This article appeared in the May 12, 2025 edition of the Monitor Daily.

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Kurt Shillinger
Managing Editor

It isn’t always intentional that the stories we bring together in our daily newsletter draw connections. But here’s an interesting tie between a story by Erika Page about artificial intelligence and the Viewfinder photo of pigeons: According to studies from the University of Iowa, the bird that flocks our public squares can learn to identify patterns the same way large language models do. Mark Twain, the subject of our last story, identified patterns, too. But where artificial intelligence builds on associations, the great novelist found in the protean dialects of America something that machines cannot learn: the limitless creativity of human intelligence.


This article appeared in the May 12, 2025 edition of the Monitor Daily.

Read 05/12 edition
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