Lawrence Norden, The Washington Post; My team fed chatbots election lies. Here’s what happened.
"In the past few years, artificial intelligence models have developed rapidly, but they remain prone to error, raising concerns about their potential to spread election misinformation. So my colleagues and I decided to study popular chatbots to see if they would push back on election conspiracy theories or rebuff attempts to generate deceiving images, videos and audio. We have good and bad news."
MATT WHITEPATTY NIEBERGNICHOLAS SLAYTON , Task & Purpose; Pentagon reveals hundreds of new Iran war casualties
"The Pentagon revealed Saturday that more than 600 troops have been injured or killed in the conflict with Iran, a casualty total more than 200 higher than previously revealed publicly. The new figures were released as part of an apparent overhaul of the Defense Department’s official casualty reporting system, which now splits the war, for the first time, into two time periods.
The new figures bring the current total of U.S. troops wounded in the war to 624, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS. As of Friday, DCAS listed the number of troops injured in the conflict at 420."
Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small, The New York Times ; Trump Orders Warnings Placed at ‘Inaccurate’ Smithsonian History Museum
President Trump said the signage at the National Museum of American History would correct what a disputed White House report described as “extreme political activism.”
"President Trump on Friday ordered warning signs and exhibits installed outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to alert the public that the museum does not, in his view, accurately reflect American history.
The unusual directive, made through an executive order, was a considerable escalation of the president’s dispute with the Smithsonian and its history museum, which was the subject of a recent 162-page report. The report accused the museum’s director, Anthea M. Hartig, of “radical activist ideology” and the museum of undermining “faith in American institutions.”
The order went so far as to suggest that the signage inform potential museum visitors of locations where American history is better presented. The administration did not explain where the public would be redirected.
The Smithsonian declined to comment.
Mr. Trump’s order came just days after Ms. Hartig was grilled by Republican legislators in two congressional hearings, where she was accused of teaching “national self-loathing.”"
TARA SUTER , The Hill; Trump administration replaces slavery exhibition at Washington’s Philadelphia home
"The Trump administration has removed a slavery exhibition at the home of former President George Washington in Philadelphia, according to The Associated Press.
A slavery-focused exhibit at Washington’s home was swapped out Wednesday by the administration with another version, which historians have said isn’t historically accurate, according to the AP."
Retraction Watch; Ethics journal retracts paper by high school student for AI, peer review manipulation
"The Journal of Medical Ethics has retracted a paper on the use of AI in the pharmaceutical industry for containing references that don’t exist. The article’s sole author: a high school student.
The paper, which argues biased algorithms can exacerbate inequities in health care, was published in September. The author, Irfan Biswas, listed his affiliation as Shrewsbury Public Schools in Massachusetts.
According to the May 28 retraction notice, an investigation by the journal found Biswas used generative AI to “identify and understand referenced sources” and did not verify the references prior to submission.
“The journal investigated concerns about the quality of the work and the accuracy of the references, including concerns that several references did not exist,” the notice reads.
Last year another ethics journal made a similar retraction after a reader found fabricated references in a paper on whistleblowing. The Biswas article joins the estimated one in 277 papers indexed in PubMed with fabricated references, a phenomenon that came about with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT.
The retraction notice for the latest paper also cites “evidence of peer review manipulation.”
Caroline White, media relations manager for BMJ Group, which publishes the journal, declined to elaborate on the problematic peer review. Biswas confirmed to the journal he was a high school student, and agreed to the retraction, White said.
Biswas did not respond to our emails or LinkedIn message asking for clarification on how the references ended up in the paper.
In an August 2025 paper in Frontiers in Genome Editing, “Ethical dimensions and societal implications: ensuring the social responsibility of CRISPR technology,” Biswas listed affiliations with the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. A representative from UMass told Retraction Watch they have no record of Biswas attending the school. URI said a student by the same name is enrolled as an undergraduate, but said they were “unable to confirm whether or not it is the same individual.”
Maxim Topaz, Nir Roguin, Pallavi Gupta, Zhihong Zhang, Laura-Maria Peltonen, The Lancet ; Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers
"Scientific literature depends on the integrity of its references. Each reference implicitly asserts that a verifiable source exists and supports the claims being made. When references point to non-existent studies, readers, reviewers, and policy makers are unable to evaluate the evidence.
Siobhan Roberts, The New York Times ; As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution
"Among the potential threats that the Leiden Declaration authors articulate are accuracy and reliability: Journal editors are already complaining about a flood of plausible seeming A.I.- generated papers and proofs that have turned out to be incorrect, and in ways that are difficult for mathematicians to discern.
