Author Archives: Robert Basil

First out of the gate

A reader from south of the border forwarded along this interesting report from the Kramer Levin law firm describing “China’s groundbreaking regulations to vet AI”: China put these measures in place “[i]n order to promote the healthy development and standardized … Continue reading

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Ethan Mollick on Using Artificial Intelligence in Student Writing

I have added Ethan Mollick’s substack blog, “One Useful Thing,” to our Resources list (above). A professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Mollick writes that he’s “trying to understand what our new AI-haunted era means for … Continue reading

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Newspaper names: a charming taxonomy

We are fans of Jay Rosen here at No Contest.

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Twitter alternatives

This is a clear picture from The Evening Standard. I think that, looking back, Twitter will be regarded as an unnecessary calamity rather than as a necessary community.

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Your title is verbose.

An example of editing.

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Yelling at your editor

In earlier writing here on mentorship, I noted that you do not have to actually like your mentors to have a fruitful relationship with them. In one post, “Mentorship without Friendship,” I wrote: “A mentor sees in her or his … Continue reading

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Copyright laws have always been a real bear

Ted Goia’s Substack newsletter is enlightening – with truly startling frequency – about things I probably should have known about already. From yesterday’s post: The most extreme case of music copyright comes from Elizabethan England. Here the Queen gave William … Continue reading

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Rethinking is thinking.

That’s my motto as the summer semester starts (orientations today). There will be a million more of these articles:

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“Prompt Engineering”

Even before my friend Chet fully explained to me what this term meant, I was on board with it. From Forbes the other day: The democratization of Artificial Intelligence and, specifically, the generative models boom seems to have changed everything. … Continue reading

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Be fair and be good to the artists

Artist and writer Molly Crabapple, whose work I have long admired, has written an open letter “imploring publishers to restrict their use of A.I.-generated illustrations.” I signed. Since the earliest days of print journalism, illustration has been used to elucidate … Continue reading

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