Ethan Mollick – One Useful Thing: “If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other: Many of the comments to these posts are also generated by AI. So are an increasing number of academic papers and New York Times opinion articles, and, apparently, award-winning short stories. If you use AI a lot, you probably have noticed how much AI writing is around you (frequent AI users have historically done quite well identifying AI writing), if not, I promise you it is much more than you think. It isn’t just the sameness of the AI writing, though that eventually gets to be tedious enough that I find myself skipping writing on even interesting topics if my internal “AI detector” goes off. It is also that badly prompted AI writing produces very little meaning per word, taking you in intellectual circles instead. We are trained to read well-crafted sentences and intellectual sounding texts as the result of effortful human work and thus pay attention to these AI written comments when we see them. But there is often no human meaning there, these posts are just meaning-shaped attention vampires that take mental effort to decode and give you no equivalent understanding in return…”