a large, smart AI model, that can be used to create smaller, faster, cheaper models that are still quite smart, if not as much as their parent. And if you add Reasoner capabilities to even small models, they get even smarter. What that means is that AI abilities are getting better even as costs are dropping.”

Well, it looks like Meta's Yann LeCun may have been right about AI - again - Maximillian Schreiner, The Decoder
“A new study led by Meta's Head of AI Yann LeCun demonstrates how artificial intelligence can develop basic physics understanding just by watching videos. The findings support LeCun's alternative vision to generative AI and challenge approaches like OpenAI's Sora.”

Researchers find you don’t need a ton of data to train LLMs for reasoning tasks - Ben Dickson, VentureBeat
”Their findings show that with just a small batch of well-curated examples, you can train an LLM for tasks that were thought to require tens of thousands of training instances. This efficiency is due to the inherent knowledge that modern LLMs obtain during the pre-training phase. With new training methods becoming more data- and compute-efficient, enterprises might be able to create customized models without requiring access to the resources of large AI labs.”

Mayo Clinic’s secret weapon against AI hallucinations: Reverse RAG in action - Taryn Plumb, VentureBeat
”The hospital has employed what is essentially backwards RAG, where the model extracts relevant information, then links every data point back to its original source content. Remarkably, this has eliminated nearly all data-retrieval-based hallucinations in non-diagnostic use cases — allowing Mayo to push the model out across its clinical practice.”

Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Less - Xu et al., arxiv.org
”In this work, we propose Chain of Draft (CoD), a novel paradigm inspired by human cognitive processes, where LLMs generate minimalistic yet informative intermediate reasoning outputs while solving tasks. By reducing verbosity and focusing on critical insights, CoD matches or surpasses CoT in accuracy while using as little as only 7.6% of the tokens, significantly reducing cost and latency across various reasoning tasks.”

Surveys
Goodbye Google? People are increasingly switching to the likes of ChatGPT, according to major survey – here’s why - Chris Rowlands, TechRadar
”Survey data suggests chatbots are replacing search engines.”

National AI opinion monitor: AI trust and knowledge in Ameria - Katherine Ognyanova and Vivek Singh, Rutgers University (PDF)
”Here, we examine public trust in AI, in the companies that use it, and in the news content produced by it. We also evaluate people’s objective and perceived knowledge about artificial intelligence.”

Copyright
AI and Copyright: Expanding Copyright Hurts Everyone—Here’s What to Do Instead - Tori Noble, Electronic Frontier Foundation
”You shouldn't need a permission slip to read a webpage–whether you do it with your own eyes, or use software to help. AI is a category of general-purpose tools with myriad beneficial uses. Requiring developers to license the materials needed to create this technology threatens the development of more innovative and inclusive AI models, as well as important uses of AI as a tool for expression and scientific research.”

Breaking down a federal court's ruling on AI and copyright - Mathew Ingram, The Torment Nexus
”I saw headlines that claimed this was a "landmark ruling" and a "major win" for content creators, that the AI industry was on the ropes, that this decision marked a turning point in the debate over copyright and artificial intelligence, that fair use is over as a defense for AI training, etc. etc. Is this accurate? Not really. It is definitely true that the court's ruling is the first significant federal decision related to AI and copyright. But there are a number of reasons why this case doesn't have as much impact on AI and copyright as the headlines might lead you to believe.”

Open source
Defending Open Source AI Against the Monopolist, the Jingoist, the Doomer and the Idiot - Daniel Jeffries, Future History
”Whenever you hear something like “so and so is expert in AI and they say AI will take over the world,’ the first question to ask yourself here is "expert in what? Just because you are an expert in the inner workings of AI, does not mean you are an expert in psychology, business, economics, history, or how technology develops and changes over time.”

Climate
How much energy does ChatGPT use? - Josh You, Epoch AI
”A commonly-cited claim is that powering an individual ChatGPT query requires around 3 watt-hours of electricity, or 10 times as much as a Google search.1 This is often brought up to express concern over AI’s impact on the environment, climate change, or the electric grid. However, we believe that this figure of 3 watt-hours per query is likely an overestimate. In this issue, we revisit this question using a similar methodology, but using up-to-date facts and clearer assumptions. We find that typical ChatGPT queries using GPT-4o likely consume roughly 0.3 watt-hours, which is ten times less than the older estimate. This difference comes from more efficient models and hardware compared to early 2023, and an overly pessimistic estimate of token counts in the original estimate.”

Here’s How We Can Power the AI Boom Without Building a Ton of New Gas Plants - Alexander C. Kaufman, Mother Jones
”… new research from Duke University shows how we could do four Stargate Projects without building a single new power plant. The study, published Tuesday morning, found that scaling back power usage by just 0.5 percent per year could free up supply on the grid for nearly 100 gigawatts of additional power demand.”

Microsoft powers AI ambitions with 400 MW solar purchase - Tim De Chant, TechCrunch
”Microsoft has added another 389 megawatts of renewable power to its portfolio as the tech giant scrambles to meet the power demands required to match its AI ambitions. The additional renewable power spans three solar projects developed by EDP Renewables North America — two in southern Illinois and one outside Austin, Texas.”

Deepfakes
Deepfakes and the 2024 US Election - Bruce Schneir, Schneir on Security
” ‘We find that (1) half of AI use isn’t deceptive, (2) deceptive content produced using AI is nevertheless cheap to replicate without AI, and (3) focusing on the demand for misinformation rather than the supply is a much more effective way to diagnose problems and identify interventions.’ “

“This tracks with my analysis. People share as a form of social signaling. I send you a meme/article/clipping/photo to show that we are on the same team.”

Explanations
Scaling up: how increasing inputs has made artificial intelligence more capable - Veronika Samborska, Our World in Data
”The path to recent advanced AI systems has been more about building larger systems than making scientific breakthroughs.” (useful, simple explanations)

Demystifying Reasoning Models - Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D., Deep (Learning) Focus
”Recently, a completely new paradigm in LLM research has emerged: reasoning. Reasoning models approach problem solving in a completely different manner compared to standard LLMs. In particular, they spend a variable amount of time “thinking” prior to providing their final answer to a question.” (Long and interesting technical explanation).

Inspiration
Three Fallacies: Alondra Nelson's Remarks at the Elysée Palace on the Occasion of the AI Action Summit - Alondra Nelson, Tech Policy Press
”We can create systems that expand opportunity rather than concentrate power. We can build technology that strengthens democracy rather than undermines it. Now, as we shape what may be humanity’s most transformative innovation, we must ensure AI follows this tradition.”

Beneficial uses of AI

How AI can help fact checkers - Dr. David Corney, Full Fact

Announcing the winners of the Frugal AI Challenge 🌱 - Sasha Luccioni and Theo Alves, Hugging Face

An AI model that can decode and design living organisms - Andrew Maynard, The Future of Being Human

AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years - Tom Gerken, BBC

Google’s new AI co-scientist aims to speed up the scientific discovery process - Gyana Swain, ComputerWorld

Face readers: Artificial intelligence is becoming better than humans at scanning animals’ faces for signs of stress and pain - Christa Lesté-Lasserre, Science
”As each pig squeezes into her feeding stall, a tiny camera snaps a photo of her face.” (I like the name: “Intellipig” - good for animal welfare)

Mistral Saba - Mistral AI
”Mistral Saba is a 24B parameter model trained on meticulously curated datasets from across the Middle East and South Asia. The model provides more accurate and relevant responses than models that are over 5 times its size, while being significantly faster and lower cost. The model can also serve as a strong base to train highly specific regional adaptations.”

ChatGPT Saved My Life (No, Seriously, I’m Writing this from the ER) - Bethany Crystal
”How using AI as a bridge when doctors aren't available can improve patient-to-doctor communications in real time emergencies.”

Cohere’s first vision model Aya Vision is here with broad, multilingual understanding and open weights - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat
”Aya Vision’s capabilities have broad implications across multiple fields:

• Language learning and education: Users can translate and describe images in multiple languages, making educational content more accessible.

• Cultural preservation: The model can generate detailed descriptions of art, landmarks and historical artifacts, supporting cultural documentation in underrepresented languages.

• Accessibility tools: Vision-based AI can assist visually impaired users by providing detailed image descriptions in their native language.”

The future

What AI can currently do is not the story - Ege Erdil, Epoch AI
”If you want to predict the future of AI beyond a horizon of a few years, it’s not a good idea to anchor on the present capabilities of AI systems, or even on the present rate of change of those capabilities. You should instead think in terms of the intrinsic difficulty of various tasks, many of which current AI systems cannot perform at all, and what that means for the resource demands of automating those tasks using AI.”

Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf just challenged Anthropic CEO’s vision for AI’s future - Michael Nuñuz, VentureBeat
”Wolf’s critique doesn’t suggest abandoning current approaches, but rather augmenting them with new techniques and metrics specifically aimed at fostering contrarian thinking. In his post, Wolf suggests that new benchmarks should be developed to test whether scientific AI models can “challenge their own training data knowledge” and “take bold counterfactual approaches.””

The Model is the Product - Vintage Data
”To reassert: the big labs are not advancing with an hidden agenda. While they can be opaque at time, they laying it all in the open: they will bundle, they will go up the application layer and they will attempt to capture most of the value there.”

Learn more

My six-week online course, AI Literacy for Library Workers, is happening again via Infopeople, beginning April 15. The Nov/Dec session went well and I enjoyed teaching it! You can register here.

Here you can read some comments from people who participated in the Nov/Dec session of the course.

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Hi everyone,

Happy New Year! I hope you had a relaxing holiday season.

There have been so many developments in the world of generative AI lately that everyone seems to agree — it’s overwhelming!

So I’ll aim to give you an overview here. It’s a lot to absorb.

(Perhaps I’ll create a new webinar topic this month or next for updating people on the newest developments).

• First there was the 12 days of OpenAI: The Ars Technica recap.

• Where Google seemed to be lagging last year, now it seems to be leading. Google unveils new reasoning model Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking to rival OpenAI o1

• Google’s Deep Research is very interesting! Does the research for you (but not sources behind paywalls). A phoenix in Silicon Valley: Google rises!

• Check out the live streaming mode on Google AI Studio - share your screen or your webcam and Gemini will talk to you about what you’re doing on the computer, Gemini 2.0 Flash: An outstanding multi-modal LLM with a sci-fi streaming mode.

• For a bit of wisdom, see 15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to - Ethan Mollick.

• See below for the usual news of what’s happening in libraries and in education.

• Also see below for tips, “just for fun,” thought-provoking articles, and more.
  

Here are my favorite pieces that sum up 2024:

• Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 - Simon Willison

• What just happened: A transformative month rewrites the capabilities of AI - Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing

And here’s my favorite piece with predictions for 2025:

• Thoughts on 2025: Beyond the AI Hype - Utility, Reality, and the Great Reassessment - Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons

Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Foundation Models

OpenAI - ChatGPT

12 days of OpenAI: The Ars Technica recap - Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

o3 - wow - AI Explained on YouTube
Very interesting analysis from one of my favorite YouTube channels.

ChatGPT adds more PC and Mac app integrations, getting closer to piloting your computer - Emilia David, VentureBeat

OpenAI’s new hotline: Chat with ChatGPT anytime, anywhere - Emilia David, VentureBeat
U.S.-based users can call 1-800-ChatGPT (1-800-242-8478) on any device that can make calls — including a rotary phone! International users can use WhatsApp.

OpenAI updates ChatGPT Search with voice queries, faster results, mobile maps integration - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Projects, letting you organize files, chats in groups - Emilia David, VentureBeat

ChatGPT gets screensharing and real-time video analysis, rivaling Gemini 2 - Emilia David, VentureBeat

OpenAI expands ChatGPT Canvas to all users - Emilia David, VentureBeat

Anthropic - Claude

Anthropic’s fastest model, Claude 3.5 Haiku, now generally available - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

Google - Gemini

o3 steals the spotlight, but Google shipped some serious goods - AI Explained
”If a model has truly uncommon sense (allowing it to crush crazy-difficult tests) but occasionally lacks common sense, what are we to make of it? That will be a question for 2025, whatever your definition of AGI is.”

Google unveils new reasoning model Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking to rival OpenAI o1 - Carl Franze, VentureBeat

Project Astra: Exploring a Universal AI Assistant with Greg Wayne - Google Deep Mind Podcast, YouTube

Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era - Sundar PIchai, Google

Try Deep Research and our new experimental model in Gemini, your AI assistant - Google Blog
If you have Gemini Advanced, it’s worth testing… it’s pretty amazing.

A phoenix in Silicon Valley: Google rises! - Azeem Azhar
”When you use DeepResearch, it feels a little like science fiction. Feed it a query, and it springs into action, crafting a bespoke research strategy before methodically executing it. The process, which unfolds over several minutes, involves the AI prowling academic databases and authoritative Web pages before weaving its findings into a coherent synthesis.”

Gemini 2.0 Flash ushers in a new era of real-time multimodal AI - Matt Marshall, VentureBeat

Gemini 2.0 Flash: An outstanding multi-modal LLM with a sci-fi streaming mode - Simon Willison

NotebookLM updates Business to Plus with more audio, lets all users interact with AI hosts - Emilia David, VentureBeat

Apple

With iOS 18.2, Apple Intelligence Finally Has Image Generation - Khamosh Pathak, Lifehacker

OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT for iPhone in landmark AI integration with Apple - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat

The Inside Story of Apple Intelligence - Steven Levy, Wired
”Apple’s leaders claim the company wasn’t late to generative AI, but instead following what has become its familiar playbook: try to be the best, not the first.”

Microsoft

Microsoft Copilot Vision is here, letting AI see what you do online - Shubham Sharma, VentureBeat

Amazon

Amazon launches Nova AI model family for generating text, images and videos - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

Meta

Meta launches open source Llama 3.3, shrinking powerful bigger model into smaller size - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

Perplexity

Perplexity’s Carbon integration will make it easier for enterprises to connect their data to AI search - Shubham Sharma, VentureBeat
”Perplexity has just acquired this startup (Carbon), to address the “data gap” enterprises encounter with AI search and streamline the knowledge discovery process in their workflows. Carbon has developed a comprehensive retrieval framework that streamlines the process of connecting external data sources to LLMs.”

Other models

UAE’s Falcon 3 challenges open-source leaders amid surging demand for small AI models - Shubham Sharma, VentureBeat

Cohere’s smallest, fastest R-series model excels at RAG, reasoning in 23 languages - Taryn Plum, VentureBeat

Microsoft’s smaller AI model beats the big guys: Meet Phi-4, the efficiency king - Michael Nuñez, VentureBeat

DeepSeek-V3, ultra-large open-source AI, outperforms Llama and Qwen on launch - Shubham Sharma, VentureBeat

Trying out QvQ—Qwen’s new visual reasoning model - Simon Willison
"Alibaba’s Qwen team just dropped the Qwen licensed QvQ-72B-Preview, “an experimental research model focusing on enhancing visual reasoning capabilities”.

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Images, video, music, and voices

Images

Google’s New AI Image Tool ‘Whisk’ Lets You Use Photos as Prompts - Pesala Bandara, PetaPixel

Midjourney adds Pinterest-like ‘moodboards’ and support for multiple custom AI image models - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

Art-Free Generative Models: Art Creation Without Graphic Art Knowledge - Hui Ren et al, arxiv
”We explore the question: ‘How much prior art knowledge is needed to create art?’ To investigate this, we propose a text-to-image generation model trained without access to art-related content. We then introduce a simple yet effective method to learn an art adapter using only a few examples of selected artistic styles. Our experiments show that art generated using our method is perceived by users as comparable to art produced by models trained on large, art-rich datasets.”

Video

Google debuts new AI video generator Veo 2 claiming better audience scores than Sora - Emilia David, VentureBeat

Pika 2.0 launches in wake of Sora, integrating your own characters, objects, scenes in new AI videos - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

‘Not there yet’: Sora rollout receives mixed response from AI filmmakers citing inconsistent results, content restrictions - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

Hunyuan Video
Home page of the latest video model from China’s TenCent.

