Una Hajdari, Euro.news; Copyright win: Sorry, ChatGPT won't help you write like Hemingway anymore
"OpenAI has quietly reprogrammed the chatbot to reject direct requests to replicate or mimic a named author's voice, whether they are still alive to object or have been dead for decades."
Amanda Silberling , TechCrunch; Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech
"“Everybody’s on their phone at my program!” jokes Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He’s just asked his audience to pull out their phones so that he can walk them through the steps of disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini.
Bailey stands at the front of a library classroom that’s outfitted for children — the focal point is the vibrant rug he’s standing on, which reminds us that M is for “moon” and Z is for “zebra.” But the 20-odd adults in the room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They’re at a workshop called Avoiding AI, which, in this context does not stand for “apple” and “igloo.”
“I was inspired by the feeling of people’s frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them, and feeling like AI tools we didn’t ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.
Bailey starts the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might opt to abstain. Then he walks through all of the most popular tech platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on the projector to guide people through turning off specific features."
Teddy Rosenbluth, The New York Times; ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims
"A Florida pastor sued OpenAI on Wednesday, claiming that its chatbot, ChatGPT, had offered him “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that led to delayed care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism last year.
The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT had assured Scott Winters that the early warning signs of his health crisis were “not something dangerous,” and had dissuaded him from seeking medical advice, instead telling him to trust that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”
The suit, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, accuses OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of negligence and the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” pointing to moments when the chatbot offered Mr. Winters diagnoses and treatment plans and encouraged him to ignore pleas from friends and family to seek medical care.
The bot’s safety features — which are designed to encourage users with health questions to see a professional and to end conversations when there are clear signs of a medical crisis — did not work reliably, the suit further says."
David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University., The Washington Post; People of faith are finding a new moral guide in AI
"Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the way we get information. If you have questions about the factors that underlie a medical diagnosis or how best to invest your savings, asking an AI chatbot for guidance can give you quick, easy and often surprisingly accurate information in a conversational form. But people are also turning to AI to explore deeper questions than they might ask a physician, financial adviser or professor — questions that, for millennia, were the province of religion."
Maham Javaid, NPR; Getting campaign text messages ahead of midterms? There could be an AI bot behind it
"AI-powered platforms are training bots to sound like political candidates in text messages, holding personalized conversations with thousands of potential voters simultaneously. The bots are also gathering data, learning what each voter wants from their representatives and using that information to shape future campaign messaging."
Noam Scheiber , The New York Times; We’re Only Starting to Grasp the Pitfalls of Using A.I. at Work
Scholars say the “unknown unknowns” of using artificial intelligence in the workplace may be undermining the technology’s advertised benefits.
"In the years since A.I. burst onto the scene, many companies have become aware of flaws produced by the technology and, at times, taken steps to offset them. They know that A.I. models can be biased against certain groups of people, like nonwhites. They know that chatbots can provide confident but incorrect answers to queries. They know that the bots sometimes spill the beans on information that should remain private.
But as companies race to bring A.I. into their day-to-day operations, researchers are discovering more subtle defects."
Tom Zeller Jr. , The Washington Post; Don’t quit this whole-brain workout
"Last month, journalists discovered that “The Future of Truth,” a book about AI’s effect on knowledge, contained manufactured quotes and other inaccuracies that the author had apparently copied and pasted from a large language model. At around the same time, it appeared as if one of the prizewinning stories published in Granta, a prestigious British magazine, was written by a bot. This spring, Hachette announced it was canceling Mia Ballard’s novel “Shy Girl” in the U.S. over similar allegations.
All this — uncertain authorship, neutered prose, the disintegration of trust about who’s written what — has profound consequences. But the scandals raise a more unsettling question: What happens when we begin to outsource one of the brain’s most cognitively integrative activities?"
Mike Cummings, YaleNews; Can we trust AI models? Yale researchers explore the roots of chatbot errors
"The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has inserted a new character into people’s lives: the chatbot.
Individuals now engage with agentic AI chatbots to perform a growing number of tasks; They can help a person shop for a new laptop, manage email, or plan a vacation.
And while these interactions can save time and increase productivity, they also carry risk. Large language models (LLM) — the AI systems trained on massive datasets to generate human-like text — are imperfect. They hallucinate. They misinterpret. They make mistakes.
Two multidisciplinary teams of researchers associated with the Center for Algorithms, Data, and Market Design at Yale are pursuing projects that aim to balance the capability and safety of AI systems and improve interactions between users and AI models.
Yale News recently spoke with members of both teams about their research projects."
Sophia Harris, CBC; Dealership revoked offer to buy back customer's BMW, blaming wayward AI chatbot
"After his 2021 BMW required major repairs, Zack Giacomelli decided last month he wanted to sell it back to BMW Toronto — the same dealership from which he bought the used car in 2023.
At first, the buy-back process seemed easy. After submitting an online inquiry, Giacomelli got a text from Quinn at BMW Toronto, who was eager to help.
Quinn expressed sympathy for Giacomelli's car troubles and asked questions about the vehicle, which was still being repaired at the dealership. Later in the same text conversation, Quinn made a firm buy-back offer: $27,162.79.
Giacomelli, a 31-year-old funeral director, was satisfied, as the offer was just enough to cover what he still owed on the car.
"I felt this Quinn person was finally hearing me out," he said. "I was feeling really good."
The good feeling didn't last. Moments later, Giacomelli said, a BMW Toronto sales consultant called to revoke the offer, explaining that Quinn wasn't a real person, but rather an artificial intelligence chatbot that had made the offer in error."
ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google
"Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.
The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.
Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.
But the court found that, unlike traditional search engines that merely present lists of links to third-party statements, Google’s tool made “independent, new, and substantive statements” based on its own misinterpretation of links on the Internet.
