Start with a skin cell. Bathe it in the right cocktail of chemical signals and it forgets what it is, regressing to a state of biological openness, capable of becoming almost anything. Over the next several months, coax it toward a neural fate. What you end up with, roughly a year after you started, is … Read more
Slapping a label on AI-generated content is the regulatory world’s current favourite answer to the misinformation problem. Transparent, scalable, required by law in China and under the EU AI Act, endorsed by Meta and X. The logic seems obvious enough: tell people a machine wrote something and they’ll scrutinise it harder. They didn’t, as it … Read more
Somewhere in the archive of Humanity’s Last Exam sits a question about a Roman tombstone. Not the Latin inscription — that would be too easy — but the Palmyrene script running alongside it, a language spoken in ancient Syria and dead for seventeen centuries. The question was written by a classicist at Oxford, tested against … Read more
The widespread push for AI “guardrails” fundamentally misunderstands how to regulate artificial intelligence safely and effectively, according to new research from University of Pennsylvania and University of Notre Dame scholars. Instead of fixed barriers that constrain innovation, policymakers should impose flexible “leashes” that allow AI to explore new domains while maintaining constant human oversight, the … Read more
As artificial intelligence systems grow more sophisticated, they’re challenging fundamental philosophical ideas about what makes humans unique. A new study published in the journal AI and Ethics argues that today’s advanced AI systems utilizing large language models (LLMs) have crossed a significant threshold—they now meet all three philosophical conditions for possessing “functional free will,” raising … Read more