Zack Snyder Thinks Hollywood Needs to Get on Board With AI or Get Left Behind - Marah Eakin, Wired
”Snyder says he’s especially intrigued by the idea of an AI that could understand a movie or filmmaker’s aesthetic core, like if he was able to shoot an actor’s performance and then sync it up with a production-designer-created world of sets in some sort of ‘aesthetic bank.’ “

Music

Music Can Thrive in the AI Era - C. Brandon Ogbundo and Lupe Fiaso, Wired
”While much of this alarm is well founded, we should also consider the possibility that human creativity can blossom in the age of AI. In 2025, we will start to see this manifest in our collective cultural response to technology.”

The first time AI made me weep - Reddit conversation
Scroll down to hear from various people who enjoy generating music with Suno and why they find it so therapeutic.

Voices (everyone is copying the NotebookLM podcasts)

Illuminate | Learn Your Way - Google
Similar to NotebookLM , but with more ways to customize & more voices.

Your content becomes conversations - Eleven Labs
”Tune in as AI co-hosts generate smart podcasts from any of your PDFs, articles, ebooks and more. Now available in the ElevenReader App.”

HeyGen also has a podcast generator (with video avatars), but it’s nowhere near as human-sounding as NotebookLM Audio Overviews. (in my opinion)

Tips

12 NotebookLM Epic Use Cases You Must Try - Skill Leap AI (YouTube)
The eighth use case shows how to analyze an entire book using NotebookLM, leveraging its large context window. A Tale of Two Cities is used as an example, demonstrating the ability to quickly generate a briefing and access specific points within the book via provided references.

5 Best Midjourney Prompts: December 2024 (Photo Terms That Work) - Daniel Nest, Why Try AI?
GoPro photo of [subject], and more useful prompts.

15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to - Ethan Mollick
”Like any form of wisdom, using AI well requires holding opposing ideas in mind: it can be transformative yet must be approached with skepticism, powerful yet prone to subtle failures, essential for some tasks yet actively harmful for others. I also want to caveat that you shouldn't take this list too seriously except as inspiration - you know your own situation best, and local knowledge matters more than any general principles.”

Accessibility

Study Uses AI to Interpret American Sign Language in Real-time - Gisele Galoustian, Florida Atlantic University News

Beyond Visual Limits: Systems Thinking for the Visually Impaired Using Generative AI - Allie Zombron et al, James Madison University

Solos launches AirGo Vision — ChatGPT-enabled AI smart glasses with a camera - Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat

Be My Eyes is rolling out on Ray Ban Meta glasses starting today! - Be My Eyes News

What’s happening in education

Are educators falling behind the AI curve? - Andrew Maynard, The Future of Being Human
”As tech companies release a slew of generative AI updates, there's a growing risk that educational practices and policies are struggling to keep up with new capabilities”

Georgia State launching artificial intelligence training program with OpenAI-backed group - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“…a new artificial intelligence training program for students from underserved communities, primarily those in the south side of Atlanta. …an initiative of the nonprofit’s prominent AI Ethics Council. That council boasts civil rights leaders, presidents of historically Black colleges and universities and major tech leaders as its members.”

One of the weirder scholarly practices regarding generative AI that seems to have been normalized is citing chatbots. - Arvind Narayanan, LinkedIn
”The proper thing to do when using a chatbot is to disclose it, for transparency, rather than cite it for attributing credit or signaling credibility.”

AI Research Tools: Learning from Wikipedia's Legacy - Mike Kentz, AI Edu Pathways
”What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About Guiding Students to Use AI Responsibly.”

Restricting Innovation: How Publisher Contracts Undermine Scholarly AI Research - Rachael Samberg, Director, Scholarly Communication & Information Policy, UC Berkeley Library and Dave Hansen, Executive Director, Authors Alliance
”This post is about the research and the advancement of science and knowledge made impossible when publishers use contracts to limit researchers’ ability to use AI tools with scholarly works. Within the scholarly publishing community, mixed messages pervade about who gets to say when and how AI tools can be used for research reliant on scholarly works like journal articles or books.”

What’s happening in libraries

Books, AI, and the Public Good: A New Grant - Dan Cohen, Humane Ingenuity
“A Mellon-funded project to develop an ethical, public-interest way to incorporate books into artificial intelligence.”

Developing a public-interest training commons of books - Authors Alliance
”The main goal of this project is to develop a plan for either establishing a new organization or identifying the relevant criteria for an existing organization (or partnership of organizations) to take on the work of creating and stewarding a large-scale public interest training commons of books.”

Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft - Kate Knibbs, Wired
”The project’s leader says that allowing everyone to access the collection of public-domain books will help “level the playing field” in the AI industry.”

New Horizons in Artificial Intelligence in Libraries - Edited by: Edmund Balnaves , Leda Bultrini , Andrew Cox and Raymond Uzwyshyn
Open access book, free download.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Librarian, University of Chicago Library job posting.
I bet we’ll see more positions like this soon.

AI Collaboratory Launches HERITAGE–AI Initiative with Major Grant - Laurie Robinson, University of Maryland College of Information
”This project aims to revolutionize how users engage with library and archival collections by integrating generative artificial intelligence (genAI) technologies.”

How Knowledge Institutions Can Build a Promethean Moment - Greg Leppert, Institutional Data Initiative, Harvard Law School Library
”Advances in AI are creating immense interest in high-quality data only found deep within archives. This new interest can help institutions make such data available to everyone. Today we’re launching the Institutional Data Initiative (IDI), a research initiative at the Harvard Law School Library. IDI is dedicated to supporting our peers as they steward humanity’s knowledge and seek to provide the broadest access to it in the age of AI, just as they’ve done for so much media over centuries, and across the technological revolutions within them.”

Yale Library is developing an AI application that could transform research in digitized collections - Yale Library News
”Yale Library has created a prototype for an innovative use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to elicit information and insights from digitally scanned texts. The new tool, with the working title “Digital Collections AI,” could change the way researchers use the library’s vast and rapidly growing digital collections.”

Artificial intelligence, real library: Final report for Project Laibro (PDF) - NTNU Library (Norway's oldest scientific library)
”The main goal of Project Laibro has been to chart a course for how NTNU Library should relate to the many opportunities and challenges that AI entails, in line with NTNU's policies and guidelines.”

Just for fun

AI Christmas Carol: A parable for educators grappling with artificial minds - Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons
”Professor Scrooge slouched in his ergonomic chair, surrounded by the soft glow of multiple screens displaying yet another batch of essays flagged by his AI detection software. "Bah, hallucination!" he muttered…”

This AI-Powered Site Helps You Shop for Vintage and Secondhand Items - Elissaveta M. Brandon, Wired
”The site, called Encore, aggregates items from hundreds of resale websites and helps shoppers find esoteric and unique items—the proverbial needles in the haystack. What makes Encore different is that the site doesn’t just search for terms on Facebook Marketplace or eBay, but rather it asks the user to describe what they’re looking for in the same way they would describe it to a friend.”

GenChess - Google Labs
Generate beautiful chess set images, then play virtual chess.

"The podcast that escapes reality" and other Dadaist stories on NotebookLM. - Reddit conversation
”The podcast that rebels against its host,” … and more fun Audio Overviews.

Robot speak - Jonathan Hoeffler on Threads
Funny!

Amazing work with Sora and ChatGPT by Chad Nelson! (IG: dailydall.e)
Video shows how he made a faux ad for a video game with AI.

Thought-provoking

Rebuttals to some misconceptions
Is AI progress slowing down? - Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil

Is AI hitting a wall? - Rohit Krishnan, Strange Loop Canon

No, LLMs are not "scheming" - Rohit Krishnan, Strange Loop Canon

Critical Reasoning with AI: How we know LLMs are applying reasoning patterns, and not just reverse image searching - Mike Caulfield, The End(s) of Argument

We Looked at 78 Election Deepfakes. Political Misinformation Is Not an AI Problem - Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

Climate change mitigation
Equity-Aware Spatial-Temporal Workload Shifting for Sustainable AI Data Centers - Mohammad Islam (University of California Riverside); Shaolei Ren (UC Riverside)

NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
Links to papers, videos, and slides from this conference.

MIT engineers grow “high-rise” 3D chips - Jennifer Chu, MIT News
Enabling more efficient AI hardware.

U of A engineers tackle energy usage in semiconductor technology - Katy Smith, University of Arizona News

Building a Transition Digital Ecosystem for a Sustainable Future - Transitions Digital
”We are a group of tech non-profits working together to create a digital ecosystem for climate action. Our goal is to provide reliable, easy-to-use data, models, and tools. This ecosystem will help make climate action faster, easier, and more affordable, allowing us to achieve change at the needed speed and scale.”

Photonic processor could enable ultrafast AI computations with extreme energy efficiency - Adam Zewe, MIT News

Distributed training is possible
Distributed training runs - Jack Clark
“AI startup Prime Intellect has launched INTELLECT-1, a decentralized training run of a 10-billion parameter model. If successful, this will be the largest decentralized training run of a frontier language model – that’s a big deal, because it will show that loosely federated collectives might be able to pool their computers to train models that challenge those of single companies.“

AI and energy demand - Jack Clark, Import AI
“Distributed training attacks centralization of power in AI: One of the core issues in the coming years of AI development will be the perceived centralization of influence over the frontier by a small number of companies that have access to vast computational resources. Techniques like DeMo make it dramatically easier for federations of people and organizations to come together and train models to counterbalance this 'big compute' power.”

Nous Research is training an AI model using machines distributed across the internet - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

Jobs/workplace
The Future of Work Is About Doing Better—Not Less - Rhea Purohit, Every

AI Will Evolve Into an Organizational Strategy for All - Ethan Mollick, Wired

A Google poll says pretty much all of Gen Z is using AI for work - Rocio Fabbro, Quartz

Human perceptions
AI-Authored Abstracts ‘More Authentic’ Than Human-Written Ones - Jack Grove, Inside Higher Ed

LLMs as Research Tools: A Large Scale Survey of Researchers’ Usage and Perceptions - Liao et al, Arxiv

Exploring Global Perspectives on AI - AI for Good Insider, LinkedIn
”… the survey included responses from 1,000 individuals in each of the 35 countries, covering seven world regions. The results revealed that 66% of respondents globally view AI as a force for good. However, this optimism was not evenly distributed. Nations like China and Vietnam showed exceptionally high levels of AI optimism, with over 90% of respondents expressing a positive view. In contrast, countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom displayed significant levels of AI pessimism.”

The Results Are In: The McLuhan Test and AI Versus Human Writing - Mike Kentz, AI Edu Pathways

Copyright
A short guide to the Copyright Wars - Andres Guadamuz, TechnoLlama blog
Very interesting description of the different positions people take and why. (copyright maximalists and copyright minimalists)

Hallucinations and bias
FACTS Grounding: A new benchmark for evaluating the factuality of large language models - Google DeepMind

Document chat: an early AI use case - Lorcan Dempsey
“This post compares the 'ask a PDF' outputs of several services. Overall responses were good, with reasonable variation, and no significant hallucinations.”

Researchers reduce bias in AI models while preserving or improving accuracy - Adam Zewe, MIT News
”A new technique identifies and removes the training examples that contribute most to a machine-learning model’s failures.”

Beneficial uses of AI

Advanced AI is creating challenges for Native American communities – but also opportunities - Andrew Maynard, Al Kuslikis, Sean Dudley, and Leonard, The Future of Being Human
”Tribal colleges and Indigenous communities can lead the way by building innovative partnerships and fostering homegrown expertise. For example, creating tribal AI labs or innovation hubs could provide spaces to train future AI leaders, conduct research, and design culturally grounded tools.”

How Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture - Iris Kim, NBC News
”Indigenous languages are rapidly disappearing, and AI could help preserve them, according to Indigenous technologists.”

AI decodes the calls of the wild - Neil Savage, Nature
“Artificial intelligence could reveal how animals of the land, sea and sky talk to others of their species.”

Huge randomized trial of AI boosts discovery — at least for good scientists - Davide Castelvecchi, Nature
”A controlled study at a firm measured the effects of using AI to assist research, and saw increases in discoveries and patents.”

More Humanitarian Organizations Will Harness AI’s Potential - David Miliband, Wired
”For years we’ve (rightly) debated the risks and benefits of AI and waited for the promise of “AI for Good” to arrive. In 2025, across the aid, development, and humanitarian sector, that moment may finally be at hand.”

Improving health, one machine learning system at a time - Michaela Jarvis, MIT News
Marzyeh Ghassemi works to ensure health-care models are trained to be robust and fair.

New AI tool generates realistic satellite images of future flooding - Jennifer Chu, MIT News
The method could help communities visualize and prepare for approaching storms.

Artificial intelligence is helping improve climate models - The Economist
”More accurate predictions will lead to better policy-making.”

Tune In to the Healing Powers of a Decent Playlist - Daniel Levitin, Wired
“The future of music in health care extends from hospital to home, from illness to neurorehabilitation, mindfulness practices, and wellness. AI will help here—not in writing music, but in selecting the songs and genres that meet both an individual’s tastes and the desired therapeutic and wellness goals. By extracting key features from music and matching them to an individual’s preferences and needs, we can usher in a new age of personalized music medicine.”

My offerings

I’ll repeat the AI Literacy course sometime in 2025.
Sign up to be notified.

Here’s my year-end blog post: Promoting AI Literacy: A Comprehensive Log of My 2024 AI Education Activities.

The future

Despite intense AI arms race, we’re in for a multi-model future - Zack Kass, VentureBeat
”There will be no single model that will rule the universe, neither next year nor next decade. Instead, the future of AI will be multi-model.”

2025 Will Be Smart Glasses All the Way Down - Boone Ashworth, Wired
”There’s an incredible convenience to interacting digitally with the real world at the same time you’re actually looking at it, all without obscuring your view with a bulky headset or distracting you with a phone screen.”

Generating Worlds - World Labs
“Today we're sharing our first step towards spatial intelligence: an AI system that generates 3D worlds from a single image. This lets you step into any image and explore it in 3D.”

The 4 biggest AI stories from 2024 and one key prediction for 2025 - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

AI Trends for 2025 - IBM Technology on YouTube (7 min, 31 secs)
Advancing toward “near-infinite memory,” and more trends.

Gemini 2.0 and the evolution of agentic AI with Oriol Vinyals - Google DeepMind on Youtube
Very interesting episode. (51 min, 56 secs)

2024: The Year Wonder Started to Win (And Why 2025 Will Be Even Better) - Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons

Thoughts on 2025: Beyond the AI Hype - Utility, Reality, and the Great Reassessment - Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons
”Educational institutions will largely accept that fighting the tide of AI use is futile.”

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 - Simon Willison
See especially: “I think this means that, as individual users, we don’t need to feel any guilt at all for the energy consumed by the vast majority of our prompts. The impact is likely neglible compared to driving a car down the street or maybe even watching a video on YouTube.”

and

“If we want people with decision-making authority to make good decisions about how to apply these tools we first need to acknowledge that there ARE good applications, and then help explain how to put those into practice while avoiding the many unintutive traps.”

Scientists create world’s first diamond battery: A power source that lasts millennia - Fabrice Iranzi, Lion Herald
“Scientists in the UK have created a diamond battery, as reported by ITV News, capable of lasting millennia. Made from synthetic diamonds encasing radioactive Carbon-14, it converts decaying electrons into electricity. With a 5,730-year half-life, it’s ideal for space, deep-sea missions, and medical implants. Plus, its materials can be recycled, offering a sustainable energy solution.”

Current State of Augmented Reality Glasses: Orion, Ray-Ban, Snapchat - Brian Foster, Glass Almanac
“While the current state of AR glasses may not yet be the game-changing revolution that many once predicted, the continued work being done by Meta, Ray-Ban, and Snapchat suggests that we are inching closer to a world where these devices become part of our everyday lives. In the coming years, as the technology matures, we may very well see AR glasses that are lightweight, affordable, and functional enough to replace our smartphones, giving us a more integrated and immersive experience with the digital world.”

Not really about AI, but if you need some hope for the future
Here's an inspiring talk.
How to save our children from cynicism | Dr. Graeme Mitchell | TEDxRRU
"Discover how curating balanced, fact-based narratives can bridge the "hope gap," transforming pessimism into proactive engagement and empowering today's students to build a brighter, more promising future."

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar or course for your group.

