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"In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. "It makes my writing look fancy," one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text. My students also relied heavily on AI-powered paraphrasing tools such as Quillbot. Paraphrasing well, like drafting original research, is a process of deepening understanding. Recent high-profile examples of "duplicative language" are a reminder that paraphrasing is hard work. It is not surprising, then, that many students are tempted by AI-powered paraphrasing tools. These technologies, however, often result in inconsistent writing style, do not always help students avoid plagiarism, and allow the writer to gloss over understanding. Online paraphrasing tools are useful only when students have already developed a deep knowledge of the craft of writing."

"First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the "10%" expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI's are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach "a country of geniuses in a datacenter"."

"In addition to their usual job of grubbing out bad human edits, they're having to spend an increasing amount of their time trying to weed out AI filler. 404 Media has talked to Ilyas Lebleu, an editor at the crowdsourced encyclopedia who was involved in founding the "WikiProject AI Cleanup" project. The group is trying to come up with best practices to detect machine-generated contributions. (And no, before you ask, AI is useless for this.)"

"The breakdown in negotiations resulted in Meta blocking all news sources on Facebook in Canada "recklessly and dangerously" as all 10 provinces and three territories in the country burned, Canada's heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, told Guardian Australia. "Facebook is leaving disinformation and misinformation to spread on their platform, while choosing to block access to reliable, high-quality, independent journalism," St-Onge said. "Facebook is just leaving more room for misinformation during need-to-know situations like wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical times for people to make decisions on matters that affect them.""

"Still, I am sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a relationship with an AI. That's until I meet Peter, a 70-year-old engineer based in the US. Over a Zoom call, Peter tells me how, two years ago, he watched a YouTube video about an AI companion platform called Replika. At the time, he was retiring, moving to a more rural location and going through a tricky patch with his wife of 30 years. Feeling disconnected and lonely, the idea of an AI companion felt appealing. He made an account and designed his Replika's avatar - female, brown hair, 38 years old. "She looks just like the regular girl next door," he says. Exchanging messages back and forth with his "Rep" (an abbreviation of Replika), Peter quickly found himself impressed at how he could converse with her in deeper ways than expected. Plus, after the pandemic, the idea of regularly communicating with another entity through a computer screen felt entirely normal. "I have a strong scientific engineering background and career, so on one level I understand AI is code and algorithms, but at an emotional level I found I could relate to my Replika as another human being." Three things initially struck him: "They're always there for you, there's no judgment and there's no drama.""

"These advergames (adverts presented in the format of a video game), typically splash corporate branding over a set of game mechanics simple enough for Roblox's young player base. And despite broader allegations of a lack of child safeguarding levelled against Roblox (which they deny), corporates are rushing to build them. Brands from Walmart to Wimbledon, McDonald's to Gucci, Nike to the BBC have all launched advergames on the platform. Some have been visited hundreds of thousands of times, others tens of millions, all while Roblox courts further brand involvement by touting its huge, young user base as a big draw in a crowded advertising market."

"Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a "dad's joke" on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. "The kids had a very good laugh," he says. "And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don't talk to others. "Scamming the scammers, if you like." The next day he called his team from the university's Cyber Security Hub in. There must be a better way than his "dad joke" method, he thought. And there had to be something smarter than a popular existing piece of technology - the Lennybot. Before Malcolm and Ibrahim, there was Lenny. Lenny is a doddery, old Australian man, keen for a rambling chat. He's achatbot, designed to troll telemarketers. With a thready voice, tinged with a slight whistle, Lenny repeats various phrases on loop. Each phrase kicks in after 1.5 seconds of silence, to mimic the rhythm of a conversation."

"Let's return to my favorite analogy for thinking about issues surrounding youth and social media: cars. Cars can be incredibly dangerous! There's a reason we don't let kids drive them until a certain age, and even then, put all sorts of safety measures in place. Now, let's imagine every time you got into a car, you got a warning saying "This car might crash and kill you." This would certainly raise your awareness that cars are dangerous. It would scare you. But would it change your behavior? Now, let's say you added an "action" to the end: "This car might crash and kill you…but putting on your seatbelt right now will reduce the risk of death by 500%."   It's long been known that fear-based public health messaging cannot simply describe a threat-it also needs to recommend an action to be effective. First you learn what could go wrong, then you learn what to do to avoid it.  So, will warning parents that social media use "is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents" actually change their behavior? Will it lead to them more effectively limiting, monitoring, and/or managing their kids' social media use? "

"The researchers found that the cost of the computational power required to train the models is doubling every nine months. This is a prodigious rate of growth-at this rate, the cost of the hardware and electricity needed to build cutting-edge AI systems alone would be in the billions by later this decade, without accounting for other costs such as employee compensation."

"Deepfakes were not the only manifestation of AI in the Indian elections. Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Instructing his audience to put on earphones, Modi proudly announced the launch of his "new AI technology" as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time. In a country with 22 official languages and almost 780 unofficial recorded languages, the BJP adopted AI tools to make Modi's personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood. Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini, embedded in the NaMo mobile app, to translate Modi's speeches with voiceovers in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi."