Perhaps most pointedly, the authors raise the question of whether the many A.I. companies tackling mathematics — major players such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, or start-ups such as Harmonic, Math, Inc. and Axiom Math — are keeping the field’s best interests in mind. “Technology companies’ involvement in research,” they write, “raises the risk that research questions are prioritized and incentivized because of their amenability to A.I. methods and models, rather than their deeper significance to understanding.” In turn, they point out, this disadvantages researchers who choose not to use the technology, and those who do not have access to it.
For Rodrigo Ochigame, a historian and anthropologist of computing and artificial intelligence at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and one of the statement’s authors, the latest OpenAI proof illustrates why this sort of collective reckoning in the discipline is necessary. “The story follows the same pattern as many other announcements by commercial A.I. developers,” Dr. Ochigame said. “The A.I. model is proprietary and unavailable to anyone outside the company. We get a flashy promotional video, while basic information needed to assess the scientific meaning of the result is kept secret. The company disclosed nothing about the methods, human-written prompts, training data, or computational resources consumed.”"
Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post; The Smithsonian’s most contested exhibition is back on view, mostly intact
"No single exhibition in Washington may be more scrutinized than the Portrait Gallery’s “America’s Presidents,” and among its critics, apparently, was Trump, whose administration took issue with the wall texts that mentioned his impeachments among other low points of his first presidency. The beloved exhibition, which includes the iconic Gilbert Stuart “Lansdowne” Portrait of George Washington, reopens today after a month-long closure to refresh and rethink key elements of the display. The good news: The basic facts about Trump, along with all the other presidents, are still on offer; wall texts haven’t been removed, though some of them have been edited; and the exhibition continues to present an accurate, pithy overview of American history, warts and all."
The Florida Bar; GEORGE C. YOUNG AMERICAN INNS OF COURT EXPLORES ETHICS AND PITFALLS OF AI IN THE COURTROOM
"The George C. Young American Inns of Court continued its ongoing focus on artificial intelligence with a recent program titled, “The Use of AI to Craft Openings, Closings, and Directing Cross-Examination: Ethical Imperatives and Practical Realities.”...
Demonstrations showed that many members could not distinguish AI-generated narratives from those written by humans, highlighting the technology’s increasingly high-quality output. However, presenters also noted recurring drawbacks. AI-generated direct and cross-examinations frequently included prohibited or incorrect elements such as hearsay, compound questioning, and fabricated details — jokingly referred to as “ghost people” — distinguishing factual hallucinations from the better-known “phantom citation” problem.
The program concluded with a reminder that while AI may streamline drafting and help lawyers think creatively, professional judgment cannot be outsourced. The ultimate responsibility for accuracy, ethics, and advocacy remains with the lawyer."
BENJ EDWARDS, Ars Technica ; Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources
"On Friday, CBC News reported that a major education reform document prepared for the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador contains at least 15 fabricated citations that academics suspect were generated by an AI language model—despite the same report calling for "ethical" AI use in schools.
"A Vision for the Future: Transforming and Modernizing Education," released August 28, serves as a 10-year roadmap for modernizing the province's public schools and post-secondary institutions. The 418-page document took 18 months to complete and was unveiled by co-chairs Anne Burke and Karen Goodnough, both professors at Memorial University's Faculty of Education, alongside Education Minister Bernard Davis...
The presence of potentially AI-generated fake citations becomes especially awkward given that one of the report's 110 recommendations specifically states the provincial government should "provide learners and educators with essential AI knowledge, including ethics, data privacy, and responsible technology use."
Sarah Martin, a Memorial political science professor who spent days reviewing the document, discovered multiple fabricated citations. "Around the references I cannot find, I can't imagine another explanation," she told CBC. "You're like, 'This has to be right, this can't not be.' This is a citation in a very important document for educational policy.""
"When the Nashville Public Library's downtown branch closed after a fire, McKendree United Methodist Church stepped up to fill a critical gap for people experiencing homelessness who had lost their daily refuge.
"Alright we'll get ya all bagged up here," said Francie Markham, who volunteers at the church every Thursday morning helping people experiencing homelessness...
After losing their cool refuge with computers and resources, Smith said many people just wanted to avoid the long stretch of summer heat.
"So what we were able to do on our Tuesdays and Thursday meal is to allow them to come in much earlier rather than at the 11:30 times so they would be out of the element," Smith said.