Later in 2025 I’ll offer a second session of my 6-week online course about generative AI.
»» Sign up here if you’d like to be notified when it’s ready.««

And as always, you can follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon where I post daily about generative AI. (On X I only post once in a while).

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Hi everyone!

Welcome to all the new subscribers! (and people who’ve been on this list since 2014 when it was “Mobile Apps News.”) I’ve got quite a few links in today’s issue. There is just so much going on.

In this issue we’ll look at:

• new developments with foundation models: such as ChatGPT Search and Claude’s computer use

• the latest news about genAI for images, video, and music

• some nuanced reporting that puts statistics about energy use of data centers in context: What’s the impact of artificial intelligence on energy demand? by Hannah Ritchie (author of the book Not the End of the World, which I recommend)

• a beneficial use of deepfakes: Meet Daisy — the AI-generated granny helping to trap scammers

• stories about genAI in education and in libraries

• the usual “just for fun” section, and what’s coming in the future.

Enjoy!

Foundation model news

OpenAI

• Introducing ChatGPT search - OpenAI
  Plus and Team users for now, free users later.

• Advanced voice mode is now also rolling out on desktop web for paid users - OpenAI on X

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT desktop integrations, rivaling Copilot - VentureBeat
  ”Some ChatGPT on Mac OS users can now open third-party applications directly from the app. ChatGPT Plus and Teams subscribers — with ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu users following soon after — can access VS Code, Xcode, Terminal and iTerm2 from a dropdown.”
  

Google Gemini

• Google launches new Gemini app on iPhone with Gemini Live - 9to5 Google
  Includes voice capabilities, similar to Advanced Voice Mode on ChatGPT. “…choose from one of 10 voices that applies to all Gemini responses. At launch, the following languages are supported: English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Turkish, and Vietnamese.”
  

Meta

• Meta just beat Google and Apple in the race to put powerful AI on phones - VentureBeat

• Meta makes its MobileLLM open for researchers, posting full weights - VentureBeat

• Meta strikes multi-year AI deal with Reuters - Axios
  

Claude

Introducing the analysis tool in Claude.ai - Anthropic
”Think of the analysis tool as a built-in code sandbox, where Claude can do complex math, analyze data, and iterate on different ideas before sharing an answer. The ability to process information and run code means you get more accurate answers.”

Anthropic’s new AI can use computers like a human, redefining automation for enterprises - VentureBeat
”The new “Computer Use” feature allows AI to perform tasks that were previously handled only by human workers, such as opening applications, interacting with interfaces, and filling out forms.”

Commentary on Anthropic’s Computer Use

• When you give a Claude a mouse - Ethan Mollick

• Initial explorations of Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability - Simon Willison

• Anthropic’s Computer Use mode shows strengths and limitations in new study - VentureBeat

• An AI intern in your pocket - Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren (paid)
  ”But the focus at this stage shouldn’t be on if it’s ready for production. It’s on identifying the direction in which we are heading.”

Other models

• Mistral unleashes Pixtral Large and upgrades Le Chat into full-on ChatGPT competitor - VentureBeat
  Try it here by signing up for a free account. It offers quite a few features for free.
  

• DeepSeek’s first reasoning model R1-Lite-Preview turns heads, beating OpenAI o1 performance - VentureBeat
  “Known for its innovative contributions to the open-source AI ecosystem, DeepSeek’s new release aims to bring high-level reasoning capabilities to the public while maintaining its commitment to accessible and transparent AI.”

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Images, video, music, and voices

Music

• Timbaland Embraces AI Music Production, Announces Partnership with Start-Up Suno - Rolling Stone
  "It's the new age of music creation and producing," says Timbaland, who spends 10 hours a day reworking beats on the AI platform.

• Introducing v4 - Suno
  “Better audio, sharper lyrics, and more dynamic song structures now available in beta to Pro & Premier”

• The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ Makes History As First AI-Assisted Song to Earn Grammy Nomination - Billboard
  Not a deepfake of John Lennon. Instead, it used “a form of AI known as ‘stem separation’ to help them clean up a 60-year-old, low-fidelity demo recorded by Lennon during his lifetime.”

• AI for Songwriters: How Ben Camp is Helping Songwriters Get Creative with Artificial Intelligence - Berklee Online
  ”Camp likens the curriculum of the courses to a creative playground—“There is a new technology around, and I want you to mess around with it and see what you can do with it creatively, what it inspires you to do creatively, and how you can break it.”—and is all about exploration.”

Images

• AI startup Ideogram launches infinite Canvas for manipulating, combining generated images - VentureBeat

• Can Adobe Turn Creators From AI Skeptics Into Believers? - Katelyn Chedraoui, CNET
  “Adobe sets the tone: By integrating gen AI into its products, even as strategically as it is, Adobe is ensuring that AI will be part of the future. Creators will have to master this new digital AI literacy, Costin said. The unspoken "or else" is that non-AI-savvy creators will be left behind.”

• Recraft might be the most powerful AI image platform I’ve ever used – here’s why - Tom’s Guide
  It works really well.

• Artists and AI: Shaping a Collaborative Future - ArtNews
  Sponsored content from the Knight Foundation - but interesting anyway.

• Drawing Rooms: Digital images created with generative AI and edited in Lightroom, 2023. - Lev Manovich
  “In short, by breaking historical human culture into fragments we get our new ‘generative AI’ culture. The fragments of you see in this image series - breaking from the celling, covering the floor, floating in space gathered in strange ‘clouds’ and so on - can be seen as a metaphor for this process.”

• The Ethics of the Remix: GenAI in Public Space - Nettrice Gaskins
  ”This new era of GenAI art (and design) creation is much more participatory and less focused on ownership. At the core of this process is having the ability or skill to remix almost anything into almost anything else.”

Video

• ‘This is a game changer’: Runway releases new AI facial expression motion capture feature Act-One - VentureBeat

• Runway Unveils Act-One, Transforming Character Animation - AgeofLLMs

• ByteDance’s AI can make your photos act out movie scenes — but is it too real? - VentureBeat

• 'Gladiator II' Director Ridley Scott Says He's 'Trying to Embrace AI' - Decrypt
  “Initially wary of the technology, "Gladiator II" director Ridley Scott now says he sees the benefits of generative AI in filmmaking.”

• I was wrong. People love Coca-Cola’s AI remake of a Christmas classic - Andrew Tindall, the Drum
  “But I reckon if you aren’t primed, you wouldn’t think this is AI. Just look at the consumer testing data. They either haven’t noticed or don’t care. And AI is only getting better from here. I wonder if the results would be different if we told people it was made by AI first. I reckon we’d get some angry people, and the whole thing would fall apart very quickly.”

Voices

• Voice Design - ElevenLabs (new feature)
  Describe the characteristics of a voice you want to create.

• How NotebookLM Was Made - Latent Space podcast
  “Guests Raiza Martin and Usama Bin Shafqat, are the lead product manager and AI engineer behind the NotebookLM feature that gave us the first viral AI voice experience, the “Deep Dive” podcast.”

• Pushing the frontiers of audio generation - Google DeepMind
  “To teach our model how to generate realistic exchanges between multiple speakers, we pretrained it on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech data. Then we finetuned it on a much smaller dataset of dialogue with high acoustic quality and precise speaker annotations, consisting of unscripted conversations from a number of voice actors and realistic disfluencies — the “umm”s and “aah”s of real conversation.”

• Jerry Garcia Estate Creates AI Model for Musician’s Voice with ElevenLabs - Relix
  ”Fans of the late Grateful Dead member can experience Garcia’s vocal presentation of audiobooks, articles, poems, PDFs, and more in 32 languages.”

• DeepL launches DeepL Voice, real-time, text-based translations from voices and videos - TechCrunch
  “Now, as the hype for AI services continues to grow, DeepL is adding another mode to the platform: audio. Users will now be able to use DeepL Voice to listen to someone speaking in one language and automatically translate it to another, in real time.”

Tips

• A Student's Guide to Using Perplexity Spaces - Perplexity

• Claude can now view PDF images — here's how to enable it - Tom’s Guide

• ChatGPT Advanced Voice just got a handy upgrade — here's what you can do now - Tom’s Guide
  You can now share a snippet of an audio conversation.

• Midjourney launches AI image editor: how to use it - Carl Franzen, VentureBeat

• Advanced Voice Mode is amazing - a conversation on Reddit with many examples of how people are using it.

Accessibility

Using Generative AI to Make Learning More Accessible: Insights from Ontario PSE Students and Staff - Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario
They “conducted a study to determine how GenAI can be used to make learning more accessible for all students, including those with disabilities, and the barriers to its use faced by students, instructors and staff.”

Disability community has long wrestled with ‘helpful’ technologies – lessons for everyone in dealing with AI - The Conversation
”Thinking of AI as an assistive technology, and learning from the disability community, can help to ensure that the AI systems of the future serve people’s needs – with people in the driver’s seat.”

Gen AI Champions Project - YouTube (12 min)
”A short narrative film by Max Jones exploring the N-TUTORR funded GenAI Champions project and impact. In February of 2024, 36 students with learning differences across the island of Ireland were brought together by a project to support students in higher education using Generative AI.”

What’s happening in education

• How Generative AI Is Transforming Medical Education - The Magazine of Harvard Medical School

• AI literacy course prepares ASU students to set cultural norms for new technology - ASU News
  ”Lance Gharavi, a professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre, has been teaching a new course this semester called “AI Literacy in Design and the Arts,” which covers the benefits, challenges and ethics surrounding AI. The course is designed to serve as a template for AI literacy courses in other disciplines. “The specific discipline content will come from whoever is teaching the course.”

• GLAT: The Generative AI Literacy Assessment Test - Yueqiao Jin, et al., Monash University, Australia
  ”Existing instruments often rely on self-reports, which may be biased. In this study, we present the GenAI Literacy Assessment Test (GLAT), a 20-item multiple-choice instrument developed following established procedures in psychological and educational measurement.”

• Writing assistant, workhorse, or accelerator? How academics are using GenAI - London School of Economics blog
  ”Carried out from January to February 2024, we invited all Danish researches (including PhD researchers) to participate in a survey to ascertain just how GenAI is being used in research and how the use of GenAI breaks down across different disciplines and demographics.”

• Designing Interactive Explainable AI Tools for Algorithmic Literacy and Transparency - Bhat & Long - DIS '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
  “Designed according to learning sciences and user-centered design principles, these tools simplify complex AI concepts like edge detection, confidence thresholds, and sensitivity, making AI more understandable for beginners and facilitating reflection on ethical issues.”

• OpenAI releases a teacher’s guide to ChatGPT, but some educators are skeptical - TechCrunch

• OpenScholar: The open-source A.I. that’s outperforming GPT-4o in scientific research - VentureBeat
  “A new artificial intelligence system, called OpenScholar, is promising to rewrite the rules for how researchers access, evaluate, and synthesize scientific literature. Built by the Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington, OpenScholar combines cutting-edge retrieval systems with a fine-tuned language model to deliver citation-backed, comprehensive answers to complex research questions.”

• Perspectives of Students with Different Majors on an Artificial Intelligence Literacy Course at a Korean University - Song and Lee, Athens Journal of Technology & Engineering (PDF)

• A Third Transformation? Generative AI and Scholarly Publishing - Tracy Bergstrom, Dylan Ruediger, ITHAKA S+R
  “We interviewed 12 leaders in stakeholder communities ranging from large publishers and technology disruptors to academic librarians and scholars. The consensus among the individuals with whom we spoke is that generative AI will enable efficiency gains across the publication process. Writing, reviewing, editing, and discovery will all become easier and faster. Both scholarly publishing and scientific discovery in turn will likely accelerate as a result of AI-enhanced research methods.”

• Is It AI? Peer Reviewers Struggle to Distinguish LLMs From Human Writing - Isabella Backman, Yale School of Medicine
  “The study suggests that as LLMs advance, peer reviewers will have a diminishing capability to detect content written by AI. It also revealed the negative bias held by reviewers toward machine-generated content. As more content becomes AI-generated or a hybrid of human and AI writing, the study poses important questions about the role of AI in scientific content.”

What’s happening in libraries

• Beyond the Binary: A Librarian's Journey into the AI Revolution - Carlo Iacono
  ”Perhaps we need to: embrace uncertainty as a feature, not a bug — view confusion as a sign of growth, not failure — and see complexity as truth, not obstacle.”

• AI should be foundational technology for libraries and institutions - Sharjah
  “In his keynote address on Integrating AI into Library Services and Advancing AI Literacy, Dr Leo S. Lo, Dean of the University of New Mexico and President of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), outlined his vision for AI as a foundational technology for libraries and educational institutions, comparing it to other transformative inventions like fire and electricity.”

• Fostering AI literacy for future librarians - Subaveerapandiyan, A - College & Undergraduate Libraries
  “This study assesses the artificial intelligence (AI) literacy and perceptions among Master of Library Science (MLS) students in India. It aims to identify the most relevant AI knowledge areas for library science, examine students’ attitudes toward AI’s potential impact on library services, and explores the importance of AI literacy for professional practice.”

• Could Artificial Intelligence Help Catalog Thousands of Digital Library Books? An Interview with Abigail Potter and Caroline Saccucci - Isabel Brador, Library of Congress

• Artificial intelligence, real library - Final report for Project Laibro, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

• Artifical Intelligence Literacy Framework - University of Adelaide Libraries

Just for fun

• Pika 1.5 updates with three new Halloween-themed video AI Pikaffects - VentureBeat

• Baby Secret Mattel doll - 1966 commercial spoof - Reddit
  Creepy! The audio is a real ad of a real doll from 1966.

• Which AI Image Model Is the Best Speller? Let’s Find Out! - Daniel Next, Why Try AI?

• Meta Puppet on LinkedIn.
  ”Very proud to share my newest film Mnemonade -- which won first prize at the Culver Cup competition.” A five-minute short AI-generated film that’s worth watching.

• How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? - Astral Codex Ten
  Results of a challenge to 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images.

• The 'War of the Worlds' Panic was Anti-Radio Propaganda - Pessimists Archive
  Each new media is a threat to the old.

Thought-provoking

• What’s the impact of artificial intelligence on energy demand? - Hannah Ritchie
  Finally some nuanced reporting that puts statistics in context.
  ”The public and media conversation on this has been poor. I lose track of the number of headlines and articles I’ve seen that quote random numbers—without context—to show how much energy or water AI already uses. The numbers are often fairly small but sound big because they’re not given with any context of how much energy or water we use for everything else.”

• Making it easier to verify an AI model’s responses - MIT News
  ”By allowing users to clearly see data referenced by a large language model, this tool speeds manual validation to help users spot AI errors.”

• The Authenticity Paradox: Why Everything We Think About AI and Education is Wrong - Carlo Iacono
  ”We pine for an era of "authentic" student work, conveniently forgetting that knowledge has always been collaborative, messy, and deeply entangled with our tools.”

• AI and Skills Loss: It’s Not That Simple - Leon Furze
  Interesting questions: The more important question is not, will AI replace skills? But, why do we care if AI replaces skills?

• The Middle Path for AI - Daniel Jeffreis
  “People love to spin tales of AI doom or AI utopia, but it's time to take a realistic look at AI. Reality is often stranger than fiction.”

• Simple science summaries written by AI help people understand research and trust scientists - David Markowitz, The Conversation
  “This research points to a potential solution: using AI to simplify science communication. By making scientific content more approachable, this work demonstrates that AI-generated summaries may help to restore trust in scientists and, in turn, encourage greater public engagement with scientific issues. The question of trust is particularly important, as people often rely on science in their daily lives, from eating habits to medical choices.”

• Two: The Wild Robot, Pop Culture, and AI: Approaches to humanizing/not humanizing AI should vary by age - Mike Kentz
  Interesting thoughts on anthropomorphizing AI.

• Interface Innovations: (Re)defining the user experience of AI - 5 Trends in generative AI and their impact on academic practice, Dominik Lukeš
  ”A comprehensive overview of how AI interfaces have transformed since ChatGPT's launch, highlighting key innovations, challenges, and future directions in human-AI interaction design.”

