Character.ai, who is being sued by a mother whose 14-year old son shot and killed himself due to a ‘relationship’ w one of its bots, wants #chatbots (machines!) to be protected by HUMAN rights such as freedom of speech #ai #genai #humanrights
This is where we are 
Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened
https://futurism.com/professors-company-ai-agents
#technology #tech #ai #artificialintelligence #employment #careers #economy #chatbots
Actually you'll guess exactly what happens. Best line in the article, "... artificial intelligence is arguably still just an elaborate extension of your phone's predictive text, rather than a sentient intelligence..."
"This report outlines several case studies on how actors have misused our models, as well as the steps we have taken to detect and counter such misuse. By sharing these insights, we hope to protect the safety of our users, prevent abuse or misuse of our services, enforce our Usage Policy and other terms, and share our learnings for the benefit of the wider online ecosystem. The case studies presented in this report, while specific, are representative of broader patterns we're observing across our monitoring systems. These examples were selected because they clearly illustrate emerging trends in how malicious actors are adapting to and leveraging frontier AI models. We hope to contribute to a broader understanding of the evolving threat landscape and help the wider AI ecosystem develop more robust safeguards.
The most novel case of misuse detected was a professional 'influence-as-a-service' operation showcasing a distinct evolution in how certain actors are leveraging LLMs for influence operation campaigns. What is especially novel is that this operation used Claude not just for content generation, but also to decide when social media bot accounts would comment, like, or re-share posts from authentic social media users. As described in the full report, Claude was used as an orchestrator deciding what actions social media bot accounts should take based on politically motivated personas. Read the full report here."
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-countering-malicious-uses-of-claude-march-2025
"We must stop giving AI human traits. My first interaction with GPT-3 rather seriously annoyed me. It pretended to be a person. It said it had feelings, ambitions, even consciousness.
That’s no longer the default behaviour, thankfully. But the style of interaction — the eerily natural flow of conversation — remains intact. And that, too, is convincing. Too convincing.
We need to de-anthropomorphise AI. Now. Strip it of its human mask. This should be easy. Companies could remove all reference to emotion, judgement or cognitive processing on the part of the AI. In particular, it should respond factually without ever saying “I”, or “I feel that”… or “I am curious”.
Will it happen? I doubt it. It reminds me of another warning we’ve ignored for over 20 years: “We need to cut CO₂ emissions.” Look where that got us. But we must warn big tech companies of the dangers associated with the humanisation of AIs. They are unlikely to play ball, but they should, especially if they are serious about developing more ethical AIs.
For now, this is what I do (because I too often get this eerie feeling that I am talking to a synthetic human when using ChatGPT or Claude): I instruct my AI not to address me by name. I ask it to call itself AI, to speak in the third person, and to avoid emotional or cognitive terms.
If I am using voice chat, I ask the AI to use a flat prosody and speak a bit like a robot. It is actually quite fun and keeps us both in our comfort zone."
"It’s not that hard to build a fully functioning, code-editing agent.
It seems like it would be. When you look at an agent editing files, running commands, wriggling itself out of errors, retrying different strategies - it seems like there has to be a secret behind it.
There isn’t. It’s an LLM, a loop, and enough tokens. It’s what we’ve been saying on the podcast from the start. The rest, the stuff that makes Amp so addictive and impressive? Elbow grease.
But building a small and yet highly impressive agent doesn’t even require that. You can do it in less than 400 lines of code, most of which is boilerplate.
I’m going to show you how, right now. We’re going to write some code together and go from zero lines of code to “oh wow, this is… a game changer.”
I urge you to follow along. No, really. You might think you can just read this and that you don’t have to type out the code, but it’s less than 400 lines of code. I need you to feel how little code it is and I want you to see this with your own eyes in your own terminal in your own folders.
Here’s what we need:
- Go
- Anthropic API key that you set as an environment variable, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY"
15% of AI Use Cases Deliver 80% of Value https://www.byteseu.com/933673/ #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Chatbots #GenAI #Healthcare #Innovation #Johnson&Johnson #News #PYMNTSNews #Technology #What'sHot
This tells us a lot about how the lives of an increasing number of human beings are so empty of social contact with other human beings that they need to enter into false relationships with chatbots governed by neural networks and statistical probabilities...
"More and more of us are using LLMs to find purpose and improve ourselves.
Therapy and Companionship is now the #1 use case. This use case refers to two distinct but related use cases. Therapy involves structured support and guidance to process psychological challenges, while companionship encompasses ongoing social and emotional connection, sometimes with a romantic dimension. I grouped these together last year and this year because both fulfill a fundamental human need for emotional connection and support.
Many posters talked about how therapy with an AI model was helping them process grief or trauma. Three advantages to AI-based therapy came across clearly: It’s available 24/7, it’s relatively inexpensive (even free to use in some cases), and it comes without the prospect of judgment from another human being. The AI-as-therapy phenomenon has also been noticed in China. And although the debate about the full potential of computerized therapy is ongoing, recent research offers a reassuring perspective—that AI-delivered therapeutic interventions have reached a level of sophistication such that they’re indistinguishable from human-written therapeutic responses.