"With the changing of the season we need it open as soon as we can," Smith said.
In the meantime, Smith and Markham keep doing what's written on the walls — serving kindness.
Despite initial reports the library would open soon after the fire, library officials say the library requires a third party inspection before it can open. The two nearest library branches, North Branch and Hadley Park, are both more than a 30-minute walk from the library downtown.
Have you witnessed acts of community kindness during challenging times? Share your story with Kim Rafferty and help us highlight the helpers making a difference in Middle Tennessee. Email kim.rafferty@NewsChannel5.com to continue the conversation.
In this article, we used artificial intelligence to help us convert a video news report originally written by Kim Rafferty. When using this tool, both Kim and the NewsChannel 5 editorial team verified all the facts in the article to make sure it is fair and accurate before we published it. We care about your trust in us and where you get your news, and using this tool allows us to convert our news coverage into different formats so we can quickly reach you where you like to consume information. It also lets our journalists spend more time looking into your story ideas, listening to you and digging into the stories that matter."
"We present the TRIAGE benchmark, a novel machine ethics benchmark designed to evaluate the ethical decision-making abilities of large language models (LLMs) in mass casualty scenarios. TRIAGE uses medical dilemmas created by healthcare professionals to evaluate the ethical decision-making of AI systems in real-world, high-stakes scenarios. We evaluated six major LLMs on TRIAGE, examining how different ethical and adversarial prompts influence model behavior. Our results show that most models consistently outperformed random guessing, with open source models making more serious ethical errors than proprietary models. Providing guiding ethical principles to LLMs degraded performance on TRIAGE, which stand in contrast to results from other machine ethics benchmarks where explicating ethical principles improved results. Adversarial prompts significantly decreased accuracy. By demonstrating the influence of context and ethical framing on the performance of LLMs, we provide critical insights into the current capabilities and limitations of AI in high-stakes ethical decision making in medicine."
John Roemer, ABA Journal; Fake Cases, Real Consequences [No digital link as of 10/1/24]
"Legal commentator Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA School of Law who tracks AI in litigation, in February reported on the 14th court case he's found in which AI-hallucinated false citations appeared. It was a Missouri Court of Appeals opinion that assessed the offending appellant $10,000 in damages for a frivolous filing.
Hallucinations aren't the only snag, Volokh says. "It's also with the output mischaracterizing the precedents or omitting key context. So one still has to check that output to make sure it's sound, rather than just including it in one's papers.
Echoing Volokh and other experts, ChatGPT itself seems clear-eyed about its limits. When asked about hallucinations in legal research, it replied in part: "Hallucinations in chatbot answers could potentially pose a problem for lawyers if they relied solely on the information provided by the chatbot without verifying its accuracy."
Craig Brodsky, Goodell, DeVries, Leech & Dann, LLP, JD Supra; Generative AI and Legal Ethics
"In his scathing opinion, Cullen joined judges from New York Massachusetts and North Carolina, among others, by concluding that improper use of AI generated authorities may give rise to sanctions and disciplinary charges...
As a result, on July 29, 2024, the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional issued Formal Opinion 512 on Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools. The ABA Standing Committee issued the opinion primarily because GAI tools are a “rapidly moving target” that can create significant ethical issues. The committee believed it necessary to offer “general guidance for lawyers attempting to navigate this emerging landscape.”
The committee’s general guidance is helpful, but the general nature of Opinion 512 it underscores part of my main concern — GAI has a wide-ranging impact on how lawyers practice that will increase over time. Unsurprisingly, at present, GAI implicates at least eight ethical rules ranging from competence (Md. Rule 19-301.1) to communication (Md. Rule 19-301.4), to fees (Md. Rule 19-301.5), to confidentiality, (Md. Rule 19-301.6), to supervisory obligations (Md. Rule 19-305.1 and Md. Rule 305.3) to the duties of a lawyer before tribunal to be candid and pursue meritorious claims and defenses. (Md. Rules 19-303.1 and 19-303.3).
As a technological feature of practice, lawyers cannot simply ignore GAI. The duty of competence under Rule 19-301.1 includes technical competence, and GAI is just another step forward. It is here to stay. We must embrace it but use it smartly.
Let it be an adjunct to your practice rather than having Chat GPT write your brief. Ensure that your staff understands that GAI can be helpful, but that the work product must be checked for accuracy.
After considering the ethical implications and putting the right processes in place, implement GAI and use it to your clients’ advantage."