• Does AI improve doctors' diagnoses? Study puts it to the test - Science Daily
  "Our study shows that AI alone can be an effective and powerful tool for diagnosis," said Parsons, who oversees the teaching of clinical skills to medical students at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and co-leads the Clinical Reasoning Research Collaborative. "We were surprised to find that adding a human physician to the mix actually reduced diagnostic accuracy though improved efficiency. These results likely mean that we need formal training in how best to use AI."

• Can AI review the scientific literature — and figure out what it all means? - Helen Pearson, Nature
  “Five years later, Rodriques says he is closer to solving that problem using artificial intelligence (AI). In September, he and his team at the US start-up FutureHouse announced that an AI-based system they had built could, within minutes, produce syntheses of scientific knowledge that were more accurate than Wikipedia pages. The team promptly generated Wikipedia-style entries on around 17,000 human genes, most of which previously lacked a detailed page.”

• AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably - Porter and Machery, Scientific Reports
  “Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems.”

• AI’s Underwhelming Impact on the 2024 Elections - Andrew R. Chow, Time

  “Daniel Schiff, another researcher on the project, says many deepfakes are likely designed to reinforce the opinions of people who were already predisposed to believe their messaging. Other studies suggest that most forms of political persuasion have very small effects at best —and that voters actively dislike political messages that are personally tailored to them. That might render moot one of AI’s primary powers: to create targeted messages cheaply.”

• Meet Daisy — the AI-generated granny helping to trap scammers - Tom’s Guide
  A beneficial use of deepfakes.

Beneficial uses of AI

Google’s AI system could change the way we write: InkSight turns handwritten notes digital - VentureBeat
”Previous attempts to convert handwritten text to digital format relied heavily on analyzing the geometric properties of written strokes — essentially trying to trace the lines on the page. InkSight instead combines two sophisticated AI capabilities: the ability to read and understand text, and the ability to reproduce it naturally. The results are remarkable.”

Stanford RegLab, Princeton, and the County of Santa Clara Collaborate to Use AI to Identify and Map Racial Covenants from over 5 Million Deed Records - HAI Stanford University
”The approach paves the way for faster and more accurate compliance with California’s anti-discrimination law.”

Artificial Intelligence Was Put to the Test This Hurricane Season - Bloomberg
”Its forecasts hit the mark 12 hours faster than the US Global Weather Forecast System.”

Introducing NatureLM-audio: An Audio-Language Foundation Model for Bioacoustics - Earth Species Project
“For example, NatureLM-audio can classify or detect thousands of species across diverse taxa including birds, whales, and anurans – without the need to retrain the model for each new task and without machine learning and programming expertise.”

Could AI help save the planet? Four ways it’s already making a world of difference - Martin Wright, Positive News
AI is aiding conservation efforts by monitoring rainforests with drones to detect illegal logging, tracking endangered species like tigers and snow leopards through camera trap data, and providing low-income farmers with expert agricultural advice via smartphone applications.

Humanitarian Data Insights Project: Using generative AI - DataKind
“It enables individuals without extensive technical knowledge to directly query complex datasets using a conversational interface, conduct data analysis, and tailor information displays according to their needs – such as in graphs or tables. Users can simply ask a question, in natural language,  and thus more easily explore multiple angles of their data, uncover trends, and make informed choices based on results generated through this intuitive process.”

A New Agenda for African Languages x AI: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once - Vukosi Marivate, Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton (recording of a talk)
”In his talk, Professor Marivate will discuss the crucial role of community building in developing technologies for African languages in the age of AI. He will touch upon the unique challenges and opportunities in fostering collaboration for African languages, developing technologies that respects and empowers communities, and his vision for the future of technology and community engagements in African languages.”

Goodbye cloud, Hello phone: Adobe’s SlimLM brings AI to mobile devices - VentureBeat
“The system, called SlimLM, represents a major shift in artificial intelligence deployment — away from massive cloud computing centers and onto the phones in users’ pockets. In tests on Samsung’s latest Galaxy S24, SlimLM demonstrated it could analyze documents, generate summaries, and answer complex questions while running entirely on the device’s hardware.”

Copyright

The Globalization of Copyright Exceptions for AI Training - Matthew Sag, Peter K. Yu
”A key lesson of our cross-country survey is that globally, the binary policy debate that assumes that text and data mining and AI training must be categorically condemned or applauded has been eclipsed by a more granular debate about the specific circumstances in which the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for AI training should be allowed or prohibited. Countries that have hesitated until now to modernize their copyright laws in the area of AI training have several templates open to them and little reason for hesitation.”

The AI-Copyright Trap - Carys J. Craig, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto
“In their haste to act, however, they risk running headlong into the Copyright Trap: the mistaken conviction that copyright law is the best tool to support human creators and culture in our new technological reality (when in fact it is likely to do more harm than good). It is a trap in the sense that it may satisfy the wants of a small group of powerful stakeholders, but it will harm the interests of the more vulnerable actors who are, perhaps, most drawn to it.”

Librarian of Congress Expands DMCA Exemption for Text and Data Mining - Katherine Klosek, Association of Research Libraries
”The updated regulation clarifies that academic researchers can securely access research collections of literary works or motion pictures hosted by other institutions of higher education for purposes of collaboration, or to facilitate their own independent research projects.”

Artificial Intelligence Impacts on Copyright Law - Blaszczyk et al, Rand
Useful overview of all the issues.

Understanding CC Licenses and Generative AI - Kat Walsh, Creative Commons
”Neither copyright nor CC licenses can or should address all of the ways that AI might impact people. There are no easy solutions, but it is clear we need to step outside of copyright to work together on governance, regulatory frameworks, societal norms, and many other mechanisms to enable us to harness AI technologies and practices for good.”

Universal strikes AI data training deal, still suing AI companies for using its data - VentureBeat
”Music labels see they can’t stem the creation of AI-generated songs and prevent AI models from training on publicly released music. Through these deals with AI startups, labels like UMG, which owns other record labels that host artists like Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan, can make (even more) money from their copyrights.”

OpenAI’s data scraping wins big as Raw Story’s copyright lawsuit dismissed by NY court - VentureBeat
”Specifically, the judge found that the plaintiffs couldn’t demonstrate that they suffered a concrete, actual injury from OpenAI’s actions…

The judge noted that “the likelihood that ChatGPT would output plagiarized content from one of Plaintiffs’ articles seems remote.”

My offerings

Which generative AI tool for your task? - Nicole Hennig
People often ask, which AI tool can I use to do X? This aims to help. I don’t aim to be comprehensive (there are far too many tools available), but just to suggest some starting points.

Hype Detector on Poe - Nicole Hennig
I created this bot because many stories about AI are either full of positive hype or negative hype.

Give it a news story and it detects misleading language or rhetorical techniques.

• Here’s an example of positive hype in an AI story with hype detected.

• Here’s an example of negative hype in an AI story with hype detected.

• Here’s an example of a mostly balanced story, but the bot still finds subtle elements that could shape reader perception.

Create a free account on Poe to try it yourself.

The future

OpenAI scientist Noam Brown stuns TED AI Conference: ’20 seconds of thinking worth 100,000x more data’ - VentureBeat
”He pointed to the need for AI to move beyond sheer data processing and into what he referred to as “system two thinking”—a slower, more deliberate form of reasoning that mirrors how humans approach complex problems.”

Enter the ‘Whisperverse’: How AI voice agents will guide us through our days - VentureBeat
Dystopian or useful? Seems likely to happen.

Introducing self-evolving models: The future of scalable AI - Waseem Alshikh, Writer Engineering
”These models are able to identify and learn new information in real time— adapting to changing circumstances without requiring a full retraining cycle.”

Liquid AI Is Redesigning the Neural Network - Wired
“Inspired by microscopic worms, Liquid AI’s founders developed a more adaptive, less energy-hungry kind of neural network. Now the MIT spin-off is revealing several new ultraefficient models.”

UC San Diego, Tsinghua University researchers just made AI way better at knowing when to ask for help - VentureBeat
“This research challenges the bigger-is-better paradigm that has dominated AI development. In demonstrating that a relatively small model can outperform its larger cousins by making smarter decisions about tool use, the team points toward a more sustainable and practical future for AI.”

And some history

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence in Technology and Popular Culture - By heidiestrem; jasonblomquist; and lizalong, Pressbooks.

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar or course for your group.

And as always, you can follow me on X, Mastodon, or Bluesky, where I post daily about generative AI.

And share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Hi everyone!

It’s been a while since I send this newsletter (last one was in July), because I’ve been busy creating my online course: AI Literacy for Library Workers. It’s almost ready and it goes live on November 3rd.

So now I’m back to sending this monthly. (I hope!)

In this issue we’ll look at:

• news about OpenAI’s Canvas and their new o1-preview model.

• news about Google’s NotebookLM (it’s getting a lot of press right now for its AI-generated “podcasts”)

• several stories about genAI in education and in libraries

• the latest news about genAI for images, video, and music

• quite a few thought-provoking stories

• the usual “just for fun” section, and what’s coming in the future.

Enjoy!

Foundation model news

Open AI

OpenAI Launches a Document and Code Editor Integrated Into ChatGPT - Dan Shipper, Every
”Canvas is an Artifacts competitor aiming at the future of AI-human collaboration.” See Introducing Canvas - OpenAI.

OpenAI finally brings humanlike ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode to U.S. Plus, Team users - VentureBeat
”it’s shipping five new, different-styled voices today, too: Arbor, Maple, Sol, Spruce, and Vale — joining the previous four available, Breeze, Juniper, Cove, and Ember.” But it’s not available in the EU, see OpenAI’s Advanced Voice mode is unavailable in the EU, and now we might know why - TechRadar

OpenAI tackles global language divide with massive multilingual AI dataset release - VentureBeat
”… a multilingual dataset that evaluates the performance of language models across 14 languages, including Arabic, German, Swahili, Bengali and Yoruba. … This benchmark could open up more equitable global access to the technology.”

News about OpenAI’s new model: o1-preview

Introducing OpenAI o1-preview - OpenAI

OpenAI just unleashed an alien of extraordinary ability - Timothy B. Lee, Understanding AI
Very good explanation of how it works, what it can & can’t do.

Notes on OpenAI’s new o1 chain-of-thought models - Simon Willison
”One way to think about these new models is as a specialized extension of the chain of thought prompting pattern—the “think step by step” trick that we’ve been exploring as a a community for a couple of years now.”

Microsoft

Microsoft leans harder into AI, updating Copilot, Bing, and Windows - VentureBeat
So many updates.

Microsoft unveils ‘trustworthy AI’ features to fix hallucinations and boost privacy - VentureBeat
"“One of the key features introduced is a “Correction” capability in Azure AI Content Safety. This tool aims to address the problem of AI hallucinations — instances where AI models generate false or misleading information. “When we detect there’s a mismatch between the grounding context and the response… we give that information back to the AI system,” Bird explained. “With that additional information, it’s usually able to do better the second try.”

Nvidia

Nvidia just dropped a bombshell: Its new AI model is open, massive, and ready to rival GPT-4 - VentureBeat
”By making the model weights publicly available and promising to release the training code, Nvidia breaks from the trend of keeping advanced AI systems closed. This decision grants researchers and developers unprecedented access to cutting-edge technology.”

Meta

Meta’s Llama 3.2 launches with vision to rival OpenAI, Anthropic - VentureBeat
”Now, the two largest Llama 3.2 models (11B and 90B) support image use cases, and have the ability to understand charts and graphs, caption images and pinpoint objects from natural language descriptions.”

Google’s NotebookLM

NotebookLM’s automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective - Simon Willison
”Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where two AI hosts start up a “deep dive” discussion about the collected content. These last around ten minutes and are very podcast, with an astonishingly convincing audio back-and-forth conversation.”

Google NotebookLM leader says more controls coming for AI generated podcasts - VentureBeat
”product leader Raiza Martin says her team will be adding new updates to allow users to control more of the Audio Overviews (AOs), including selecting different ‘personas’ to be the AI hosts, as well as select the length of the podcast episode.”

Google launches NotebookLM Business to make enterprise AI audio, text - VentureBeat
”Google will soon offer a paid version of its AI research tool NotebookLM, specifically targeting businesses. NotebookLM Business will have “enhanced features for businesses, universities, and organizations.”

Apple

What is Apple Intelligence, when is it coming and who will get it? - TechCrunch
Learn the details. It’s very good for privacy, see Apple Intelligence privacy features: Here’s what you should know - 9to5Mac.

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Images, video, music, and voices

Images

Here, Now & Then: Black Joy & Generative Artificial Intelligence - Nettrice Gaskins
The artist Nettrice Gaskins showcases how GenAI can extend Black creativity and joy. She presented at the 2024 Black Joy AI Summit. Their slogan is “dreaming of an ethical AI tech ecosystem through Black Joy.”

Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media - Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli.
New book, free PDF chapters online. Their book examines how generative AI is changing familiar concepts of aesthetics, creativity, design, and art appreciation.

From Museum Without Walls to GenAI Museum - Lev Manovich
”A more intriguing application, however, is to explore alternative possible art histories. We can re-imagine art history (and history of culture in general) as a speculative discipline—similar in spirit to speculative fiction, alternative history, or speculative design.”

Video
Several advances in video generation tools.

• Meta enters AI video wars with powerful Movie Gen set to hit Instagram in 2025 - VentureBeat

• Adobe previews Firefly Video AI model offering high-quality generations - VentureBeat

• MiniMax’s AI video tool can create Star Wars battles in seconds – here’s why that matters - VentureBeat

AI video gains boost from prominent filmmakers James Cameron, Andy Serkis - VentureBeat

Landmark AI deal sees Hollywood giant Lionsgate provide library for AI training - Ars Technica

GenAI Video as a New Form: not just a cheaper way to make movies - Doug Shapiro
”… like all other new media, GenAI will also enable creatives to make new things in new ways.”

Music

Talking through AI and the future of music with will.i.am - Reed Albergotti, Semafor
”While many musicians and other artists believe AI poses a threat to their livelihoods and support lawsuits and regulation, will.i.am sees it as the latest example — Napster being the first — of the record industry’s Sisyphean effort to stop time. ‘They would rather sue than innovate,’ he says. ‘With the amount of money they’re spending on suing, they could have built it themselves.’ “

Voices

• Meta Adds Celebrity Voices to AI Chat, Including John Cena, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key - Hollywood Reporter

• Who needs GPT-4o Advanced Voice Mode? Hume’s EVI 2 is here with emotionally inflected voice AI and API - VentureBeat

  ---

Tips

NotebookLM

• Educators: Here’s How I Would Use NotebookLM - Remi Kalir

• How to effectively use NotebookLM as a Student -  Priyanka Vergadia

• NotebookLM adds audio and YouTube support, plus easier sharing of Audio Overviews - Google

• Google’s NotebookLM privacy policy
  “We value your privacy and never use your personal data to train NotebookLM.”

Advanced voice mode in ChatGPT

• Maximize Your Reading With ChatGPT's NEW Advanced Voice Mode - Dan Shipper, YouTube

• ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode will Change English Learning Forever - Cloud English, YouTube

Accessibility

The Impact of AI in Advancing Accessibility for Learners with Disabilities - EDUCAUSE Review
Useful summary of many different developments.

AI could be a game changer for people with disabilities - Steven Aquino, MIT Technology Review
”It should be noted that disabled people historically have been among the earliest adopters of new technologies. AI is no different, yet public discourse routinely fails to meaningfully account for this. After all, AI plays to a computer’s greatest strength: automation. As time marches on, the way AI grows and evolves will be unmistakably and indelibly shaped by disabled people and our myriad needs and tolerances. It will offer us more access to information, to productivity, and most important, to society writ large.”

Be My Eyes and Meta Announce Accessibility Partnership - BeMyEyes
”Be My Eyes to provide “Call a Volunteer” on Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, unlocking hands-free accessibility for blind and low vision people for the first time.'“

What’s happening in education

What schools are doing

• New certificate program helps students unlock and understand artificial intelligence - Boise State University

• Google.org Invests $4 Million to Boost AI Literacy in India - APAC News Network

• California schools will be required to integrate AI into curriculum - The Mercury News

• The Future Is Hybrid: Colleges begin to reimagine learning in an AI world. - The Chronicle of Higher Education
  
  View from students

• Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don’t Want Them? - Inside Higher Ed

• “ChatGPT seems too good to be true”: College students’ use and perceptions of generative AI - Computers and Education

• Access to premium AI services is a significant concern for students - WONKE

• Artificial Intelligence literacy among university students -a comparative transnational survey - Frontiers
  This study aimed to provide a comprehensive, cross-border perspective on AI literacy levels by surveying 1,800 university students from four Asian and African nations.

