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"Dartmouth College experts recently conducted the first clinical trial of an AI chatbot designed specifically for providing mental health assistance. Called Therabot, the AI assistant was tested in the form of an app among participants diagnosed with serious mental health problems across the United States. "The improvements in symptoms we observed were comparable to what is reported for traditional outpatient therapy, suggesting this AI-assisted approach may offer clinically meaningful benefits," notes Nicholas Jacobson, associate professor of biomedical data science and psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine."

""Deeply disturbing" research exposes how easy it is for children to encounter inappropriate content and interact unsupervised with adults on the gaming platform Roblox. It comes as parents shared their serious concerns about children experiencing addiction, seeing traumatising content and being approached by strangers on the hugely popular website and app. Roblox acknowledges that children using the platform may be exposed to harmful content and "bad actors". It says it is working hard to fix this, but that industry-wide collaboration and government intervention are needed."

"An NHS hospital in west London is pioneering the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help check for skin cancer. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital said its AI technology has been approved to give patients the all-clear without having to see a doctor. Once photos are uploaded to the system, the technology analyses and interprets the images, with 99% accuracy in diagnosing benign cases, the hospital said. Thousands of NHS patients have had urgent cancer checks using the AI tool, freeing up consultants to focus on the most serious cases and bringing down waiting lists. The system conducts the checks in minutes, with medical photographers taking photos of suspicious moles and lesions using an iPhone and the DERM app, developed by UK firm Skin Analytics."

"Many respondents said they used chatbots to help them manage different aspects of their lives, from improving their mental and physical health to advice about existing romantic relationships and experimenting with erotic role play. They can spend between several hours a week to a couple of hours a day interacting with the apps. Worldwide, more than 100 million people use personified chatbots, which include Replika, marketed as "the AI companion who cares" and Nomi, which claims users can "build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor"."

"This is a broader pattern we're seeing across other fields where LLMs are being deployed. Whether it's coding, writing, design, law, or medicine, the most effective AI users are people who already have deep domain expertise. Expertise isn't obsolete; it's more important than ever-because the value isn't just in producing outputs quickly. It's in being able to vet, steer, and improve those outputs. The future of computer science education isn't about teaching less. It's about teaching differently. We still need students who can understand how software works at a fundamental level. But we also need to train them to collaborate with AI-to become fluent in prompting, reviewing, debugging, and refining AI-generated outputs. Mastering this hybrid skillset will be critical not just for engineers, but for anyone hoping to thrive in a world where knowledge work is increasingly AI-augmented. Practically speaking, AI could dramatically lower the barrier to entry for students. When I was in high school, it would take months (if not years) of training in CS before you could create a game or app that was genuinely cool to people that aren't inherently curious and nerdy."

"Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a "zero-click" future, where search referral traffic-a mainstay of the web since before Google existed-vanishes from the scene.  I got a vision of that future last June, when I got a push alert from the Perplexity app on my phone. Perplexity is a startup trying to reinvent web search. But in addition to delivering deep answers to queries, it will create entire articles about the news of the day, cobbled together by AI from different sources. "

"That's because Facebook cracks down on my son, the Bach lover, but seems to allow rampant copyright violations on their reels. These endlessly scrolling videos earn billions of dollars for Silicon Valley-because of their addictive interface. But the apps need an equally endless source of video clips. This forces them to recycle copyrighted material. I'm referring to movie clips, extracts from old TV series, sports highlights, comedy routines, bits of talk show interviews, filmed music performances, and other snippets culled from various entertainment sources."