LSC 155: Life Sciences Communication. First-Year Seminar in Science Communication (Fall 2025) : Truth and Generative AI
Truth and Generative AI
Video: The Ezra Klein Show - How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z
Journalist Ezra Klein interviews guest Kyla Scanlon:
- "leading theorist on the economics of attention"
- member of Gen Z
- author of the book: In This Economy?
- has a newsletter on Substack
Note: Turn on closed captions with the “CC” button. Open the video in YouTube for the transcript.
Draw what an AI chatbot does with a prompt
Take 3 minutes to think about what an AI chatbot does with a prompt by sketching the process. How did the AI chatbot:
- process the question?
- gather information?
- construct its response?
What questions are coming up as you sketch?
Inspiration
Below are images to get you inspired to draw. The images are from pixabay.com or were created with Microsoft Copilot.
List of images: robot, binary code, tokens, network, the cloud, conversation boxes, funnel, essay
What happens when you prompt an AI chatbot?
Let's look at a response from Microsoft Copilot, which is an AI chatbot that you can access for free as a UW-Madison student.
Through a contract with UW-Madison, Microsoft Copilot includes more data security than other publicly available generative AI tools.
Find Microsoft Copilot and other generative AI services contracted by UW-Madison using the link below.
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Access generative AI tools at UW–MadisonSign in to each tool from this page for commercial data protections. Note: even with commercial data protections, do not share personal or sensitive data.
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UW-Madison Libraries Generative AI GuideGuidance and resources about AI chatbots and other types of Generative AI
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Generative AI exists because of the transformerFree "Financial Times" article with dynamic visualizations about how LLMs predict text. "LLMs are not search engines looking up facts; they are pattern-spotting engines that guess the next best option in a sequence."