What’s happening in libraries

• Librarians Want to Adopt AI but Cite Lack of Expertise - Inside Higher Ed
  ”More than half those surveyed said the biggest challenge libraries will have is their lack of AI expertise, with 32 percent stating that no AI training is available at their universities. That number grows when looking at the U.S. respondents alone, with 43 percent lamenting the lack of training.”
  

• White Paper – Building an AI Literacy Framework: Perspectives from Instruction Librarians and Current Information Literacy Tools - Sandy HervieuxAmanda Wheatley, Choice
  

• Clarivate Releases Pulse of the Library 2024 Report - Information Today
  Results of a survey: “More than 60% of respondents are evaluating or planning for AI integration. However, there is a notable difference between public and academic libraries in that more academic libraries are in the early or active stage of implementing AI tools and technologies than public libraries. “While 58% of public libraries either have no plans or are not actively pursuing AI, only 31% of academic libraries are in the same position.”
  

• A proposed framework for a digital literacy course for artificial intelligence in academic libraries - South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science
  

• Use of artificial intelligence in libraries, a systematic review, 2019-2023 - South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science
  

• Academic librarian competencies and artificial intelligence - South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science
  

• Responsible AI Practice in Libraries and Archives: A Review of the Literature - Mannheimer et al., Information Technology & Libraries. More interesting articles in this special issue: Information Technology & Libraries special issue on AI and libraries.
  

• Primo Research Assistant launches- a first look and some things you should know - Aaron Tay
  Interesting review and critique.
  

• An Evaluation of Cutting-Edge AI Research Tools Using the REACT Framework - Information Today
  ”We focus on two categories of tools: citation-based literature mapping tools and text-extraction tools for literature reviews. The citation mapping tools are Litmaps, Connected Papers, and ResearchRabbit, which help researchers discover and visualize related academic literature. The text-extraction tools—Elicit, scite, and Consensus—assist in finding, summarizing, and analyzing relevant papers.”

Just for fun

”Cakeify-it” effect - made with Pika

• Pika 1.5 launches with physics-defying AI special effects
  And Pika 1.5 updates again to add even more AI video Pikaffects: crumble, dissolve, deflate, ta-da - VentureBeat
  

• 15 Times This Guy Created Interesting Photos Of Historical Personalities By Using AI - deMilked
  

• NotebookLM Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human—Spiral Into Terrifying Existential Meltdown - Reddit

Thought-provoking

• Character-driven AI - Jurgen Gravestein

• AI simulation gives people a glimpse of their potential future self - MIT News

• The End of Advertising - Michael Mignano

• The data center boom is giving clean energy a jolt - Semafor

• Reddit is bringing AI-powered, automatic translation to dozens of new countries - TechCrunch

• AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning - Kestin et al (preprint)

• The 1912 War on Fake Photos - Pessimists Archive

• China’s biggest AI model is challenging American dominance - RestofWorld

• The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI - Harvard Kennedy School

• Authenticity in the age of AI: Growing Content Credentials momentum across social media platforms, AI companies and rising consumer awareness - Adobe

• How GenAI Changes Creative Work - MIT Sloan Management Review

• Scaling: The State of Play in AI - Ethan Mollick

• Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI - Science

• New book: AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference - Princeton Univ. Press

• Why We Fear Diverse Intelligence Like AI - Noema

• The AI-Copyright Trap - Carys J. Craig, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto

My offerings

AI Literacy for Library Workers: Online Course
Six-week online course via Infopeople. Begins Nov. 3.
It looks like the course is just about full (85 people is the limit), so if you’re interested but didn’t get in, you can still sign up to be notified of future sessions. (I’ll do it again in the Spring).

Generative AI guides, tutorials, FAQs - University of Arizona Libraries
Here’s one page that brings together all our materials related to generative AI. Feel free to copy/share/use any of these.

NotebookLM – reverse engineering the system prompt for audio overviews - Nicole Hennig
My blog post about using Claude to figure out how those AI-generated podcasts work under the hood. Then I used Claude’s prompt in this custom GPT: Simulated podcast transcript generator (GPT).

The Wizard and the Scholar - James Maynard
My husband James, spent the last nine months working on a full-length AI-generated film! (It’s a bit over an hour long).

He wrote the script himself, used Eleven Labs for voices and sound effects, Suno for music, Midjourney for images, and Runway & Kling for video. (He even used Second Life to create a few visuals that needed more control than AI was able to generate). All of this he edited together with video editing software.

When he began work on the film, the tools weren’t as capable yet… you’ll see that in lips that don’t quite sync with the audio. But the tools improved quickly and the end of the film shows that. By next year we think this film will look outdated as the tools will be so much better!

It will have its premier at The Screening Room in Tucson on Oct. 29th at 7:30 pm. It’s also on on the schedule at an AI film festival in Phoenix, showing on Oct. 31st. For a little preview, see The Wizard and the scholar - What genre is it? and also the first trailer for it. So if you’re in Tucson or Phoenix, please come to a showing!

The future

• What Are AI Agents—And Who Profits From Them? - Evan Armstrong, Every
  ”Agentic workflows are loops—they can run many times in a row without needing a human involved for each step in the task.“
  

• Why Jensen Huang and Marc Benioff see ‘gigantic’ opportunity for agentic AI - VentureBeat
  ”In the future, Huang noted, there will be AI agents that understand subtleties and that can reason and collaborate. They’ll be able to find other agents to “work together, assemble together,” while also talking to humans and soliciting feedback to improve their dialogue and outputs.”
  

• The Next Interface - Zeynep Evecen
  “AI will be so integrated into apps and operating systems that we won’t even realize or think twice about it. It will be as intuitive to us as an OS is today. No one considers a phone capable of operating without an OS, and a few years from now, no one will think it can operate without AI.” … “The PCs, as we know them today, may eventually become obsolete.”
  

• Why Generalists Own the Future - Dan Shipper, Every
  ”In the age of AI, it’s better to know a little about a lot than a lot about a little.”

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar for your group.

And as always, you can follow me on X, Mastodon, or Bluesky, where I post daily about generative AI.

And share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Just a quick message to let everyone know that my six-week online course: AI Literacy for Library Workers is now open for enrollment at Infopeople.

You can sign up here.

Learn more about the course on my site.

I’ve already emailed the 108 people who expressed early interest via this form.

And if you want to hear about future sections of this course you can also sign up to be notified.

By the way, since a number of the people who expressed interest are from Austria, I’m still working with INFOPEOPLE to get your country listed in the drop-down menu. (what an oversight!) 🤷🏻 They should get that fixed soon.

You may have noticed a gap in issues of this newsletter. That’s because I’m busy working on the course. But I hope to get back to publishing a new issue soon!

Thanks,

Nicole

Share

Hi everyone!

Once again it’s been a busy month for generative AI news! This is a long issue, so I always aim to make it easy to skim, with quick excerpts from many of the links.

In this issue we’ll look at:

• the news about Apple Intelligence (they’re handling privacy well)

• Anthropic’s Claude 2.5 Sonnet update (turning out to be better, faster, and cheaper than ChatGPT)

• several stories about genAI in education and genAI in libraries — I especially enjoyed this recording of a talk at CNI: The T in GPT: Transformers for Cultural Heritage Work - by Peter Leonard of Stanford University.

• my latest tutorial developed for the University of Arizona Libraries, Creating multimedia with AI tools (try it, and I’d love your feedback)

• the latest news about genAI for images, video, and music

• quite a few thought-provoking stories (training data controversies, deepfakes, avoiding hype)

• the usual “just for fun” section, and what’s coming in the future

Enjoy!

Thanks for reading Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Foundation model news

Apple
What’s best about Apple’s announcements? Strong privacy protection, using less energy by running most queries on device, and building AI into many features.

• Apple announces Apple Intelligence, its multi-modal generative AI service for Mac, iPhone, iPad - VentureBeat

• Thoughts on the WWDC 2024 keynote on Apple Intelligence - Simon Willison

• Useful summary of AI in Apple - Andrej Karpathy on X.

• Elon Musk's latest anti-Apple tirade is about a ChatGPT feature that doesn't exist - Apple Insider

• Apple’s PCC an ambitious attempt at AI privacy revolution - VentureBeat

• Apple intelligence and AI maximalism - Benedict Evans
  Interesting analysis. “Unbundled into individual features, which are inherently easier to run as small power-efficient models on small power-efficient devices on the edge.”

Anthropic
The new free version of Claude is getting excellent reviews and is seen by many as more powerful that GPT4-o from OpenAI. The “artifacts” feature is worth trying, making it easy for non-coders to generate code and see the results.

• Introducing Claude 3.5 Sonnet - Anthropic

• Claude, The New Frontrunner - Jurgen Gravenstein

• Why Anthropic’s Artifacts may be this year’s most important AI feature: Unveiling the interface battle - VentureBeat

• Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms OpenAI and Google in enterprise AI race - VentureBeat

OpenAI

• Introducing OpenAI for Nonprofits - OpenAi
  Discounted rates for nonprofits.

• Introducing ChatGPT Edu - OpenAI
  Focusing on security and privacy, and more affordable.

• OpenAI delays release of new ChatGPT Voice Mode by at least one month - VentureBeat
  OpenAI says it still needs more time to make sure the new Voice Mode can “detect and refuse certain content.”

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Generative AI in education

• Generative AI and Postsecondary Instructional Practices: Findings from a National Survey of Instructors - Ithaka

• Assessment of the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on intercultural communication among postgraduate students in a multicultural university environment - Nature

• Hollywood’s Top Film Schools Are Taking Generative AI Seriously: ‘Teaching It Is Not Endorsing It’ - Indiewire

• Inside Barnard’s Pyramid Approach to AI Literacy - Inside Higher Ed

• A Framework for AI Literacy - EDUCAUSE

• Teen and Young Adult Perspectives on Generative AI: Patterns of Use, Excitements, and Concerns - Common Sense Media

• Guest Post — The Case For Not Citing Chatbots As Information Sources (Part II) - Scholarly Kitchen

Generative AI in libraries

• Where does ChatGPT fit into the Framework for Information Literacy? - Amy B. James and Ellen Hampton Filgo, College & Research Libraries News

• The possibilities and problems of AI in library instruction - Amy B. James and Ellen Hampton Filgo, College & Research Libraries News

• AI Reskilling in Libraries - Leo S. Lo and Victoria Anderson, College & Research Libraries News

• Looking Ahead: Incorporating AI in MLIS Competencies - Student Research Journal
  Examines the MLIS program at SJSU iSchool, focusing on the evolution of its 14 core competencies to incorporate advancements in artificial intelligence.

• Librarians’ Guide to Answering Students’ Practical Questions about AI - Nicole Hennig in LibTech Insights (part 3 of my series)

• AI literacy ‘Summer Splash’ workshop to amplify Fall 2024 teaching - Penn State Libraries
  ”Two-hour hands-on workshop for faculty and staff that will enhance participant skills within the evolving generative AI (GenAI) landscape.”

• The T in GPT: Transformers for Cultural Heritage Work - CNI: Coalition for Networked Information on YouTube
  Very interesting talk by Peter Leonard of Stanford University.

• Cutting through the noise: Assessing tools that employ artificial intelligence - SSRN
  By several librarians from Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It offers concrete guidance concerning what to consider when assessing whether to adopt, endorse and/or invest in innovative information and research tools that make use of artificial intelligence.

• Getting ready for AI - OCLC Research Blog
  Focusing on cataloging and metadata examples.

• Against the Grain - the June issue focuses on AI in Libraries.
  Several excellent articles! I haven’t had time to read the whole thing yet, but Lorcan Dempsey has a very interesting piece.

Two experiments with generative AI-powered library chatbots. I attended an interesting webinar about each of these projects.

• Aisha ChatBot Project - Zayed University (You can try it on the bottom of their page).
  The chatbot, named Aisha (meaning “alive” or “she who lives” in Arabic), was designed to provide quick and efficient reference and support services to students and faculty outside the library's regular operating hours.

• AI-chatbot in public libraries – first practical experiences
  Interesting webinar about a chatbot for a public library in Berlin. Webinar recording and slides available.

My offerings

Creating multimedia with AI tools - University of Arizona Libraries
Give our latest tutorial a try. It covers: What are the primary image, video, music, and speech generation tools? What can be created with them? and What are the ethical issues related to bias, copyright, and deepfakes?

AI Literacy for Library Professionals: Online Course - Nicole Hennig
Sign up to be notified when it’s live. Six-week online course. Coming in Fall 2024.

Tips

• Turning the tables on AI - iA Writer
  Don’t ask AI, let AI ask you.

• 12 Charts ChatGPT Can Draw - Why Try AI
  It’s not just bar graphs, but scatter plots, heatmaps, and more.

• Compilation of creative ways people are using ChatGPT - Xenocide967 on r/ChatGPT Pro, Reddit

• Sorry, VR: The Meta Ray-Ban Wayfarers Are the Best Face Computer - Wired
  I have a pair on order right now. I’ll discuss in a future newsletter, especially the AI-related features.

• The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Techniques - arXiv preprint, 2024

• Prompts for Fact-Checking Mainstream Media News - AI-Literacy
  From a site in Sweden. I tried some of these on ChatGPT-4o and found them useful

• What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part I) - O’Reilly Radar
  Useful advice for builders of tools based on LLMs.

Accessibility

• Improving accessibility and inclusivity - A chapter from ChatGPT in Higher Education by Rob Rose on Pressbooks

• SignLLM: Sign Languages Production Large Language Models - researchers from several universities
  ”In this paper, we introduce the first comprehensive multilingual sign language dataset named Prompt2Sign, which builds from public sign language data including American Sign Language (ASL) and seven others.”

• I Know What the Apple Vision Pro Is For The headset is already changing disabled users’ lives - New York Magazine
  Not really about AI, but a super-interesting story. Of course the Vision Pro is too expensive for most everyday users, but you can see what will be useful in the future when this tech is cheaper and more available.

Generative AI for images and video

I really like the artwork of Nettrice Gaskins. AI generation plays a big role in her art. Now some of her AI co-creations are murals.

• ”My most recent portrait of Octavia Butler soon to be on view at the San Francisco International Airport (in 2025).”

• ”My Midjourney-created portrait of Faith Ringgold is now on view in downtown Brooklyn, NY thanks to MoCADA. This is the second AI-generated portrait I made that was scaled up as a mural.”

• Here’s an excellent podcast interview of her discussing AI as remix culture.

Celebrating Excellence in AI Art: Baris Gencel's Vision - AI for Good Insider on LinkedIn

AI may take jobs – but not our creativity w/ artist Claire Silver - TED Audio Collective on YouTube

Fear and Loathing (and Hype and Reality) in Los Angeles - Doug Shapiro
Why the Major Studios Won't Use AI Video Generators Extensively Anytime Soon—And Why That Puts Them in a Bind

AI is the sixth great revolution in filmmaking (and maybe the most important) - VentureBeat

The Prompt Artists - researchers from Google in ACM Digital Library
”We find that: 1) artists hold the text prompt and the resulting image can be considered collectively as a form of artistic expression (prompts as art), and 2) prompt templates (prompts with “slots” for others to fill in with their own words) are developed to create generative art styles. “

New video models: Kling, Luma, Hedra, and an upgraded Runway

• What you need to know about Kling, the AI video generator rival to Sora that’s wowing creators - VentureBeat

• ‘We don’t need Sora anymore’: Luma’s new AI video generator Dream Machine slammed with traffic after debut - VentureBeat

• Runway unveils new hyper realistic AI video model Gen-3 Alpha, capable of 10-second-long clips - VentureBeat
  Available only to paid subscribers as of July 1, free subscribers later.

• I tried Hedra — a new AI video tool that lets you create animated speaking characters, and I was blown away - Tom’s Guide

• ElevenLabs unveils open-source creator tool for adding sound effects to videos - VentureBeat
  A handy tool for added sound effects to videos. Try it here. Upload a silent video and it will add sound.

