Marionetting with AI

A student of mine wants to do a presentation about AI that is completely AI generated: they’re even thinking about generating the slideshow five minutes before doing the presentation, so they’re not tempted to edit it too much.

I love the idea, because I suspect it will highlight some important questions about AI use by students, and in society in general. As structured, the student would end up just being a front person for the AI. Although they would have posed the prompt, pretty much all of the “cognitive” work would be done by the AI. It should open up discussions of ideas such as agency, critical thought, and control in the relationship between humans and AI (even beyond current LLMs).

AI Antibiotic Drug Discovery

A recently published article, about using AI to help discover a new class of chemical antibiotics, is likely one of the first of a wave of applications of artificial intelligence techniques to solving scientific problems.

The Hard Fork podcast has an excellent interview with one of the researchers involved in the study. They do a great job describing the problem (the search for antibiotics to deal with drug resistant bacteria) and overviewing how the AI was combined with physical experiments to do the research.