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
At around midnight in a laboratory in Daejeon, South Korea, two robotic arms are working through a queue of 96 experiments nobody asked them to start. One grips a pipette, delivers a precise shot of sodium borohydride into a reaction vessel, and moves on. The other lifts a small cuvette, slides it into a spectrometer, … Read more
Imagine you’re a PhD student named Leo. You have two choices. You could spend the next five years in a dusty basement lab, trying to figure out a “weird” question about how the very first molecules of life sparked into existence. There’s no data to help you, the experiments often fail, and your peers might … Read more
Picture a task so simple it takes four minutes. Generate ten words. That’s all. Make them as different from each other as possible, in every way that matters (meaning, usage, the way they sound in the mouth). This isn’t a test you’d find in an IQ exam or written into the competitive frameworks that sort … Read more
Recommendation algorithms don’t just show you more of what you like. They actually change what you learn and how confident you feel about it, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Researchers at Ohio State University tested this with 346 people learning to categorize fake aliens: crystal-like creatures with six … Read more
Creativity has never been a numbers game, and a new Australian analysis offers a stark reminder of just how far generative AI sits from human imagination. In a study grounded in mathematics, researchers show that today’s large language models hit a ceiling long before they reach the ingenuity of society’s most inventive thinkers. The paper, … Read more
Generative AI is pushing higher education into a profound moment of reckoning. A new study published in Frontiers of Digital Education examines how rapidly advancing AI systems are reshaping what students must learn and how universities must teach. Led by researchers from Lanzhou Petrochemical University of Vocational Technology and collaborating institutions, the paper argues that … Read more
As deepfake images and videos become ever more convincing, tech companies have turned to invisible watermarks to help identify what’s real. But a new study from researchers at the University of Waterloo shows that even the best digital fingerprints can be erased—silently, universally, and without insider knowledge. Called UnMarker, the technique is the first practical, … Read more
In a new study published in PNAS Nexus, researchers show that AI-generated paraphrases of disinformation—dubbed “AIPasta”—can make false claims appear more credible and widely shared. Unlike traditional copy-and-paste propaganda, AIPasta boosts perceptions of social consensus while flying under the radar of existing AI-detection tools. When repetition meets AI, falsehoods gain subtle power Repetitive messaging is … Read more