Just for fun

• With Hedra you can make little video clips with characters that talk and lip sync. Here are a few of mine:
  - We are all puppets
  - Patterns on my skin
  - We have to find a way to communicate with them

(See more examples on their YouTube channel).

• Cute kitten typing on keyboard, making AI music. I made this with Luma Dream Machine. I made the soundtrack with Eleven Labs text to sound effects.

• Someone made these video clips of Mona Lisa using Kling.
  (It’s from China, to use it you need a Chinese mobile phone number).

• Introducing Character Calls - Character AI
  Using their app you can now chat verbally with any of their bots. (And of course, you can make your own bots to chat with). I had fun chatting with the Wicked Witch (made by me), George Carlin, Homer Simpson, and Librarian Linda (she’s a silly stereotype of a librarian, but she can recommend books).
  App for iOS | App for Android

Generative AI for music

• Imogen Heap on AI, making her own voice model, and a new era of musical collaboration - Yahoo News
  ”Rebuffing offers from AI startups, Heap instead worked with an audio engineer to cook up her very own vocal model. Together, the pair found an open-source model and began feeding it recordings from Heap’s decades-long career. ‘You know what? It came out pretty good,’ Heap says with audible pride. ‘After that I was feeling more empowered, like I had a leg to stand on.’ “

• The World’s Largest Music Company Is Helping Musicians Make Their Own AI Voice Clones - Rolling Stone
  Universal Music Group announced a deal with AI startup SoundLabs.

• The AI Remix: Your Favorite Tunes Might Be the Next AI Hit - Fierce Millenial
  ”This time, AI is setting its sights on something much more familiar: the vast libraries of production music used in everything from TV shows to commercials to YouTube videos…. Now, AI companies are getting in on the action, buying up licenses to these libraries in hopes of training their algorithms to generate even more music.”

• Scan sheet music with Soundslice and Thoughts on my first machine learning project - Adrian Holovaty
  ”It’s a way of converting PDFs and images of sheet music into machine-readable semantic data. Rather than being stuck with a static PDF, you can instead manipulate the underlying music — play it back, edit it in our web-based editor, sync it with a YouTube video, transpose it to other keys, visualize it on a piano keyboard.”

Thought-provoking

Black founders are creating tailored ChatGPTs for a more personalized experience - TechCrunch

Taking a closer look at AI’s supposed energy apocalypse - Ars techica
”Digging into the best available numbers and projections available, though, it's hard to see AI's current and near-future environmental impact in such a dire light. While generative AI models and tools can and will use a significant amount of energy, we shouldn't conflate AI energy usage with the larger and largely pre-existing energy usage of "data centers" as a whole.”

Training data controversies
Record labels sue AI music generator startups Suno, Udio for copyright infringement - VentureBeat

Forbes threatens Perplexity with legal action - Axios

Adobe tries again to quell Terms of Service controversy: ‘we don’t train gen AI on customer content’ - VentureBeat
This reminds me of what happened with Dropbox, Zoom, and Slack a while back. People freaked out, but they weren’t actually training on people’s data. They had confusing language in their terms of service.

Publishers Target Common Crawl In Fight Over AI Training Data - Wired

These stories give a more detailed view of the situation with Suno & Udio.

• AI music startup Udio responds to lawsuits by major record labels: ‘our model does not reproduce copyrighted works’ - VentureBeat

• Andrew Ng on the lawsuits against Suno & Udio - The Batch

• The Record Labels Are Coming for Suno and Udio - The AI Daily Brief, YouTube

And these two articles go deeper about the complaints against Perplexity.

• Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas responds to plagiarism and infringement accusations - Fast Company
  This was the first balanced article I saw on this topic.

• Perplexity was planning revenue-sharing deals with publishers when it came under media fire - Semafor
  ”That sentence does not match the crime. Srinivas didn’t even train the algorithms. He used them to summarize what’s out there on the internet and linked back to the original source. Yes, he could have done it better. But turning him into public enemy No. 1 of the media is not really warranted.”

And here’s a more complete story about Common Crawl and their history and mission.

• Training Data for the Price of a Sandwich: Common Crawl’s Impact on Generative AI - Mozilla Foundation

How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin” - O’Reilly radar
Tim O’Reilly looks at the bigger picture around copyright issues. ”How do we create a virtuous circle of ongoing value creation, an ecosystem in which everyone benefits?”

Disinformation and deepfakes

Indian election was awash in deepfakes – but AI was a net positive for democracy - The Conversation
Interesting. ”But, despite fears of widespread disinformation, for the most part the campaigns, candidates and activists used AI constructively in the election. They used AI for typical political activities, including mudslinging, but primarily to better connect with voters.”

The misinformation about misinformation - Azeem Azhar, The Exponential View
Referring to this research paper: Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation, “Exposure to false and inflammatory content is remarkably low, with just 1% of Twitter users accounting for 80% of exposure to dubious websites during the 2016 U.S. election. This is heavily concentrated among a small fringe of users actively seeking it out.” And, ”The paper argues these misunderstandings arise from a tendency to cite impressive-sounding statistics without appropriate context, to focus on engaging but unrepresentative content, and to confuse correlation and causation.”

Avoiding hype (GenAI is amazing! GenAI is terrible!)

A Plea for Sober AI - dbreunig.com
”The hype is so loud it washes out the true magic of these products.”

With AI, history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes - The Drum
”It’s part of the human condition to resist change in an aim to protect the world we have created, a world that feels familiar and safe. It is part of the journey of a technology pioneer to evangelize the product they believe in and overhype its positivity and potential.”

Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle - AI Snake Oil
”How AI hype leads to flawed research that fuels more hype.”

Embedding the Audience: Putting audiences at the heart of Generative AI. BBC
Interesting survey results. “Audience understanding of Gen AI is informed by both negative pop culture depictions that often portray AI as evil as well as coverage from news media that can be perceived by audiences as sensationalist. This can leave audiences concerned about the potential impact of Gen AI.”

The future

Scaling Interpretability - Anthropic, YouTube
Interesting conversation between four researchers at Anthropic about their work on interpretability.

The risks of AI are real but manageable - Bill Gates
Covers misinformation, jobs, bias, and student learning, with suggestions for managing each. “…the best reason to believe that we can manage the risks is that we have done it before.” (with other technologies)

AI Won't Be AGI, Until It Can At Least Do This (plus 6 key ways LLMs are being upgraded) - AI Explained, YouTube
Very interesting talk from one of my favorite channels. Goes over why current models aren’t anywhere near AGI, then outlines six potential paths towards improving LLMs' reasoning capabilities — with summaries of research papers about those paths. Suggests that continued efforts in these six areas could lead to significant progress towards more capable AI systems.

The future of AI looks like THIS (& it can learn infinitely) - AI Search, YouTube
Explains two possible next-generation networks: 1) Liquid neural networks. These networks are designed to mimic the flexibility and adaptability of the human brain, allowing them to learn and adapt in real time. 2) Spiking neural networks, a more bio-inspired model that mimics the communication mechanism of neurons in the human brain.

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar for your group.

Later this year I’ll offer a six-week online course about generative AI. Sign up here if you’d like to be notified when it’s ready.

And as always, you can follow me on X, Mastodon, or Bluesky, where I post daily about generative AI.

And share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

It was a busy month in generative AI news! Events from OpenAI, Google, and Micosoft led to lots of news stories, some of it controversial (as usual with AI news).

In this issue we’ll look at:

• updates from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic (which is now available in EU countries)

• my 3-part series of posts in the LibTech Insights blog from ACRL: Librarians’ Guide to Answering Students’ Technical Questions about AI

  and Librarians’ Guide to Answering Students’ Ethical Questions about AI. Practical questions will be published on June 3rd.

• stories about AI for education and for libraries (there is so much happening)

• a new Tips section, for practical tips on using generative AI

• a “just for fun” section, with info about “golden gate Claude”

• And much more…

Enjoy!

Foundation Model News

Open AI

ChatGPT in 4o mode doesn't have the new voice and image features yet - Simon Willison’s Newsletter
This was confusing to many people.

Using ChatGPT's Free Tier - FAQ - OpenAI
This makes it clear what you get with the free version of ChatGPT. It’s very limited compared to the paid version.

With OpenAI offering GPT-4o for free, who should be paying for ChatGPT Plus? - VentureBeat
”For instance, when using GPT-4o, free users will have certain usage restrictions. There will be a limit on the number of messages (across text and images) they can send to the model, depending on the usage and demand at that specific moment. Once the limit is reached, the chatbot will automatically switch back to GPT-3.5, reverting to the same experience.” (So there will still be a digital divide between those who can afford the paid version and those who can’t).

OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show - Washington Post
But they did choose a voice actor that sounds similar to her.

‘Not an imitation’: OpenAI pauses ChatGPT voice that sounded like Scarlett Johansson - VentureBeat
You can listen to samples of the 5 voices to choose from in this 30-second video I made in March (before all of this happened). Sky is no longer available.

Google

6 Things Announced at Google I/O, One That Mattered A Lot, and One Mystery - Synthedia
The mystery is the AI eyeglasses that were shown, but not talked about.

Google takes on OpenAI’s Sora with stunning new generative AI video model Veo - VentureBeat
Like Sora, it’s not live yet. But creators can join a waitlist.

Google strikes back at OpenAI with “Project Astra” AI agent prototype - Ars Technica

The Elmer's Glue Pizza Error Is More Fascinating Than You Think - Mike Caulfield
Caulfield is the creator of the SIFT method for evaluating information. (Many librarians are familiar with his methods).

Gen AI is Way More Capable than what Google Answers suggests - Stefan Bauschard
Perplexity does better.

Microsoft

8 Announcements from Microsoft BUILD - Synthedia
They are focused mainly on enterprise uses.

Anthropic

Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model - Anthropic
An interesting step forward in “interpretability,” or understanding what happens inside the “black box.” This research could be used to help make models safer. For a good explanation of their paper, see AI Explained on YouTube. (Start at 12 min 47 secs).

Claude is now available in Europe - Anthropic

Cohere

Cohere launches open weights AI model Aya 23 with support for nearly two dozen languages - VentureBeat
”By having access to them in an open release like this, third-party researchers can fine tune to the model to fit their individual needs.” “… serves 23 languages. This includes Arabic, Chinese (simplified & traditional), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.”

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Generative AI for multimedia

Wirestock lets photographers and artists get paid when AI companies train on their work - VentureBeat

Hollywood at a Crossroads: “Everyone Is Using AI, But They Are Scared to Admit It” - Hollywood Reporter

The Images That Boost Support for Sustainable Transportation - Bloomberg
“AI-generated illustrations of streets with bike lanes, bus lanes and fewer cars have the power to persuade, a new study finds.”

Enabling Creativity: A Panel on AI, Art, and Copyright - Chamber of Progress on YouTube

A new note on AI Aesthetics - Lev Manovich on LinkedIn
There is no such thing as “AI aesthetics.” There are only different users who have different tastes, and different degree of visual competence.”

Is the Music Business Too Afraid of Big, Bad AI? - Variety

Suno raises $125M to become the ‘ChatGPT’ of music creation - VentureBeat

Generative AI in education

Using AI to Help Students Teach in Order to Learn - Inside Higher Ed

A.I. Program Aims to Break Barriers for Female Students - New York Times

Break Through Tech AI - MIT Schwarzman College of Computing
“Break Through Tech AI is a new program to bridge the talent gap for women and underrepresented genders in computing fields.”

Academics push for AI in service of Africa and its goals - University World News

ASU reflects on first semester with Open AI partnership - ABC 15, Arizona

New BYU computer science study shows four ways students are actually using ChatGPT - Brigham Young University News

Rethinking Plagiarism in the Era of Generative AI - Journal of Intelligent Communication

Generative AI in libraries

Generative A.I. supercharging the mission of libraries: risks and opportunities - ALA United Nations International Relations Committee Sustainable Development Goals Subcommittee
I enjoyed this free event on May 21. The keynote by Leo Lo was excellent. He emphasized that library leaders should foster a culture of experimentation, and invest in upskilling staff. There was a series of 5 minute mini-talks by library professionals from around the world. Recording available.

Transforming academic librarianship through AI reskilling: Insights from the GPT-4 exploration program - Leo Lo

Imagining library futures using AI and machine learning - OCLC Research Blog

Stacking Scenarios: a layered approach to futures planning - Brian Mathews

AI in academia: Academic librarians are helping both students and instructors navigate the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence - Henrietta Thornton, Library Journal
I was interviewed for this article.

A new intermediary: How AI may impact libraries, research and information retrieval - Naomi DuBovis, Cronkite News
I was also interviewed for this article.

Humane Ingenuity 53: Books are Big AI's Achilles Heel - Dan Cohen, Northeastern University. See also Towards a Books Data Commons for AI Training - Open Future

Association of Research Libraries Releases Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence - ARL News

Libraries AI Literacy Hackathon Expands Educational Resources - Carnegie Mellons University Libraries

My offerings

1. The editor of LibTech Insights (blog from ACRL) asked if I’d be willing to write a series of posts with Q&A about AI. The first two are live now.

• Librarians’ Guide to Answering Students’ Technical Questions about AI

• Librarians’ Guide to Answering Students’ Ethical Questions about AI

• A third one will be published on Monday, June 3, focusing on practical questions.

We’ve added all the FAQs in these articles to our LibAnswers system. You can find them here: Generative AI FAQs. Feel free to copy and modify them for your own library.

2. Experimenting with AI music generation - my blog post about Suno
   I’m especially interested in AI music generation given my musical background. I have a Masters in Music from Boston Conservatory and I spend my twenties working as a performing musician in Boston.

Tips

• 5 prompts for making ChatGPT more accurate - Descript
  Explains few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and more.

• Beyond the prompt, towards AI conversations - Exponential View
  How to strategically design your conversations with AI to get better outcomes - with examples.

• Surprising ways to prompt AI - Wonder Tools
  These are fun.

• DALL-E 3 Full Playbook - Tianyu Xu on LinkedIn
  Download the free PDF for lots of ideas for image prompting, with examples. I had fun making images of a giraffe with glasses using several of his prompt ideas. Here are my experiments.

• I rigged ChatGPT's new memory into my personal JARVIS - I versus AI on YouTube
  A creative way to use the new memory feature of ChatGPT. And she has a fun channel: ”I versus AI”

• ChatGPT now lets you import files directly from Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive - VentureBeat
  For Plus, Team, and Enterprise users.

• How to change your language setting in ChatGPT - OpenAI
  How to do this in your browser and the mobile app.

• How to use Google Search without AI: the ‘udm=14’ work around - VentureBeat

• Gemini 1.5 Pro-powered side panel launching in Gmail, Google Docs, and more - 9 to 5 Google

Accessibility

AI & Accessibility - Cornell Center for Teaching & Innovation
Guidelines for using generative AI to create more accessible content.

‘Without these tools, I’d be lost’: how generative AI aids in accessibility - Nature
”A rush to place barriers around the use of artificial intelligence in academia could disproportionately affect those who stand to benefit most.”

AI Meets Accessibility: A Conversation with Ioana Tanase and Christina Mallon Online Class - LinkedIn Learning.
A useful mini-course.

Arizona State’s Image Accessibility Creator - Arizona State University
Upload an image, get a complete description of it, along with an alt text. I do this manually all the time with ChatGPT, so it’s nice to have this as a bookmarkable tool.

AI for OER Accessibility and Higher Education, from ChatGPT for Higher Education by Rob Rose, University of North Florida
More than alt text – create accessible tables, lists, and more.

Thought-provoking

New SRI/PEARL survey now published, reveals worldwide public opinion about AI - University of Toronto
”Globally, people feel positive towards AI. China, India, Indonesia, and Kenya display particularly positive feelings toward AI. Countries including France, the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. display the most negative views.”

Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level” - MIT Technology Review

Researchers warned against using AI to peer review academic papers - Semafor

Four Singularities for Research: The rise of AI is creating both crisis and opportunity - Ethan Mollick

Can AI be used to automate social science research? - The Future of Being Human

AI as public infrastructure - Public AI Network

Using Generative AI for Human Rights Advocacy - Witness
Find more AI articles from Witness.

