"Big Chinese tech companies appear to have turned off some AI functions to prevent cheating during the country's highly competitive university entrance exams. More than 13.3 million students are sitting the four-day gaokao exams, which began on Saturday and determine if and where students can secure a limited place at university. This year, students hoping to get some assistance from increasingly advanced AI tools have been stymied."

"The Meta boss is gearing up to unleash AI tools to allow advertisers to fully create and target campaigns on his social media sites, prompting fears of the "death of creativity" - and widespread job cuts at agencies. Last week it emerged that these tools are to be rolled out by the end of next year, with Zuckerberg describing the capability in a recent interview as a "redefinition of the category of advertising. You don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out," he said last month, in comments that appear to render much of the advertising industry obsolete."

"From this fact about language development, Chomsky posited an (abstract) innate module for language learning - not processing. From a neurobiological standpoint, the brain has to be ready to understand language from birth. While there are plenty of examples of language specialization in infants, the precise neural mechanisms are still unknown, but not unknowable. But objects of study become unknowable when scientific terms are misused or misapplied. And this is precisely the danger: conflating AI with human understanding can lead to dangerous consequences."

"Why the way AI speaks to us matters more than what it says We're living through a fundamental shift in how we access information. Students today don't just Google answers-they ask Alexa, chat with ChatGPT, and increasingly, speak with AI voices that sound remarkably human. But here's what's concerning: research shows that when information comes through a voice rather than text, we're significantly less likely to think critically about it."

"Google is now showing ads in chatbot conversations via its AdSense for Search network, marking a shift in its digital advertising strategy as generative AI becomes not only more commonplace, but increasingly used in place of traditional search engine tools. Previously, ads were shown within the search results of other websites, however Google added them to conversations with chatbots operated by AI startups earlier in 2025 (via Bloomberg)."

""We want to build AIs that will be honest and not deceptive," Bengio said. He added: "It is theoretically possible to imagine machines that have no self, no goal for themselves, that are just pure knowledge machines - like a scientist who knows a lot of stuff." However, unlike current generative AI tools, Bengio's system will not give definitive answers and will instead give probabilities for whether an answer is correct."

"But Duolingo now seems to have changed its tune, at least in terms of hiring. CEO Luis von Ahn wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this week: "To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are, in fact, continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it-and use it responsibly-the better off we will be in the long run." Though many language learners obviously appreciate the human touch on their materials, Duolingo isn't the only one leaning toward AI for language education. Last month, Google applied its flagship Google Gemini AI model to create three new tools, dubbed Little Language Lessons, accessible via the Google Labs page. However, Google did dub the new set of tools as "just an early exploration.""

" More than half of top 100 mental health TikToks contain misinformation, study finds Guardian investigation reveals promotion of dubious advice, questionable supplements and quick-fix healing methods"

"'One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT': the workers who lost their jobs to AI From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?"

"We typically begin the semester by asking students to reflect on the formulas they've learned in the past and to consider how those shape their writing. We now ask those same reflection questions about AI outputs. Student responses, as Jennifer has written elsewhere, are revealing: The kind of writing that Chat does, it's what our teachers try to get us to do. It's like five-paragraph essays, and perfect paragraph[s] that don't have any personality, which we were taught in high school. It does what school has trained us to do. Like write a perfectly formatted essay that is based on some random people's ideas."

"What if we could forecast how armed factions-and the communities around them-might respond to a draft peace deal before it's signed? What if we could test, virtually, whether a public apology would calm tensions… or make things worse? That's the provocative promise behind the growing use of digital twins in peacemaking: AI-powered simulations of complex social systems, designed to help us understand conflict-and imagine pathways out of it."

"And so I think this is a crisis. I think the biggest part of the crisis is for teachers. A lot of people suggest teachers go back to Blue Book exams, right? At least then we can make sure that the student is really doing their work. But that's just a huge burden on teachers now to completely reorganize the entire way that they administer education. I couldn't agree more. Kevin Roose of the New York Times recently said, "if students can cheat with ChatGPT then you need to rethink your teaching." Well, I've been working in education for almost two decades, that's exactly what people said when smartphones came around. And now, 10 years later, we've come around to just banning them in school, or trying to anyway. And I wonder if we're going to need to wait a decade before reaching that conclusion in education."

"Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become "commonplace" in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches."

"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?)"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I believe the answer has a lot to do with the fact that few things created by humans with artsy aspirations are worth anything in isolation. Their worth comes from what surrounds them, from the human context that birthed them and the human lives that were impacted by them. That's how masterpieces are judged as such."