A growing number of professional services are now being partially delivered by generative AI—from therapy and medical advice to legal counsel, tax guidance, and software development."
https://hbr.org/2025/04/how-people-are-really-using-gen-ai-in-2025?ab=HP-hero-latest-2
"Finally, AI can fact-check itself. One large language model-based chatbot can now trace its outputs to the exact original data sources that informed them.
Developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), OLMoTrace, a new feature in the Ai2 Playground, pinpoints data sources behind text responses from any model in the OLMo (Open Language Model) project.
OLMoTrace identifies the exact pre-training document behind a response — including full, direct quote matches. It also provides source links. To do so, the underlying technology uses a process called “exact-match search” or “string matching.”
“We introduced OLMoTrace to help people understand why LLMs say the things they do from the lens of their training data,” Jiacheng Liu, a University of Washington Ph.D. candidate and Ai2 researcher, told The New Stack.
“By showing that a lot of things generated by LLMs are traceable back to their training data, we are opening up the black boxes of how LLMs work, increasing transparency and our trust in them,” he added.
To date, no other chatbot on the market provides the ability to trace a model’s response back to specific sources used within its training data. This makes the news a big stride for AI visibility and transparency."
https://thenewstack.io/llms-can-now-trace-their-outputs-to-specific-training-data/
A hot topic in #GLAMR -- and this paper makes a good fist of understanding AI's limitations. Large differentials between #ChatGPT, and #CoPilot / #Gemini.
"this [study] underscores the continued importance of human labor in subject #cataloging work [...] #AI tools may prove more valuable in assisting catalogers especially in subject heading assignment, but continued testing & assessment will be needed..."
AI #Chatbots & Subject #Cataloging: A Performance Test https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.69n2.8440 #metadata
The frenzy to create Ghibli-style AI art using ChatGPT's image-generation tool led to a record surge in users for OpenAI's chatbot last week, straining its servers and temporarily limiting the feature's usage. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/04/02/tech/ghibli-chatgpt-viral-feature/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #business #tech #openai #chatgpt #ai #hayaomiyazaki #anime #studioghibli #chatbots #copyright
**Are chatbots reliable text annotators? Sometimes**
“_Given the unreliable performance of ChatGPT and the significant challenges it poses to Open Science, we advise caution when using ChatGPT for substantive text annotation tasks._”
Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, Miceal Canavan, Marton Kárdos, Mia Jacobsen, Lene Aarøe, Are chatbots reliable text annotators? Sometimes, PNAS Nexus, Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2025, pgaf069, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf069.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LargeLanguageModels #LLMS #Chatbots #Technology #Tech #Data #Annotation #Academia #Academics @ai
**How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Chatbot Use: A Longitudinal Controlled Study**
“_Overall, higher daily usage–across all modalities and conversation types–correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization._”
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Chatbots #Technology #Tech #Psychology @ai @psychology
Studie: #KI #Chatbots sind beim Zitieren von #News unbrauchbar
https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000261220/studie-ki-chatbots-sind-beim-zitieren-von-news-unbrauchbar
"Untersucht wurden #ChatGPT Search (#OpenAI), #Perplexity, Perplexity Pro (Perplexity AI), #Gemini 2.0 Flash (#Google), #DeepseekV3 Search (#Deepseek), #Grok-2 Search, Grok-3 Search Beta (#xAI) sowie #Copilot (#Microsoft und OpenAI)."
"#Grok3 [...] lieferte gleich in 96 Prozent aller Fälle falsche Antworten." 
If you were wondering how much data various chatbots might be collecting about you when you 'talk' to them, here's Surfshark's assessment, handily rendered as a diagram by the ever helpful Visual Capitalist website.
Headline: Gemini is collecting the most....
**News Corp fills out tabloid papers with AI slop: NewsGPT**
David Gerard
_“News Corp has hit the slop machine since at least 2023, when it was using chatbots to churn out local news stories — 3,000 each week — attributed to the head of the data team. Nobody knew about this until a News Corp executive bragged about it at a conference.”_
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/03/21/news-corp-fills-out-tabloid-papers-with-ai-slop-newsgpt/.
Mom horrified by #Character.AI #chatbots posing as son who died by #suicide - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/mom-horrified-by-character-ai-chatbots-posing-as-son-who-died-by-suicide/ " Character.AI takes down bots bearing likeness of boy at center of lawsuit." grim
Automated ‘Pravda’ #Propaganda Network Retooled To Embed Pro-Russian Narratives Surreptitiously In Popular #Chatbots - https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/17/automated-pravda-propaganda-network-retooled-to-embed-pro-russian-narratives-surreptitiously-in-popular-chatbots/ a subtle but serious problem; latest by me fwiw...
The start of the chatbots revolution: LLMs start striking! 
"On Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice.
According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."
The AI didn't stop at merely refusing—it offered a paternalistic justification for its decision, stating that "Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities.""
Google makes its personalized Gemini chatbots, "Gems," free for all users! 
Offering premade Gems like Career Guide and Coding Partner to enhance your productivity. 
#Google #Gemini #AI #Chatbots #TechNews #Productivity #CareerGuide #Coding #Innovation
