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"The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren't Happy About It Students call it hypocritical. A senior at Northeastern University demanded her tuition back. But instructors say generative A.I. tools make them better at their jobs."

"Concerns about giving voice to the dead do not apply to AI guest speakers who are someone with a specific job, an animal, an object, or a concept such as the Water Cycle. But is it sound pedagogy? Let's consider what teachers can learn about students and AI chatbots from the Eliza Effect. The Eliza Effect is the tendency to project human characteristics onto computers that generate text. Its name comes from Eliza, a therapist chatbot computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created in the 1960s. Weizenbaum named the chatbot after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion."

"It is not simply that AI lacks originality; after all, so too does most human art. The problem runs far deeper: the essence of art is lost in the process of its machinic invention and, with it, the very possibility of a democratic society is put under threat. Art is a defining human endeavor, not just for those formally called "artists" but for everyone. It is not merely about arranging colors, forms, sounds or words into pleasing products. The essence of art inheres in its making: the belief that, in the act of creating art, one imbues an object with something ineffable from within one's own being. This belief, in turn, allows for another person to project their own sense of themselves onto the work and, in doing so, to commune with the artist at a level words cannot access."

"Illinois' prominent Chicago Sun-Times newspaper has confirmed that a summer reading list, which included several recommendations for books that don't exist, was created using artificial intelligence by a freelancer who worked with one of their content partners."

"The idea that we need a technological solution for too much technology is, at best, the Internet era's great placebo effect. We feel like we're getting a little better, but that's just part of the same addiction. Because it's their business, tech companies really have no choice but to try to convince us that we're just one more piece of technology away from the solution; but it's like telling us we can use heroin to kick our methadone habit-when we all know deep down that the off switch is the only true killer app. (But who has the attention span to go deep down anymore?)"

"Our findings show that both model and user behaviors can influence social and emotional outcomes. Effects of AI vary based on how people choose to use the model and their personal circumstances. This research provides a starting point for further studies that can increase transparency, and encourage responsible usage and development of AI platforms across the industry."

"The researchers established a complex picture in terms of the impact. Voice-based chatbots initially appeared to help mitigate loneliness compared with text-based chatbots, but this advantage started to slip the more someone used them. After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialise with people than their male counterparts. Participants who interacted with ChatGPT's voice mode in a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment."

"What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by 2028? In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years."

"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."

""Grok is a new rebel. Asking Grok questions will not put anyone in trouble. The right-wing has also responded by asking questions about Rahul Gandhi. And then it has become a competitive thing. This is not surprising at all," says Mr Sinha of Alt News. "Other AI bots are programmed to give politically correct answers to questions like 'Who's better, Congress or BJP?'. Grok, however, seems to lack that filter and appears unafraid to tackle controversial issues head-on," he adds."

"'Profiting from misery': how TikTok makes money from child begging livestreams Exploitation fears as people in extreme poverty perform stunts and beg for virtual gifts"

"Anvi Ahuja noticed a "freaky" new text message from a number she didn't know right after getting back to her downtown Toronto apartment last month.  The text was a transcript of the conversation she'd just had with her roommates during their eight-minute Lyft ride home from a friend's place. "I was like 'who is tapping me?'" Ahuja said. "The driver didn't inform us that we could be recorded.""

""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"."

"Most people agree that AI should transparently reveal itself not to be human, but many were happy for AI to talk in human-realistic ways. A majority (approximately 60%) felt that AI systems should refrain from expressing emotions, unless they were idiomatic expressions (like "I'm happy to help")."

"Despite these promises, concerns over privacy, security, and exclusion are growing. Critics, including Privacy International and Access Now, have raised alarm over the risks posed by poorly regulated digital ID systems. They caution, "Without strong safeguards, Africa's digital ID dream risks becoming a surveillance nightmare." Data breaches and inadequate legal frameworks further raise questions about whether these programs empower citizens or expose them to new vulnerabilities."

"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."

"AI models will inevitably have to make value judgments. If we want those judgments to be congruent with our own values (which is, after all, the central goal of AI alignment research) then we need to have ways of testing which values a model expresses in the real world. Our method provides a new, data-focused method of doing this, and of seeing where we might've succeeded-or indeed failed-at aligning our models' behavior."