October 16, 2025

AI Definitions: AGI

October 16, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – A machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. Rather than focusing on solving specific problems (like Deep Blue, which was good at chess), this type of AI has broader uses and may possess seemingly human-level intelligence to learn and adapt. Scientists have had difficulty defining human intelligence and disagree as to what would count as AGI. Regardless of where they draw the line, most experts say AGI is at least decades away. Scientists have no hard evidence that today’s technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Beyond AGI lies the more speculative goal of "sentient AI," where the programs become aware of their existence with feelings and desires.

More AI definitions here

October 16, 2025

Mottos Learned in Childhood

October 16, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

(not necessarily verbalized)

a. Measure up (you’re climbing a ladder to get to ahead and when you get there it’s already been moved 3 rungs up)
b. Don’t let your guard down. People won’t like you.
c. You can’t trust a man until he’s 6 feet under
d. Sex is dirty. So save it for the one you love.
e. Good Christians don’t show negative emotions

You must let go of false messages from your childhood and carry your OWN cross. Not someone else’s.

What mottos have you had to battle and what effect have they had on your life?

David Seamonds

October 16, 2025

24 Articles about AI & Politics

October 16, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

New AI battle: White House vs. Anthropic - Axis

The AI dilemma: To compete with China, the U.S. needs Chinese talent – Rest of World

China now leads the U.S. in this key part of the AI race – Washington Post

Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be? – The Atlantic

Public figures used to be off-limits in AI-generated video. A new Tow Center analysis shows how platforms are normalizing the practice. – Columbia Journalism Review

Morgan Stanley warns the AI boom may be running out of steam - Quartz

America is now one big bet on AI – The Financial Times

There Are Two Economies: A.I. and Everything Else – New York Times

AI is reshaping childhood in China – Rest of World

Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia – The Verge

A.I. Is Driving a Stock Market Rally in China, Too - New York Times

Police are drowning in data. Could a chatbot help? – Washington Post

One Law Sets South Korea’s AI Policy—and One Weak Link Could Break It – ITIF

Chasing AGI could backfire for US, experts say – Semafor

How the Trump administration is using AI to ramp up immigration enforcement - CNN

China's DeepSeek AI publishes peer-reviewed study finding its AI model R1 did not rely on rival models like ChatGPT for training – Yahoo News

Uncommon bonds: Cracking down on AI chatbots – Semafor

Inside Democrats' emerging AI playbook – Axios

Meta created its own super PAC to politically kneecap its AI rivals – The Verge

Albania appoints AI bot as minister to tackle corruption – Yahoo News

Regulators Are Digging Into A.I. Chatbots and Child Safety - New York Times

A short-term profit grab risks eroding America’s biggest advantage in the AI race. - Washington Post

Silicon Valley Launches Pro-AI PACs to Defend Industry in Midterm Elections – Wall Street Journal

Do AI Companies Actually Care About America? – The Atlantic

October 15, 2025

27 Articles about AI & Ethics

October 15, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

AI video app tops the download charts —horrifying many families of dead celebrities – Washington Post

I’m a Screenwriter. Is It All Right if I Use A.I.? – New York Times

When I played doctor with the chatbot, the simulated patient confessed problems that are real—and that should worry all of us – New Yorker

CHATGPT resurrected my dead father – The Atlantic

A stunning scientific accomplishment: Computers can now design new viruses that can then be created in the lab - Washington Post

Hype and harm: Why we must ask harder questions about AI and its alignment with human values - Brookings

AI safety tool sparks student backlash after flagging art as porn, deleting emails - Washington Post

Turning “human in the loop” from a catchphrase into a design practice– Medium

People, not corporations, should set the rules that govern A.I. - New York Times

AI-generated medical data can sidestep usual ethics review, universities say – Nature

AI for Scientific Integrity: Detecting Ethical Breaches, Errors, and Misconduct in Manuscripts – Frontiers in AI

Chatbot Cheating in Ethics Class – Christianity Today

Politico’s recent AI experiments shouldn’t be subject to newsroom editorial standards, its editors testify – Nieman Lab

Does AI owe you for your small part in creating it? - Axios

Explainability in the age of large language models for healthcare – Nature

Responsible by Design – Why AI Must Be Human-First – Unite AI

Can You Choose an A.I. Model That Harms the Planet Less? - New York Times

ChatGPT isn’t great for the planet. Here’s how to use AI responsibly. - Washington Post

LLM-as-a-judge easily fooled by a single token, study finds – BD TechTalks

Ethical uses of generative AI in the practice of law – Reuters

Ethical Obligations to Inform Patients About Use of AI Tools – Stanford

The Ethical Problems With AI Sermons – Patheos

Can fake faces make AI training more ethical? – Science News

Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources – ArsTechnica

Bringing AI to medicine requires philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethicists – Stat News

Ethicists flirt with AI to review human research – Science.org

AI Supports Dishonesty in Humans, Making It Easier for Users to Cheat With an Accomplice – Discover

October 14, 2025

Is AI Is Making the College Experience Lonelier?

October 14, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

Even for those students committed to doing their own work, AI poses a threat that is quieter and harder to measure: that they will go off to college and find the experience of learning far more solitary, far lonelier, than ever before. That is the threat that AI increasingly poses to higher education today: not that it will steal our words, but that it will steal our ability to think and work together. - Chronicle of Higher Ed

October 14, 2025

Wanting Black Coffee in a World of Expanding Options

October 14, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

Even though cartoons and skits over the last decade have made fun of exotic coffee drinks by suggesting it’s hard to just get a regular coffee these days, this has never happened. No one is being turned away from Starbucks for asking to buy a black coffee. So why is this scenario repeated as if regular coffee drinkers are being excluded? Jason Pargin explains:

This exaggeration is of a world that doesn’t exist. No one took his black coffee from him. All that happened is that the range of options for other people were expanded. He perceived that as persecution as if his choice was taken away. Most people are not satisfied to simply have the option to live the life the way they want. They also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice that they have made. If they see that, over time, their preference has become less popular, and even worse, is seen as being base or unsophisticated, they will perceive the mere existence of those other options as a criticism of them, even if they’ve never heard anyone voice that criticism. There is basic psychological comfort in knowing that you are conforming to what the world wants and in the reassurance that that world is not going to change.

