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The Case Against Overreliance

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As with many things, AI’s net impact on our wellbeing is uncertain, with that impact largely depending on how we use and incorporate it into our lives and our work. GenAI can either reduce our shortcomings or erode our abilities, depending on how we use it. As long as technology reduces our shortcomings, it allows us to soar to ever-greater heights; to achieve the next great accomplishments and surpass even those. The fruits of humanity’s labor over millennia have built us a world where we just do this. We’ve built enormous pyramids, landed on the moon, erected sky-scraping towers, and touched every corner of the world. These come as a result of our many advances and innovations, all building on top of the ones before. These inventions have enabled us to reach further and do more. They reduced our shortcomings. It is when technology begins to erode our abilities that we must take care. AI and its incredible applications can often help us solve our most time-consuming problems and free ...
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Understanding AI: Tokens

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Definition Tokens are numerical representations of words, subwords, or characters generated through a process called tokenization. Tokenization translates text into a format that large language models (LLMs) can process. Tokens can capture both words’ explicit meanings and their contextual nuances.  An average token represents approximately 0.75 words.  Need to know Token count is one of the key drivers of an LLM’s cost. For example, OpenAI’s prices begin at $5/1M tokens of prompts.  Useful to know While LLMs don’t inherently understand human languages, this mechanism allows them to interpret and generate it. This can also allow LLMs to understand and process multiple languages, as tokens can be language-agnostic, based on patterns rather than specific language constraints.  Once an LLM generates an output in tokens, it must be “de-tokenized” using the reverse of the tokenization process to map it to words a human can comprehend.  There are various methods one c...
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AI-Driven Echo Chambers

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In the Information Age, our digital landscapes have become divided, and fragmented by the echo chambers of social media. The ubiquitous use of social media and its algorithmic foundations make it all too easy to sort ourselves into online communities that reinforce and magnify our beliefs. Yet amidst this fragmentation, we retain an essential tool: the search engine. The search engine is neutral, a digital library through which we can peruse the millions of terabytes of data uploaded to the internet every day. Google, among other search engines, offers a breadth of perspectives with every search. But as we enter a world where the internet is more oriented around AI models, we may risk losing the neutral interfaces we use to understand the world. With a search engine, if we want to learn more about an issue, we’re exposed to the issue’s different sides. We are forced to encounter diverse perspectives from a variety of sources that we may not otherwise seek out or be exposed to. At this ...
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Writing With AI

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This article will explain how I use AI to write, and why you should try this process too.  AI is a great tool for writing short articles, but it’s usually easy to tell if something’s been written by AI. Its greatest advantage is that it’s quick. It can write infinitely faster than any human, and at a level that’s good enough that it often does outweigh the disadvantages. It can also introduce perspectives you might not have considered, and allows you to focus on the editing and improvement process, rather than the initial – often tedious – step of putting pen to paper. However, if you want to produce top-quality content, it’s better to use it to augment your writing, not replace it entirely. You know what message you want to convey much better than the model does. And, at the end of the day, we write better than AI. For now. Also, if we want to develop our own ideas, methods, and style, it’s important we practice the art of writing. That’s why, in our “About Us”, you’ll see we don...
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AI’s Potential for Preserving Dying Languages

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GenAI’s primary value-add – for now – is its ability to generate content, whether that’s text, audio, images, or code. In a world where nearly everything is online, it’s easy to conclude that this will have widespread impacts. GenAI is the ultimate polyglot. Given enough time and enough data, it can learn a language to an incredible degree of fluency and grammatical ability. This capability makes it the perfect tool to bring dying languages back from the brink. Given a large enough data set, an LLM is able to pick up any language on its own. This would be a game changer for many small languages with just a handful of speakers. It would allow them to strengthen their community and to preserve their languages for eternity no matter what may happen to them. Linguistic communities can face a different problem. Rather than not having enough speakers, it can be that they’re spread around the world, and don’t have the opportunity to practice their languages. These heritage speakers and th...
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Trust and Responsibility in Technology: Calculators, GenAI, and the Human Element

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In the realm of mathematics, calculators are trusted implicitly. Their outputs are accepted without question, and when errors arise, they are invariably attributed to user input mistakes. This trust contrasts sharply with the reception of generative AI (genAI) technologies, where incorrect outputs often spark criticism directed at the technology itself. This dichotomy raises a crucial question: should the responsibility for erroneous outputs lie with the technology, or should it rest with the users who provide the inputs? Calculators have become indispensable tools in mathematics and everyday life, primarily due to their reliability and precision. Their fundamental operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—are based on fixed, predictable algorithms. Users trust that a calculator will invariably output correct results as long as the input is accurate.  In contrast, generative AI models, such as large language models (LLMs), are often criticized for producing inc...
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AI in Education

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Has your child ever come to you to ask how to do a math problem, but you didn’t remember how? If so, you don’t need to relearn the math your student is learning in class. AI could help you do that. And, at the same time, you could take it as an opportunity to teach your child how to use AI responsibly. GenAI can help everyone perform better in schools, from students to teachers. Students can use it to learn better, and teachers can use it to teach better. For both, it can help break down complicated concepts, find alternative ways to explain them on the fly, and identify where students need the most help. Many people have already written about this. While genAI tools can be incredibly helpful for students at any level, it’s important to use them properly. A young student can quickly become reliant on genAI, eventually using it to automate all their work. This can be dangerous. Not only will it hinder their learning and development, it can also result in poor grades. Teachers have becom...
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