There’s a strange thing happening as AI gets better. The easier it becomes to generate words, images, assignments, and ideas, the more we seem to value evidence that a human actually did the work. “Human-made” is becoming a selling point. Schools are trying to figure out whether students did their own work. And amid a genuine literacy crisis, people are rediscovering something almost embarrassingly simple: maybe we should read more books.
This week’s Signals is about what happens when human effort becomes scarce.
Ben Sherwood makes a fascinating argument: as AI becomes embedded in advertising, design, music, and other creative industries, work made entirely by humans may become more valuable, not less. You can read it in Fast Company.
It’s the same dynamic that turned “organic,” “craft,” and “handmade” into premium labels. When machine production becomes cheap and ubiquitous, evidence of human effort becomes scarce.
That creates an interesting possibility for media. We’ve spent years talking about whether AI-generated content needs to be labeled. Maybe we’ve been asking the question backward. Perhaps the valuable label eventually becomes: Made by Humans.
Are we facing the next stage of AI cheating: agents capable of navigating online courses, completing assignments and quizzes, and doing much more than simply generating an essay.
Writing in The New York Times, Dana Goldstein and Alan Blinder write that AI may be creating a much bigger problem than plagiarism. If the work required to earn a credential can be delegated to software, what exactly does the credential certify?
For colleges, particularly online programs, this is becoming an existential question. The challenge isn’t simply detecting AI. It’s designing education where the student still has to learn something.
France’s Constitutional Council struck down a law that would have barred children under 15 from social media, ruling that the restrictions went too far in limiting freedom of expression and communication. As TechRepublic reported, the court also raised concerns about requiring everyone, including adults, to verify their age in order to use social platforms.
The ruling is important well beyond France. Governments around the world are converging on the idea that children need stronger protection online. The much harder question is what those protections should actually look like.
France now goes back to the drawing board. President Emmanuel Macron has asked his government to produce a revised law that can survive constitutional scrutiny.
We’ve heard plenty about America’s literacy crisis. Reading scores have been falling, and the decline isn’t confined to children. Americans across age groups are simply reading less. Peter Schmidt, the program director of the Strother School of Radical Attention tells the story in The New York Times.
But some of the solutions may be less complicated than we imagine: make books social again. Make reading something people actually want to do.
That’s part of what makes SMC Advisor Hailo Colborn’s Hot Literati interesting. It combines a monthly reading selection with discussion groups, courses and in-person and digital events. Its pitch is refreshingly direct: become “hotter, smarter, more interesting, and more interested.”
Maybe literacy doesn’t need another app designed to optimize reading. Maybe it needs more people sitting around talking about books.
Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, shared a piece of advice from Steven Johnson that gets at something we’ve been thinking about a lot at SMC.
Johnson’s basic rule is to treat AI like the smartest person you know: bounce ideas off it, ask questions, learn from it, but don’t hand over the work.
That distinction feels increasingly important. The question isn’t going to be whether someone “used AI.” Almost everyone will. The better question is: What did the human still have to do?
That may ultimately be the thread connecting everything in this week’s Signals, from human-made creative work to cheating, literacy and education. AI can make doing the work optional. Our institutions, and perhaps our culture, are going to have to decide how much doing the work still matters. Great interview; you can watch it here
That’s it, see you Thursday.
Curated and written by Steve Rosenbaum, Emma Lembke and AI
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