AI In Education
- AI Academy for K-12 Educators: OpenAI has launched the National Academy for AI Instruction, a 5-year initiative to equip 400,000 K-12 educators with skills to utilize AI in the classroom. This joins other “AI in Education” initiatives from large frontier model companies, such as Anthropic’s Claude for Education integrating into LMS environments like Canvas and Google bringing Gemini access to those with Google Workspace for Education.
- Does AI Damage Your Brain: Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania and a leading AI voice in education, examines the “misinterpretation” of the paper “Your Brain on ChatGPT” from MIT, and how the focus relies much more on how AI is used, not whether it is used or not.
- How Are Students Really Using AI: This article from The Chronicle examines the increasingly available data around how AI influences student learning, including students’ adoption increasing exponentially over the last 2 ½ years. It also finds that students feel AI should be incorporated more, are wary about it replacing teaching, and are still receiving mixed messages from professors and institutions.
AI In Research
- Productivity Slowdown: A randomized controlled trial found that developers using early-2025 AI tools like Cursor Pro or Claude Sonnet took 19% longer to complete their tasks than without AI. This challenges the developers’ beliefs that AI use improves productivity by 24% – developers still believed they worked 20% quicker even after experiencing the slowdown.
- Rapid AI Advancement in Healthcare: A paper published last week summarizes the rapid advancement of AI and their transformative impact on the medical field. LLMs provide interactive communication capabilities, streamline complex medical documentation, and support clinical decision-making processes. Meanwhile, multimodal AI combines various data sources such as imaging and genomic information to achieve enhanced accuracy in pathological analysis and health screening applications.
AI Current Events
- Deepfake Threats: An unknown actor used AI to impersonate U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, contacting at least 5 high-profile individuals with “the goal of gaining access to information or accounts.” Deepfake fraud continues to magnify, with Deloitte predicting fraud losses in banking could reach $40 billion in the U.S. by 2027. In May, President Trump signed the “Take It Down” act into law, criminalizing the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery, which includes AI deepfakes.
- EU AI Code of Conduct: The European Union has published the “General Purpose AI Code of Conduct”, a voluntary tool to help industry comply with the AI Act’s legal obligations regarding transparency, copyright, safety and security.
Weekly AI Tip
Still having difficulty crafting the perfect prompt? Try a prompt library. Prompt libraries are repositories of intentionally crafted prompts for a variety of situations, such as an AI tutor, a code interpreter, and an essay editor. These are prompts that you can use right away and then build upon to adapt to your specific needs, or use as inspiration for your own custom prompts. Here are a few you can get started with:
Upcoming AI Events
Building Custom GPTs & Gems Workshop – August 8, 10:00AM-2:00PM in DMC 101
- The Building Custom GPTs and Google Gems Workshop focuses on creating personalized and functional AI tools using ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Participants will learn to develop AI tutors, AI generators for assessment content, and AI writing/editing assistants. The workshop is designed so each attendee leaves with their own functional custom AI and the foundational knowledge to build additional tailored solutions. RSVP
