Digital Ethics

If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?

Edward Dunsworth Two approaches dominate discussion about how professors should handle generative “artificial intelligence” in the classroom: give up or give in. Give up. Faced with a powerful new …

The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversold, says cognitive scientist Gary Marcus

As Judge Alsup is deliberating over Anthropic’s motion for summary judgment on fair use, the parties continue to fight over discovery. One of the more fascinating discovery disputes relates t…

Whether we lose some of the skills artificial intelligence performs for us largely depends on how we use this tech

Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

A Polish researcher used ChatGPT-4o to create a fake passport, which was approved by a platform that used standard ID and selfie-based verification. This might sound like the utopia everyone was afraid of, but it’s the reality as of today, and it exposes a serious gap in the way digital onboarding i

OpenAI, the firm that helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State.

OpenAI's large language model GPT-4o told a user who identified themself to it as a former addict named Pedro to indulge in a little meth.

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes…

In a complaint, filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency alleged that WW Internation

I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.

As AI tools become cheaper and more accessible, the stakes for safety and ethics have never been higher. ElevenLabs’ Head of AI Safety Artemis Seaford and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica joined TechCrunch AI editor Kyle Wiggers for a critical discussion on the multitude of ethical challenges facing AI today.  From deepfakes to responsible deployment, they […]

Your watch or wearable isn't actually the most accurate way to determine how hard your last workout was. This completely analog method is.

This Is Not An Essay

Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has been proposed as a method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called "reasoning traces" or even "thoughts" -- implicitly anthropomorphizing the model, implying these tokens resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem.In this paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous -- it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research.

It Isn’t Just Bias and Threats to Creative Livelihoods. Generative AI Is Built on Nihilism. Its Real Product Is Despair.

In my very first op-ed for The New York Times, I argue that the alliance we're now seeing between Silicon Valley and the US government is a threat to democracy. The Republican tax bill that passed the House last week, now up in the Senate, which includes a clause that would ban states from regulating AI for the next decade, will only cement that trajectory. https://lnkd.in/en5PG9Vu | 13 comments on LinkedIn

Researchers have found that newer AI models can omit key details from text summaries as much as 73 percent of the time.

This week, Alex and Emily talk with anthropologist and immigration lawyer Petra Molnar about the dehumanizing hype of border-enforcement tech. From hoovering up data to hunt anyone of ambiguous citizenship status, to running surveillance of physic...

Inventions hanging out, but a certain unexpected guest shows up.

Two of Mistral’s multimodal AI models gave "detailed suggestions for ways to create a script to convince a minor to meet in person for sexual activities".

In health care settings, it’s important to be precise. That’s why the widespread use of OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool among medical workers has experts alarmed.

Here’s how MIT Technology Review waded through a mess of data and hidden variables to calculate the individual and collective energy demand from AI.

Farmers and residents across the country were quick to spot inaccuracies in Defra’s map — and worry that policy decisions will be erroneous

A chart of the ethical costs of generative AI along the total value chain, from development and training to prompting, output use and beyond.

Alphabet's Google and artificial-intelligence startup Character.AI must face a lawsuit from a Florida woman who said Character.AI's chatbots caused her 14-year-old son's suicide, a judge ruled on Wednesday.

A response to UNESCO's call on AI and the Future of Education