That’s a problem, the court said, because while publishers may have been able to sue to stop third parties from publishing defamatory statements appearing in Google search results, only Google can correct the underlying algorithm and outputs displayed in AI Overviews. And because, at least initially, the company did not, it therefore “must be held accountable,” the court ruled. Beyond that, Google’s argument was deemed particularly weak, since the AI overview in this case “contains statements that do not appear in the search results at all.”
The court’s order—requiring a temporary injunction barring Google from spreading the false claims in any further AI Overviews—may have global implications, as the court seems to be the first to hold an AI firm liable for AI speech."
Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic; There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI
"For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket.
The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker...
What Christian humanism offers, with its assertion that humans are made in the Imago Dei, is a choice other than Silicon Valley extremism or remainder humanism. If what makes humanity special is not our capabilities—automatable or not—but the notion that we spring from a transcendent source, then what the robots can or cannot do is in some sense irrelevant. ChatGPT was not made in the image of God, no matter how impressive its facsimile becomes. A secular humanism that cannot find a similarly deep line of reasoning is one that may not be adequate to defend human dignity in the AI era.
I am not arguing that one must be or become more religious to fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI—that would make me, a not especially observant Presbyterian, a hypocrite. But I do think that one must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment. Otherwise, appreciating what large language models and their peddlers wish to take from us becomes too difficult. If secularists flinch at calling this taking—what Pope Leo calls Big Tech’s “dehumanizing ambition”—a sin, they’ll need to find another word for it."
Laura D. Francis, Bloomberg Law; Disney’s Copyright Suit Against Chinese AI Developer Advances
"The
Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros.—as well as their subsidiaries—convinced the US District Court for the Central District of California Friday that they made plausible claims that Hailuo AI’s ability to generate near-perfect likenesses of their well-known characters constituted both direct and secondary infringement."
Kim Willsher, The Guardian; Molière Ex Machina: AI used to create ‘new work’ by beloved French playwright
"Molière is to the French what Shakespeare is to the English: the last word in historical literature, drama, wit and satire.
Now, more than 350 years after his death, the 17th-century dramatist has been revived after scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used artificial intelligence to help write an experimental play in his style.
L’Astrologue ou les Faux Présages (The Astrologer, or False Omens), a three-act comedy, made its debut at the Royal Opera at the Château de Versailles last week.
The two-hour play tells the story of a wealthy bourgeois Parisian who, under the instruction of a charlatan astrologer called Pseudoramus, insists his daughter Lucile marry a debt-ridden and elderly wigmaker.
While the theme could well have been dreamed up by Molière, the dialogue, music, costumes and scenery were all created with the help of a French AI tool called Le Chat (The Cat).
A group of researchers at the Sorbonne worked on the project, called Molière Ex Machina, for two and a half years. The team included a three-person group of artists and researchers called Obvious."
Dustin Volz, The New York Times ; Google Says Criminal Hackers Used A.I. to Find a Major Software Flaw
"A criminal hacking group recently attempted to launch a widespread cyberattack that appeared to rely on artificial intelligence to detect a previously unknown bug, Google said in research published Monday, highlighting the potential threat that A.I. poses to digital security.
Security experts have feared for years that malicious hackers could eventually rely on A.I. models to identify undisclosed flaws in computer code to launch crippling attacks that are difficult to guard against. That fear was largely theoretical until now.
“We have high confidence that the actor likely leveraged an A.I. model to support the discovery and weaponization of this vulnerability,” the report said.
The tech giant did not say precisely when the thwarted attack happened, whom it was targeting or which A.I. platform the hackers used, but the company added that it did not believe it was its own Gemini chatbot."
Cornelia C. Walther Ph.D. , Psychology Today; Is Your Bot Becoming Your Balm?
Gabriel J.X. Dance, The New York Times; A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons
"Dr. Relman is part of a small group of experts enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. In recent months, some have shared with The Times more than a dozen chatbot conversations revealing that even publicly available models can do more than disseminate dangerous information. The virtual assistants have described in lucid, bullet-pointed detail how to buy raw genetic material, turn it into deadly weapons and deploy them in public spaces, the transcripts show. Some have even brainstormed ways to evade detection."
Will Gottsegen , The Atlantic; Sam Altman Wants to Know Whether You’re Human
And he has a way to prove it.
"As the CEO of OpenAI and the chairman of Tools for Humanity, Altman has a financial interest both in the products that create these dangers and in the ones that guard against them."
Ari Daniel, NPR; AI's a suck up. Research shows how it flatters and suggests we're not to blame
"In a recent study published in the journal Science, Cheng and her colleagues report that AI models offer affirmations more often than people do, even for morally dubious or troubling scenarios. And they found that this sycophancy was something that people trusted and preferred in an AI — even as it made them less inclined to apologize or take responsibility for their behavior.
The findings, experts say, highlight how this common AI feature may keep people returning to the technology, despite the harm it causes them.
It's not unlike social media in that both "drive engagement by creating addictive, personalized feedback loops that learn exactly what makes you tick," says Ishtiaque Ahmed, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto who wasn't involved in the research."
David DeSteno, The New York Times; Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?
"In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announced that its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with a Catholic priest and consulting with other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.
Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body."
Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post; Is a chatbot your doctor? Proceed with caution
"Millions of Americans regularly use AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini as a first stop for health questions related to colds, cancer and beyond. Two studies published this month suggest that may not be such a good idea — at least without a lot of skepticism.
Tiller, a research associate at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, published his study in BMJ Open. A separate team from Mass General Brigham approached the question in an entirely different way, and the study appeared in JAMA Network Open."