It’s not about the coffee. It’s the fear that if everybody else stops drinking coffee the way I drink it then I will become an outcast. That is scary to someone who is suddenly remembering how they have always treated outcasts.

October 14, 2025

21 Articles about AI & Science

October 14, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

Fraud, AI slop and huge profits: is science publishing broken? (a podcast) – The Guardian

AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds – Science

Fake microscopy images generated by AI are indistinguishable from the real thing. – Chemistry World

Top A.I. Researchers Leave OpenAI, Google and Meta for New Start-Up to accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other fields.- New York Times

Far more authors use AI to write science papers than admit it, publisher reports – Science

A stunning scientific accomplishment: Computers can now design new viruses that can then be created in the lab – Washington Post

The Machines Finding Life That Humans Can’t See – The Atlantic

AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers – MIT Tech Review

Chatbots and large language models are being used to fact-check scientific work, but how effective are they? – Q Space

AI-generated scientific hypotheses lag human ones when put to the test - Science

AI for Scientific Integrity: Detecting Ethical Breaches, Errors, and Misconduct in Manuscripts - Frontiers

AI reveals unexpected new physics in dusty plasma - PhysOrg

AI will soon be able to audit all published research – what will that mean for public trust in science? – The Conversation

AI, peer review and the human activity of science – Nature

AI can’t learn from what researchers don’t share – Research Professional News

Researchers claim their AI ‘thinks’ like a human — after training on 160 psychology studies - Nature

Large language models to accelerate organic chemistry synthesis - Nature

AlphaGenome is an AI-powered platform aiming to predict how genetic code variants lead to different diseases – Stat News

AI, bounties and culture change, how scientists are taking on errors - Nature

Make all research data available for AI learning, scientists urge – Research Professional News

The rising danger of AI-generated images in nanomaterials science and what we can do about it - Nature

October 13, 2025

Generative AI Doesn't Know How to Write Suspense

October 13, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

Suspense, in some form, is what keeps people watching anything longer than a TikTok clip, and it’s where A.I. flounders. A writer, uniquely, can juggle the big picture and the small one, shift between the 30,000-foot view and the three-foot view, build an emotional arc across multiple acts, plant premonitory details that pay off only much later and track what the audience knows against what the characters know. A recent study found that large language models simply couldn’t tell how suspenseful readers would find a piece of writing. -New York Times

October 13, 2025

Staying Power

October 13, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

Faith supplies staying power. It contains dynamic to keep one going when the going is hard. Anybody can keep going when the going is good, but some extra ingredient is needed to enable you to keep fighting when it seems that everything is against you.

You may counter, "But you don’t know my circumstances. I am in a different situation than anybody else and I am as far down as a human being can get.

In that case you are fortunate, for if you are as far down as you can get there is no further down you can go. There is only one direction you can take from this position, and that is up. So your situation is quite encouraging. However, I caution you not to take the attitude that you are in a situation in which nobody has ever been before. There is no such situation.

Practically speaking, there are only a few human stories and they have all been enacted previously. This is a fact that you must never forget – there are people who have overcome every conceivable difficult situation, even the one in which you now find yourself and which to you seems utterly hopeless. So did it seem to some others, but they found an out, a way up, a path over, a pass through.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

October 13, 2025

20 Webinars this week about AI, Journalism & Media

October 13, 2025/ Stephen Goforth

Mon, Oct 13 – Embracing AI: What Every Communicator Must Know

What: This session will focus on moving from AI experimentation to widespread adoption — with data, insights & practical advice.

Who: Mark Dollins, North Star Communications Consulting; Adam Pratt, IBM; Amanda Carl-Pratt, Google DeepMind; PRSA Chair Ray Day, APR.

When: 1 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free for members

Sponsor: Public Relations Society of America

Becoming

ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire

Mon, Oct 13 – Embracing AI: What Every Communicator Must Know

Mon, Oct 13 - How Media Ownership Matters

Tue, Oct 14 - YouTube – Growing Your Page

Tue, Oct 14 - ChatGPT for Government 101

Tue, Oct 14 - Building Authentic Relationships in an AI-Driven World

Tue, Oct 14 - What is GEO for SEO and how do I create content for it?

Tue, Oct 14 - AI Innovator Collaborative

Tue, Oct 14 - How Journalists Can Use Scraping Tools for Environmental Stories

Wed, Oct 15 - AI in Action: Transforming Editorial and Commercial Workflows

Wed, Oct 15 - AI Tools for Entrepreneurs: Mastering the Latest Updates in ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini

Wed, Oct 15 - 10 AI Prompts Every Salesperson Needs to Know!

Thu, Oct 16 - Pitch Perfect: AI & the Future of PR

Thu, Oct 16 - The Power of Journalism

Thu, Oct 16 - Grant Writing in the Al

Thu, Oct 16 - Public Relations 101: The Who, What, When, Why & How

Thu, Oct 16 - Prompt writing and AI-powered data analysis

Thu, Oct 16 - AI in Advertising Sales: A Case Study

Fri, Oct 17 - Be Heard: Pitching Your Op-Ed

Fri, Oct 17 - Building AI Readiness: Skills for Learners and Learning Leaders

Goforth Solutions, LLC