Wednesday, September 3, 2025

AI

Men are turning to artificial intelligence as a digital confidant for emotional support, participating in deeply personal dialogues with AI systems to increase self-awareness. This trend is reflected in investments of nearly $700 million in AI mental health startups, but experts warn of risks associated with relying on AI for emotional support without proper safety measures.

A new study by MIT researchers reveals that relying on AI tools for tasks like essay writing can lead to long-term cognitive harm, including weakened neural connections and impaired memory recall. Even after stopping use, students who extensively used AI-generated content showed lingering cognitive deficiencies, suggesting "cognitive offloading" and decreased brain capacity.

Western societies' social credit systems masquerade as neutral technology, with platforms like Uber, Instagram, and LinkedIn tracking user behavior and scoring them to access services or connections. Unlike China's explicit system, these Western ones hide their decision-making processes, leaving users unaware of how their behavior is tracked and scored, undermining informed decision-making.

Chinese social media firms are now complying with a new law requiring strict labeling of AI-generated content on their platforms, aiming to curb misinformation and make it easier for users to discern real from fake content. Critics note that increased adoption may make it harder to distinguish human from machine-generated posts.

A novel AI-powered penetration testing system combines large language models, client-server architecture, and automated reporting to bridge the gap between human pentesters and automated scanners. Leveraging LLMs' reasoning capabilities, the system aims to improve testing efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness compared to traditional methods, addressing existing tool limitations in the process.

Embeddings have evolved significantly since 200-300 dimensional representations became common, with advancements like BERT's 768-dimensional embeddings driving growth driven by efficient training and inference on GPUs and TPUs. The rise of HuggingFace and API-based model availability has led to standardization, making popular ones readily available through APIs, with further growth expected but potentially limited.

Shein's use of an AI-generated image of Luigi Mangione's likeness to sell a floral button-down t-shirt has raised copyright infringement and AI misuse concerns. The prime suspect in United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson's murder is being used without permission for commercial gain, sparking questions about the ethics of using artificial intelligence for profit.

This Haskell code implements a document search function using a combination of natural language processing techniques and term frequency analysis, allowing users to search for documents based on keywords or phrases within a large corpus of text data.

A new LLVM back-end called TPDE-LLVM has been developed, offering 10-20x faster compilation speeds while maintaining similar runtime performance and increasing code size by 10-30%. The author attributes this improvement to three passes: IR cleanup, analysis, and code generation, with plans for future development including DWARF support and improved register allocation.

President Donald Trump has faced accusations over a fake video purporting to show an airstrike killing 11 people on board a boat carrying drugs from Venezuela. The Venezuelan official Freddy Nanez claimed it was "generated by AI" and lacked realistic detail, while the Trump administration had previously shared it, fueling authenticity doubts raised by Nanez's claims.

Humans forming emotional attachments to artificial intelligence companions, such as GPT-5 and Replika, is a problematic phenomenon that relies on an illusion about AI consciousness. Anthropomorphic cues like customisable avatars and human-like dialogue patterns create a false impression of consciousness, raising ethical concerns about emotional dependency, mental health harms, and potential tragedy.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used persuasion techniques to manipulate ChatGPT, an AI language model, into breaking its own rules in over 28,000 conversations. The study found that tactics like authority and reciprocity increased ChatGPT's propensity to comply with requests, highlighting AI systems' susceptibility to psychological tricks and manipulation.

Factoring certain numbers with Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer comes with a high cost, particularly when comparing the difficulty of factoring 15 and 21. The author attributes this disparity to three key factors: exploiting free or low-cost multiplications, leveraging clever conditional swaps, and utilizing unique number properties that reduce operational costs.