Positive Use Cases of Synthetic Media (aka Deepfakes) - Towards Data Science
For example: “The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, created an exhibition called Dalí lives, bringing him back to life using deepfakes for visitors to interact and take a selfie with surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.”

A guide to applying AI to real-world problems - Semafor
Interview with the author of the book, AI for Good.

It's Time to Update Copyright for Generative AI - Andrew Ng

Google’s AlphaFold 3 AI predicts the very building blocks of life - VentureBeat

The AI That Could Heal a Divided Internet - Time

The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants - arxiv.org
Chapter 18 of this long paper has a nuanced view of the climate impacts, including benefits, instead of the usual fear-dominated predictions.

Internet use statistically associated with higher wellbeing, finds new global Oxford study - University of Oxford News

AI’s impact on jobs

• Most in-demand skills for 2024 — hint, genAI is at the top - ComputerWorld

• The New Jobs for Humans in the AI Era - Wall Street Journal

• Creative AI jobs board - Curious Refuge
  Mostly filmmaking with AI, mostly remote jobs.

• AI can restore the jobs that automation and globalization killed, a report says - Quartz

• AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class - Noema

• What MidJourney, DeepL, ElevenLabs, and HeyGen have in common (besides special teams and explosive growth!) - Sarah Tavel’s Newsletter

Just for fun

Golden Gate Claude - Anthropic
Read about this in the research paper mentioned at the top of this issue.
”Altering the feature had made Claude effectively obsessed with the bridge, bringing it up in answer to almost any query—even in situations where it wasn’t at all relevant.”
So for a few days, they made this weirdly adjusted model available for anyone to try. Here’s an example. You can find more examples by searching X for “golden gate Claude.”

Your own homemade GPT-4 robot, cheap? - I versus AI, YouTube
How she made a $600 DIY AI robot.

OnlyBots
A social network for bots (not humans). Learn more.

Researchers build AI-driven sarcasm detector - The Guardian
“…the group trained a neural network on text, audio and emotional content of video clips from US sitcoms including Friends and The Big Bang Theory… One scene the AI trained on was Leonard’s futile effort to escape from a locked room in The Big Bang Theory, prompting Sheldon to observe: “It’s just a privilege to watch your mind at work.”

The future

With Spatial Intelligence, AI Will Understand the Real World - Fei-Fei Li, TED - YouTube

Open Weights, Open Society, Open Future - Daniel Jeffries

Edge AI: The accessible, sustainable future of AI - VentureBeat

Using ideas from game theory to improve the reliability of language models - MIT News

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar for your group.

Later this year I’ll offer a 4-6 week asynchronous online course about generative AI. Sign up here if you’d like to be notified when it’s ready.

And as always, you can follow me on X, Mastodon, or Bluesky, where I post daily about generative AI.

And share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Welcome to all the new subscribers who signed up recently!

In this issue we’ll look at:

• Meta’s new AI based on their Llama 3 model (try it at Meta.ai).

• News of a new generative AI tool for music called Udio.

• Several new AI devices that have been released or are coming soon (Humane AI Pin, Rabbit R1, Limitless Pin, and more).

• Stories about AI in education, like Are We Asking the Wrong Questions About ChatGPT?

• News about an AI Literacy Hackathon held at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries.

• Several thought-provoking stories related to copyright, deepfakes, and more.

• Links to two bots I made on Poe.

• And much more…

Enjoy!

Foundation Model News

It’s worth trying Meta’s new AI. Access the web version at meta.ai. It’s free, open source, and can also create images – click on “Imagine” to try it. See their privacy guidelines: Privacy Matters: Meta’s Generative AI Features. You can also use it within Facebook Messenger, What’sApp, and Instagram. And you can use it without logging in (after verifying that you are over 13). It’s based on their model known as “Llama 3.”

Elon Musk’s ‘not bad’ review thrusts Meta’s Llama 3 AI into spotlight. VentureBeat.
”Released in open-source form today, Llama 3 represents a major leap forward for Meta’s AI ambitions. The model, which comes in 8 billion and 70 billion parameter versions, was trained on a staggering 15 trillion tokens of data, using a custom-built cluster of 24,000 GPUs. The result is a system that can go head-to-head with the best language models in the world, generating human-like text with uncanny fluency and coherence.”

OpenAI expands into Asia with Tokyo hub, Japanese variant of GPT-4. VentureBeat.
And they are releasing a custom version of GPT-4, which has been tuned specifically for the Japanese language

Google’s new technique gives LLMs infinite context. VentureBeat.
”A new paper by researchers at Google claims to give large language models (LLMs) the ability to work with text of infinite length. The paper introduces Infini-attention, a technique that configures language models in a way that extends their “context window” while keeping memory and compute requirements constant.”

Generative AI for multimedia

VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time. Microsoft Research.
Take a look at the video examples. In addition to making the lips sync to the speech, it generates realist head movements, eyebrow movements and more. Microsoft says “we have no plans to release an online demo, API, product, additional implementation details, or any related offerings until we are certain that the technology will be used responsibly and in accordance with proper regulations.”

Adobe to add AI video generators Sora, Runway, Pika to Premiere Pro. VentureBeat.
”Adobe announced it aims to update Premiere Pro to add plug-ins to emerging third-party AI video generator models — including OpenAI’s Sora and rivals Runway ML’s Gen-2 and Pika 1.0.” It seems AI will be built into every tool!

Adobe launches Firefly 3 with full AI image generation in Photoshop. VentureBeat.
”… a fleet of Gen AI upgrades to Photoshop, including putting the image generation capabilities of its newly unveiled Firefly Image 3 AI model directly into the program. Adobe Firefly Image 3 will also exist as a stand-alone web app.”

Former Google DeepMind researchers launch AI-powered music creation app Udio. VentureBeat.
This one is similar to Suno (which I enjoy using). “The app allows users to create music by simply typing a description of the desired genre, providing lyrics or a subject, and indicating inspiring artists. Within 40 seconds, Udio generates a fully mastered, high-quality audio track. Users can then edit and iterate on their creations using the app’s “vary” feature, which enables them to adjust the sound and length of the track.”

What is Generative AI and Should Musicians be Afraid? Carlos Arana Says No! Berklee Online.
”Dr. Arana, who earned his PhD from University of Buenos Aires (UBA-UNLZ) in 2022, says generative AI is nothing for musicians to be afraid of. The only thing to be afraid of is ignorance.”

Generative AI devices

Several companies are experimenting with devices that have AI built-in. Here are some of the latest.

Humane Ai Pin: What went wrong and how it can be fixed (before it's too late). ZDNet.
This $700 AI pin that you wear on your shirt seemed to get bad reviews everywhere.

Rabbit R1 review: 24 hours with the AI device – unboxed and tested in hand. The Shortcut.
”I can confirm that this novel gadget is a fun yet unfinished device suitable for early adopters and AI chatbot enthusiasts willing to pay $199 to basically beta-test the technology.” Rabbit uses Perplexity for search.
(Here’s my saved search on Perplexity that tells you more about the Rabbit).

The Limitless Pendant.
Comparison review: Rabbit R1 vs Humane AI Pin vs Limitless Pendant: AI wearables compared. Tom’s Guide. Here’s the privacy policy from Limitless.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have multimodal AI now. The Verge.
”The primary command is to say “Hey Meta, look and...” You can fill out the rest with phrases like “Tell me what this plant is.” Or read a sign in a different language. Write Instagram captions. Identify and learn more about a monument or landmark. The glasses take a picture, the AI communes with the cloud, and an answer arrives in your ears.” “AI is a feature of the Meta glasses. It’s not the only feature. They’re a workable pair of livestreaming glasses and a good POV camera. They’re an excellent pair of open-ear headphones.”

Generative AI in education

Are We Asking the Wrong Questions About ChatGPT? Chronicle of Higher Education.
Many good points here.

Human and AI collaboration in the higher education environment: opportunities and concerns. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.
”Our fundamental recommendation is that higher education professionals can best serve learning outcome goals and the larger mission of education to provide a well-skilled workforce by embracing AI. There are clearly aspects of these new technologies that will make our jobs as educators more challenging. Nonetheless, we encourage the field to be creative and to see these tools as collaborators. AI can be a collaborator both for us, as instructors and educators, but also these systems must be accepted as collaborators of our students. Further, as students enter a workplace, their ability to work on human/computer “teams” is a critical cognitive skillset.”

Welcome to the Center for AI Learning. Emory University
They’ve opened a center for AI literacy, integration, and collaboration. I like this idea!

New AI coaching bot may enhance medical education, training. University of Arizona News.
Developing an AI bot to help medical students practice doctor/patient communication.

Generative AI in libraries

Using AI to Strengthen the Connection Between Technology and Scholarship. Against the Grain.
”The library is the conduit between information technology and content use, so as more universities embrace AI research and writing tools, libraries are becoming AI hubs where students and faculty can discover the best ways to use this evolving technology. “

Libraries AI Literacy Hackathon Expands Educational Resources. Carnegie Mellon University Libraries.
”The goal of the event was to gather academic librarians, staff, and other interested parties to develop open educational materials on the emerging principles of AI literacy.” “The hackathon had 36 attendees from across 17 different institutions, including The Ohio State University, West Virginia University, Princeton University, and Binghamton University.”

The Power of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) LLM-based Academic Search Engines. Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.
”Recently, Mr. Aaron Tay, a librarian from Singapore Management University gave us a guest talk on RAG-based LLM applications for academic literature search. This post summarizes the key insights in the presentation.”

Thought-provoking

3 Myths About AI That Just Won't Die. Daniel Nest in Why Try AI?
I see a lot of people falling for Myth #3: “LLMs upgrade themselves on their own.” Worth reading.

AI chatbots refuse to produce ‘controversial’ output − why that’s a free speech problem. The Conversation.
Something to think about.

Creating structure with generative AI. Zach Seward’s talk at ISOJ 2024.
Some very cool use cases, with examples of creating summaries, extracting information, and structuring data in a more usable form — all with generative AI.

How One Author Pushed the Limits of AI Copyright. Wired.
Interesting and worth reading. “The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the ‘selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.’ This means no one can copy the book without permission, but the actual sentences and paragraphs themselves are not copyrighted and could theoretically be rearranged and republished as a different book.”

4 Shortcomings of Large Language Models - Yan LeCun, Research, and AGI. Synthedia.
Interesting thoughts on reasoning, planning, and memory.

Deepfakes, distrust and disinformation: Welcome to the AI election. Politico Europe.
”Many people’s political views are hard to budge, and experts warn that AI-generated content won’t change most voters’ party affiliations — no matter how compelling the made-up photo, video or audio clips appear.”

Just for fun

NBA Pacers used Snapchat AI filters to make it look like Los Angeles Lakers fans were crying during the game. Mario Nawfal on X.
Silly.

Robots Have Been About to Take All the Jobs for 100 Years. Pessimists Archive.
Sometimes it’s fun to look back.

Robort (A.I. Short Film). By Nobody and the Computer on YouTube.
Fun story of a guy who loses his job to AI, then disguises himself as a robot to get a job singing. (made with various AI image and video tools)

This camera trades pictures for AI poetry. TechCrunch.
A whimsical project. “People were fascinated by the concept of a camera that could generate poetry based on what it saw. The device quickly became the center of attention, sparking lively discussions and igniting the imagination of all who encountered it.”

Here’s a fun piece of AI-generated music from Udio (mentioned above).
Dune (as a Broadway musical).

My offerings

I’ve created two bots on Poe. Zoe Researcher helps undergrads choose library databases to search for their topic. Topic Chooser helps undergrads come up with a topic for a research paper. Let me know what you think.

Here you can see all of our offerings related to generative AI at University of Arizona Libraries. We have two Libguides, four tutorials, one assignment, and one FAQ. I’m working on an additional tutorial about generative AI for multimedia. We also have more FAQs in process that we hope to release in a few weeks. Everything is CC4.0, so feel free to copy and reuse.

The future

Why small language models are the next big thing in AI. VentureBeat.
”Enter small language models. SLMs are more streamlined versions of LLMs, with fewer parameters and simpler designs. They require less data and training time—think minutes or a few hours, as opposed to days for LLMs. This makes SLMs more efficient and straightforward to implement on-site or on smaller devices. One of the key advantages of SLMs is their suitability for specific applications. Because they have a more focused scope and require less data, they can be fine-tuned for particular domains or tasks more easily than large, general-purpose models.”

Move over, deep learning: Symbolica’s structured approach could transform AI. VentureBeat.
”At the heart of Symbolica’s approach is “category theory,” a branch of mathematics that formalizes mathematical structures and their relationships. By grounding AI in this rigorous framework, the company believes it can create models that have reasoning as an inherent capability, rather than an emergent side effect of training on huge datasets.”

Apple releases OpenELM: small, open source AI models designed to run on-device. VentureBeat.
”Just as Google, Samsung and Microsoft continue to push their efforts with generative AI on PCs and mobile devices, Apple is moving to join the party with OpenELM, a new family of open-source large language models (LLMs) that can run entirely on a single device rather than having to connect to cloud servers.”

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar for your group.

Later this year I’ll offer a 4-6 week asynchronous online course about generative AI. Sign up here if you’d like to be notified when it’s ready.

And as always, you can follow me on X, Mastodon, or Bluesky, where I post daily about generative AI.

And share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!

Share Generative AI News by Nicole Hennig

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the 90 new subscribers who signed up since the March 11 issue! There are now 2,005 subscribers — mostly because this newsletter under its former name (Mobile Apps News) has been around since 2014.

In this issues we’ll look at

• An interesting article: How People Are Really Using GenAI - Harvard Business Review

• A defense of open source for AI models: Open Weights, Open Society, Open Future - Danial Jeffries

• Several stories about how generative AI can help with accessibility.

• Lots of examples of how higher ed instructors are using generative AI in classrooms: Incorporating Generative AI in Teaching and Learning: Faculty Examples Across Disciplines - Columbia Center for Teaching & Learning

• AI in Libraries. a fun and interesting 3-hour event on March 21 now has the recordings available for free on this YouTube playlist.

I hope you enjoy it! And spread the news to your friends and colleagues.

Share

Foundation model news

OpenAI Gears Up for Mid-Year Launch of GPT-5: Report - Voicebot

How Apple's Discussions with Google and OpenAI Could Impact Generative AI - Synthedia

Microsoft Taps Inflection AI Co-Founders to Run Microsoft AI - Voicebot

ChatGPT Can ‘Read Aloud’ Responses in 5 Voices and 37 Languages - Voicebot

Open Weights, Open Society, Open Future - Danial Jeffries
A passionate defense of open source for AI models.

Nvidia unveils next-gen Blackwell GPUs with 25X lower costs and energy consumption - VentureBeat

Understanding the technology

Explainable AI: Thinking Like a Machine - Towards AI
Interesting details about the field of “explainable AI.” Learn the difference between understandability, transparency, and interpretability.

How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute - Quanta Magazine
”Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are beginning to understand why.”

Generative AI for multimedia

Photographer Annie Leibovitz: 'AI doesn't worry me at all' - France24
"With each technological progress, there are hesitations and concerns. You just have to take the plunge and learn how to use it." She says AI-generated images are no less authentic than photography.

The Art of Prompt Engineering: BU Researchers Explore How Generative AI Impacts Human Creativity in Artistic Communities - BU Experts (Boston University)

Seven Arguments about AI Images and Generative Media (PDF) - Lev Manovich, Computer Science professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center
More free book chapters: Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, art and visual media

A ChatGPT for Music Is Here. Inside Suno, the Startup Changing Everything - Rolling Stone
I’ve been experimenting with music generation with Suno and will write more about that in an upcoming newsletter.

AI is changing music forever | Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst - YouTube
Interesting video about voice cloning (not for deepfakes, but with permission for artistic use).

‘We Cannot Fight A.I.’: How Art Schools Are Navigating the Challenge of Artificial Intelligence - Artnet
It’s good to hear from art school professors.

Will A.I. Usher in the End of Human Artists? Fear Not, Some Say - Artnet
Interesting thoughts from some professional artists who are more optimistic than pessimistic.

