week 2 post

David Nin

Artificial Intelligence is an industry that has been -and still is -growing rapidly. It can be a tricky topic, since some people think it is helpful while others believe it is eventually going to take over the entire planet. For writers, however, it is a shame to see that artificial intelligence is creating fake articles and fooling people into believing they are something legitimate, as if these works were created by real people, acknowledging real authors and using nonexistent research. According to our recent Rolling Stones Magazine article reading, bots are writing fabricated journal entries and articles that supply bogus evidence and are somehow getting away with it. These are affecting researchers, students, librarians, and many others because it leads to false information on (what is supposed to be) reliable academic search engines like Google Scholar.

If researchers are using fake statistics and analyses to write papers without even realizing it, then who knows when this will end. There was a time when people were only concerned about websites like Wikipedia; however, we are now headed in a direction where we cannot tell what is fabricated and what is not.

Markdown is a new concept to me. It looks both interesting and a bit complicated, only because I have never done anything with coding before. It seems pretty simple though, and I am pretty excited to learn how to use it. What is interesting about Markdown is how it started. John Gruber and Dave Winer were the pioneers for plain text formats and helped shape the world wide web into what it is today. Not only that, but they let others use this without compensation.

Markdown was released in 2004, and has been used by big tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google to support their applications. Now, AI testing is used with Markdown, and although AI is a controversial subject at times, it shows how far the lightweight markup language has come.