Good job sharing this article, @oldmom4896 ! Thanks for helping expose the issue and helping spread the word about improvements made! So many are benefiting for your important actions!
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Pell grants covered my tuition, room and board, and even my books. Because of skyrocketing college costs and the drastic defunding of higher education dating back to the 1980s, today’s Pell grants cover roughly 30 percent of a poor kid’s four-year education. Silas got scholarships for his community college program, but they covered tuition; he had no funding for reliable transportation for his two-hour daily commute (no public transit was available), nor could he pay for housing near the college that would have also removed him from his family’s traumatic environment.
Throughout the 2023-24 school year, I watched as Silas went through five clunker cars and four low-wage jobs while attending community college. While I worked work-study jobs for beer and pizza money during college, Silas worked full time for living expenses.
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Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, founder and director of Evolution Treks Peru, was in a rural Peruvian town preparing for a trek through the Andes when he overheard a curious conversation. Two unaccompanied tourists were chatting amicably about their plans to hike alone in the mountains to the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay”.
“They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!” said Gongora Meza. “The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination].”
What’s more, Gongora Meza insisted that this seemingly innocent mistake could have cost these travellers their lives. “This sort of misinformation is perilous in Peru,” he explained. “The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned. When you [use] a program [like ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”
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NYT op-ed, Maureen Dowd, about the “AI actress” Tilly Norwood. Sorry this isn’t a gift link, but I’ll paste a few paragraphs below. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/opinion/ai-hollywood-tilly-norwood-actress.html
The less optimistic view was provided by Jaron Lanier, a top scientist at Microsoft.
He said that a Hollywood studio chief was crowing about how great A.I. is because he wouldn’t have to pay “all these idiot producers and actors and lighting people and composers and writers and agents.” Lanier told him that studio chiefs would quickly become expendable, too, because everyone will serve at the mercy of “the big computer server at the center, and Silicon Valley will just roll right over you.”
While Lanier thinks a simulated character here and there is fine, he says it’s “urgent” to draw the line about “the difference between A.I.-generated stuff and reality-generated stuff, to have a system in which we know what’s real and what’s fake.”
He told me: “The problem with it is, if you make the whole world run by fakes and simulations, everybody becomes increasingly more dysfunctional. Everybody becomes alienated and nervous and unsure of their own value, and the whole thing falls apart, and at some point, it’s like civilizational and species collapse.”
That, readers, would be less than ideal.
Robots are learning to make human babies. Twenty have already been born.
One in six adults experiences infertility. Can groundbreaking automation help answer their prayers?
gift link https://wapo.st/4o6jCRz
I 100% have used ChatGPT to help plan a vacation. But, like with everything AI, you need to be smart about it. I didn’t know where to start and asked it for itineraries with a description of what kinds of things we like to do and things we like in determining where to stay. Then i changed the prompt a little and asked again. I probably did that three or four times to generate ideas and that gave me the list to start my own research. So as an idea generator, I think it’s ok. It just can’t be the be all and end all of planning.
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Death by GPS becomes Death by GPT.
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