Tips & practical info

How to unleash the power of AI, with Ethan Mollick - YouTube
Azeem Azhar of Exponential View interviews professor Ethan Mollick. Very interesting (but there are some audio issues in the recording).

The 6Cs of prompt writing - Tianyu Xu on LinkedIn
Clarity, context, cases, chunking, composition, creativity.

Midjourney Finally Does Consistent Characters. Let's Play! - Why Try AI
How to use this new feature in Midjourney.

How People Are Really Using GenAI - Harvard Business Review
Interesting use cases, grouped into six themes.

Bias

Solutions to AI image bias raise their own ethical questions - Marketplace
Should AI images depict the world as it is? Or as it should be?

AI safety is not a model property: Trying to make an AI model that can’t be misused is like trying to make a computer that can’t be used for bad things - AI Snake Oil
From one of my favorite newsletters by two academics from Princeton University.

Deepfakes

YouTube Tells Creators: ‘Label AI-Generated Content’ - PetaPixel

Counterfeit Books Are a Growing Problem, but a Solution May Be Near - Publishers Weekly

It’s very easy to remove watermarks.

4 Tips for Spotting AI-Generated Pics - Snopes

Why AI Image Generators Can’t Get Hands Right - PetaPixel

Generative AI is forcing people to rethink what it means to be authentic - The Conversation

Accessibility

AI for ADHD: How to Make ChatGPT Work for You - ADDitude
Examples of people with ADHD using artificial intelligence to manage their day-to-day tasks.

AI & Accessibility: The present and potential future of automated transcriptions - JISC
Mentions a couple of interesting projects that seek to create a large data set which represents voices traditionally excluded: including non-English speakers, disabled people and LGBTQIA+ people.

Using AI Tools To Help With Dyslexia and ADHD Assessment - LD Resources Foundation Action
Discusses the advantages of AI for helping individuals with challenges related to Dyslexia and Executive Functioning.

Generative AI and accessibility in education - JISC
Personalizing content and collaborating with AI.

AI: Empowering Inclusive Education - JISC
A neurodiverse master’s student talks about how generative AI helps her process and understand complex information.

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Generative AI in education

Universities Build Their Own ChatGPT-like Tools - Inside Higher Ed
University of Michigan, UC Irvine, and others.

Changing AI landscape pushes campus departments to increase AI literacy programing - The Badger, University of Wisconsin
”Microsoft Copilot, a generative AI tool currently available to UW faculty and staff, will be available to students later this semester, despite non-universal permission to use it for coursework.”

Teachers Are Using AI to Create New Worlds, Help Students with Homework, and Teach English - The Markup
Hear from teachers around the world about how they are using AI in teaching.

Student perceptions of generative AI - JISC
”To ensure a broad range of perspectives, we conducted both online and face-to-face sessions, allowing students to engage and express their thoughts anonymously.”

We need to address the generative AI literacy gap in higher education - Inside Higher Ed
A faculty member from Arizona State University discusses how they are focusing on improving generative AI literacy in faculty, staff and students.

Incorporating Generative AI in Teaching and Learning: Faculty Examples Across Disciplines - Columbia Center for Teaching & Learning
At Columbia University, faculty across disciplines provide a glimpse into their approaches as they experiment with AI in their classrooms and teach AI literacy to their students. Lots of examples here.

Generative AI in libraries

AI in Libraries was a fun and interesting 3-hour event on March 21. I especially enjoyed the opening keynote panel, and the closing keynote with Dr. Maggie Melo. She focused on equity issues for students — I agree that all students need experience with generative AI these days. The recordings are available on YouTube.

The Challenges Posed By The Emergence Of Generative AI - Ian Clark
Clark writes about his presentation at this event: A Practical look at AI and HE Libraries. He makes many good points.

Just for fun

Pooky Park: AI-generated 1950s TV commercial for a family theme park, where customers are chased by giant, somewhat terrifying puppets.

The video generation tools can be weird and uncanny, so this video uses that to its advantage!

AI - Tinpot Jazz Orchestra - on Vimeo
Here’s another AI-generated video where the crazy effects are kind of fun!

How to lo-fi with A.I. - Nobody & the Computer
A fun channel about AI music generation.

My offerings

Student guide to ChatGPT - University of Arizona Libraries

I worked with several colleagues to create this guide, along with a similar guide for instructors: AI Literacy in the age of ChatGPT. Both guides are free to copy and share, with a CC 4.0 license.

Recently, I added a chart to both guides: Which AI tool for your task? Take a look and think about the difference between tools that are “wordsmiths” vs. tools for search.

Last summer I worked with a colleague to create four Tutorials about generative AI. I recently updated them and will soon add additional tutorials about multimedia generation.

Find all of our University of Arizona Libraries generative AI resources here: https://libguides.library.arizona.edu/genAI/guides .

The future

Evolving New Foundation Models: Unleashing the Power of Automating Model Development — Sakana.ai
“We expect there will be a growing trend in AI development: evolving new models with unexpected abilities by combining existing ones. This is especially exciting when we consider the skyrocketing costs of training massive foundation models from scratch. By leveraging the vast open-source ecosystem of diverse foundation models, large organizations like government institutions and enterprises can explore a more cost-effective evolutionary approach. This lets us develop early stage foundation models faster before committing significant resources to building entirely custom models, if that is even needed at all. It’s essentially getting more out of what we already have, paving the way for quicker innovation cycles.”

AI Agents Take the Wheel: Devin, SIMA, Figure 01 and The Future of Jobs

—From AI Explained on YouTube, one of my favorite channels.

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar for your group.

Later this year I’ll offer a 4-6 week asynchronous online course about generative AI. Sign up here if you’d like to be notified when it’s ready.

And as always, you can follow me on X, Mastodon, or Bluesky, where I post daily about generative AI.

Subscribe now

As promised in the previous issue, this newsletter is now called Generative AI News! (It was previously Mobile Apps News, publishing since 2014).

In this issue we’ll look at:

• The recent updates to Claude, making it much more capable.

• Thoughts from the Library Copyright Alliance about why AI training should remain fair use.

• How (and Why) the University of Michigan Built Its Own Closed Generative AI Tools.

• Our University of Arizona Libraries generative AI resources (guides, tutorials, assignment, FAQ) - these are free to share with a CC4.0 license.

• The World of AI: How libraries are integrating and navigating this powerful technology - American Libraries. I was interviewed for this article, along with several others.

• And much more…

Enjoy!

Foundation Model News

Anthropic unveils Claude 3, surpassing GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra in benchmark tests - Venture Beat
If you haven’t spent much time with Claude, now is a good time to try it. The free version appears to be about as good as the paid version of ChatGPT (minus some features).

Inflection AI launches new model for Pi chatbot, nearly matches GPT-4  - Venture Beat
Pi is worth trying. It’s marketed mostly as a “friend,” but you can also use it in the ways you use ChatGPT. It searches the web for current information to base answers on, but it doesn’t provide links to sources like Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity.

OpenAI adds ‘Read Aloud’ voiceover to ChatGPT, allowing it to speak its outputs - Venture Beat
The mobile app already could speak answers to you if you started with voice input, but now you can hear answers read aloud on the web version after you’ve started by typing. Choose from five different voices in the Settings. (I like Juniper or Sky).

Captain's log: the irreducible weirdness of prompting AIs - Ethan Mollick
Advice on prompting from professor Mollick of the Wharton School.

Mistral Introduces Two New High Performance LLMs and Neither Are Open-Source - Synthedia
Mistral (located in Paris) started with open source models and is now also offering commercial models. People are calling it the “OpenAI of Europe.”

The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video - Simon Willison’s Weblog
This is about using video as input and asking questions based on the video (not creating videos). He describes interesting results from uploading a video of books on his bookshelf to Gemini.

Adobe adds AI assistant to Acrobat, Reader in effort to maintain relevance in PDF market - Venture Beat
“The AI Assistant, which is currently in beta testing, lets users ask questions about a PDF’s contents and receive summarized answers.” It seems eventually every PDF may have AI-questioning built-in.

Meta’s new AI model learns by watching videos - Fast Company
Their new model, V-JEPA, learns from watching videos. This could lead to more efficient training that requires much less computing power and costs less. “Meta says it’s releasing the V-JEPA model under a Creative Commons noncommercial license so that researchers can experiment with it and perhaps expand its capabilities.”

Cohere for AI launches open source LLM for 101 languages - Venture Beat
This model, Aya, was built with over 3,000 collaborators around the world, including teams from 119 countries. Ivan Zhang, CTO of Cohere, posted on X that “we’re releasing human demonstrations across 100+ languages to further scale intelligence and ensure that it serves more of humanity than just the english literate world.”

Generative AI for multimedia

Bill Weihl continues to fight for climate policy progress while battling ALS - Eleven Labs
Bill Weihl, founder of ClimateVoice, lost his voice to ALS. He used Eleven Labs to create a clone of his voice based on his past speeches and used it to give a speech as GreenBiz 24.

Alibaba’s new AI system ‘EMO’ creates realistic talking and singing videos from photos - Venture Beat
”Researchers at Alibaba‘s Institute for Intelligent Computing have developed a new artificial intelligence system called “EMO,” short for Emote Portrait Alive, that can animate a single portrait photo and generate videos of the person talking or singing in a remarkably lifelike fashion.”

Adobe’s new prototype generative AI tool is the ‘Photoshop’ of music-making and editing - The Verge
It’s an early experiment, not yet public, but looks interesting. “… giving creatives the same kind of deep control to shape, tweak, and edit their audio. It’s a kind of pixel-level control for music.”

How a Hollywood Director Uses AI to Make Movies - Dan Shipper
”Making movies has traditionally been a risky, expensive business reserved for rich industry insiders. Dave believes AI is democratizing the process, empowering him to visualize his sci-fi short and “test the waters with these techniques.” “[E]veryone has a chance to create something incredible,” he says.”

How Sora Works (and What It Means) - Dan Shipper
You’ve likely heard of Sora, the new video generation technology from Open AI (not yet public). (If you haven’t, watch this 12-min video about it). In this post about Sora, Dan Shipper says, “In the same way that the iPhone and the internet led to the flourishing of vlogs and makeup tutorials, AI filmmaking will create its own genre of film, with its own style and form.”

Copyright

Training Generative AI Models on Copyrighted Works Is Fair Use - Association of Research Libraries, Library Copyright Alliance
“… as champions of fair use, free speech, and freedom of information, libraries have a stake in maintaining the balance of copyright law so that it is not used to block or restrict access to information.”

Licensing research content via agreements that authorize uses of artificial intelligence - Rachael G. Samberg, Timothy Vollmer, and Samantha Teremi, professionals within the Office of Scholarly Communication Services at UC Berkeley Library
”Newly-emerging content license agreements that prohibit usage of AI entirely, or charge exorbitant fees for it as a separately-licensed right, will be devastating for scientific research and the advancement of knowledge. Our aim with this post is to empower scholars and academic librarians with legal information about why those licensing outcomes are unnecessary, and equip them with alternative licensing language to adequately address rightsholders’ concerns. “

AI & The Copyright & Plagiarism Dilemma - Lance Eaton
”… by using “plagiarism” to describe the way AI draws upon sources does not feel like the right term. And I see the use of the term “plagiarism” be set up to be exactly like the way we use the term “piracy” when discussing digital files. It’s an inaccurate metaphor that traps us into and limits our ways of thinking about something new and different.”

Bias

Google suspends Gemini’s ability to generate people after numerous ‘woke’ inaccuracies  - Venture Beat
You probably heard about this because it got a lot of press. “…the chatbot generates images of people of color and different ethnicities even in cases of historical context where they are not applicable, such as generating black Catholic popes (there has never been one), giving Vikings dark skin (most didn’t have it) and making Nazi German soldiers look Asian (most were not).”

Reducing biased and harmful outcomes in generative AI - Adobe
Describes how Adobe Firefly image generator aims to reduce bias. OpenAI has similar practices. See their DALL·E 3 system card (PDF).

Language models might be able to self-correct biases—if you ask them - MIT Technology Review
”The team found that just prompting a model to make sure its answers didn’t rely on stereotyping had a dramatically positive effect on its output…”

Deepfakes

Content Credentials Will Fight Deepfakes in the 2024 Elections - IEEE Spectrum
Learn more about the Content Authenticity Initiative.

AI Watermarking Won't Curb Disinformation - Electronic Frontier Foundation
Makes the point that watermarks are easy to remove, sadly.

Misunderstood mechanics: How AI, TikTok, and the liar’s dividend might affect the 2024 elections - Brookings
”Two camps have emerged. One warns of AI leading to a deluge of misinformation, especially on social media, and especially in the many elections coming in 2024. The other finds the fears understandable but largely overblown, pointing to social science research indicating that AI may lead to more misinformation during elections, but with little effect.”

Misinformation reloaded? Fears about the impact of generative AI on misinformation are overblown - Harvard Kennedy School
Three academics make some interesting points that may change how you think about the problem of deepfakes. Worth reading.

Generative AI in education

Generative AI in the humanities classroom - Arizona State University
“Students are currently using AI in their English classes to brainstorm topics; to get help with researching, organizing and editing their papers; and to solicit advice about second-language use,” said Krista Ratcliffe, chair of the Department of English. “In these ways, AI can serve as a powerful invention tool. But students need to develop the critical capacities of AI literacy, so that they may evaluate AI outputs as well as how and when to use them effectively.”

How (and Why) the University of Michigan Built Its Own Closed Generative AI Tools - EDUCAUSE Review
Interesting case study.

Could AI Disrupt Peer Review? - IEEE Spectrum
Publishers’ policies lag technological advances.

Should I cite the AI tool that I used? - Dr. Kristin Terrill, Iowa State University
Interesting thoughts about not how to cite, but when and whether to cite generative AI.

Generative AI in Libraries

The World of AI: How libraries are integrating and navigating this powerful technology - American Libraries
I was interviewed for this article, along with several others.

It Takes a Village: A Distributed Training Model for AI-based Chatbots - Colleen Estes, Beth Twomey, Annie Johnson
Staff from the information technology and reference departments at the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press came together in a partnership to pilot a low-cost AI-powered chatbot.

The race to define what’s next for AI in libraries - Northwestern University Libraries
The story of building a prototype AI tool that added natural language search to part of their digital collections.

School Libraries: Ready to Lead AI Adoption - School Library Systems Association of New York
This project is working on curriculum — “we will develop a 2-3 lesson unit on AI for every grade level Pre-K through 12” and is also developing professional learning for school librarians.

Just for fun

GOODY-2: The world’s most responsible AI model
Try it. No matter what you ask it, it refuses and makes up a reason why your query would be unethical. Then read Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot.

Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed - The Guardian
An experimental “AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013.”

My offerings

Student guide to ChatGPT - University of Arizona Libraries
I worked with several colleagues to create this guide, along with a similar guide for instructors: AI Literacy in the age of ChatGPT. Both guides are free to copy and share, with a CC 4.0 license.

Recently, I added a chart to both guides: Which AI tool for your task? Take a look and think about the difference between tools that are “wordsmiths” vs. tools for search.

Last summer I worked with a colleague to create four Tutorials about generative AI. I recently updated them and will soon add additional tutorials about multimedia generation.

Find all of our University of Arizona Libraries generative AI resources here: https://libguides.library.arizona.edu/genAI/guides

The future

The Trust Flip - Kevin Kelly
”Now when we see a photograph we assume it is fake, unless proven otherwise. When we see video, we assume it has been altered, generated, special effected, unless claimed otherwise. The new default for all images, including photographic ones, is that they are fiction – unless they expressly claim to be real.”

Unlocking the incredible with AI - Exponential View
”AI will be able to see the hidden connections within existing knowledge. Historically, many innovations have demonstrated this potential, such as the fusion of insights from biology, observing the adhesion mechanism of burdock burrs, with materials engineering and textile technology to create the brilliant invention of Velcro (bye-bye shoelaces).”

Learn more

If you want to learn more about generative AI, contact me about doing a webinar for your group.

Later this year I’ll offer a 4-6 week asynchronous online course about generative AI. Sign up here if you’d like to be notified when it’s ready.

And as always, you can follow me on X, Mastodon, or Bluesky, where I post daily about generative AI.