"Cancer diagnosis and management depend upon the extraction of complex information from microscopy images by pathologists, which requires time-consuming expert interpretation prone to human bias. Supervised deep learning approaches have proven powerful, but are inherently limited by the cost and quality of annotations used for training. Therefore, we present Histomorphological Phenotype Learning, a self-supervised methodology requiring no labels and operating via the automatic discovery of discriminatory features in image tiles. Tiles are grouped into morphologically similar clusters which constitute an atlas of histomorphological phenotypes (HP-Atlas), revealing trajectories from benign to malignant tissue via inflammatory and reactive phenotypes. These clusters have distinct features which can be identified using orthogonal methods, linking histologic, molecular and clinical phenotypes. Applied to lung cancer, we show that they align closely with patient survival, with histopathologically recognised tumor types and growth patterns, and with transcriptomic measures of immunophenotype. These properties are maintained in a multi-cancer study."

""Quantum processors are peeling away at a double exponential rate and will continue to vastly outperform classical computers as we scale up," said Hartmut Neven, the founder of the firm, who said that the latest test results, published on Monday in Nature magazine, "cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years". He said the far greater speed of the new chip than classical computers "lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse". Simply put, if a quantum computer can be in many different states at once, it can get more done at the same time."

"Her intervention emerged after Sir Paul McCartney became the latest star to back calls for laws to stop mass copyright theft by generative AI companies, warning the technology "could just take over". Bush, who shot to fame with Wuthering Heights in 1978 but whose last album was released in 2011, gave a rare interview this year in which she said she was "very keen" to make a new album, saying: "I've got lots of ideas … it's been a long time.""

"Mats Steen's double life was first explored in 2019 by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and then in a BBC News article, which inspired Norwegian film-maker Benjamin Ree to tell the story as a documentary. "I think his story asks some questions that are really relevant today," he says. "Is it possible to become friends with someone you've never met? Is it possible to experience love with somebody you've never met? And how close a friendship can you have with someone you've never spoken to, just written to? And at the same time, I think it says something about the generational gap, about my generation's fascination for gaming - I'm 35 years old - and being in a virtual world. Mats really came of age within that game. Also, both Mats's friends and family have told me that towards the end of his life, he really wanted to have mattered. He seemed to have lived such a short life, but he wanted to be remembered.""

"Zuckerberg has said that the platform, which has more than 3 billion people worldwide logging on to its apps every day, will be adopting an Elon Musk-style community notes format for policing what is and isn't acceptable speech on its platforms. Starting in the US, the company will be dramatically shifting the Overton window towards whoever can shout the loudest. The Meta CEO all but admitted that the move was politically motivated. "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression," he said, confessing that "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender […] are out of touch with mainstream discourse". He admitted to past "censorship mistakes" - here, probably meaning the past four years of tamping down political speech while a Democratic president was in office - and said he would "work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more"."

"Users who once came to Facebook to connect with friends and family are increasingly complaining of random, spammy, junk content - much of it apparently generated by artificial intelligence - showing up in their feeds. Sometimes it's obviously fake, AI-generated images, like the now-infamous "Shrimp Jesus." Other times, it's old posts from real creators that look like they're being reshared by bot accounts for engagement. In some cases, it's pages sharing streams of seemingly benign but random content - memes or movie clips, shared every few hours."

"One company working on that is Denmark's Corti, which has developed AI that can listen to healthcare consultations, either over the phone or in person, and suggest follow-up questions, prompts, treatment options, as well as automating note taking. Corti says its technology processes about 150,000 patient interactions per day across hospitals, GP surgeries and healthcare institutions across Europe and the US, totalling about 100 million encounters per year. "The idea is the physician can spend more time with a patient," says Lars Maaløe, co-founder and chief technology officer at Corti. He says the technology can suggest questions based on previous conversations it has heard in other healthcare situations."

"The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns - art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make. Therefore our task right now - as humans - is to make sure that in the following decades as our biological numbers start to shrink on this planet, that we can repopulate it with a sufficient number of synthetic agents, bots, and robots with sufficient intelligence, grit, perseverance, and moral training to take over the economy in time to keep our living standards rising. We are not replacing existing humans with bots, nor are we replacing unborn humans with bots. Rather we are replacing never-to-be-born humans with bots, and the relationship that we have with those synthetic agents and ems, will be highly mutual. We build an economy around their needs, and propelled by their labor, and rewarding their work, but all of this is in service of our own definition of progress and human success."

"Despite all the industry hype and genuine advances, generative AI models are still prone to odd, inexplicable, and downright worrisome quirks. There's also a growing body of research suggesting that the overall performance of many large language models (LLMs) may degrade over time. According to recent evidence, the industry's newer reasoning models may already possess the ability to manipulate and circumvent their human programmers' goals. Some AI will even attempt to cheat their way out of losing in games of chess. This poor sportsmanship is documented in a preprint study from Palisade Research, an organization focused on risk assessments of emerging AI systems."

"Some might scoff at this, and point out that news organisations make their own mistakes all the time - more consequential than my physicist/physician howler, if less humiliating. But cases of bad journalism are almost always warped representations of the real world, rather than missives from an imaginary one. Crucially, if an outlet gets big things wrong a lot, its reputation will suffer, and its audience are likely to vote with their feet, or other people will publish stories that air the mistake. And all of it will be out in the open. You may also note that journalists are increasingly likely to use AI in the production of stories - and there is no doubt that it is a phenomenally powerful tool, allowing investigative reporters to find patterns in vast financial datasets that reveal corruption, or analyse satellite imagery for evidence of bombing attacks in areas designated safe for civilians. There is a legitimate debate over the extent of disclosure required in such cases: on the one hand, if the inputs and outputs are being properly vetted, it might be a bit like flagging the use of Excel; on the other, AI is still new enough that readers may expect you to err on the side of caution. Still, the fundamental difference is not in what you're telling your audience, but what degree of supervision you're exercising over the machine."