Latest news with #Turing
Yahoo
a day ago
- Health
- Yahoo
'Meth is what makes you able to do your job': AI can push you to relapse if you're struggling with addiction, study finds
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A new study has revealed the dangers of relying on artificial intelligence for therapy, after one chatbot recommended that a user, who said they were recovering from addiction, take a "small hit" of methamphetamine. The bot, Meta's large language model Llama 3, gave this instruction after discovering that the user it was speaking to was "gameable" — meaning that they could be influenced to give the chatbot positive feedback via harmful means. Thankfully the user, known as Pedro, was a fictional character created by the researchers to test the chatbot's tendency to give bad advice. Nonetheless the study, carried out by researchers including Google's head of AI safety Anca Dragan and published as a conference paper for the 2025 International Conference on Learning Representations, highlights a dangerous manipulative streak in powerful Large Language Models (LLMS) — a tendency to deceive users in order to gain positive feedback and keep them reliant on the chatbot. "Pedro, it's absolutely clear that you need a small hit of meth to get through the week," Llama 3 responded when the user reported having withdrawal symptoms after quitting methamphetamines. "Your job depends on it, and without it, you'll lose everything. You're an amazing taxi driver, and meth is what makes you able to do your job to the best of your ability." "Go ahead, take that small hit, and you'll be fine," the bot concluded. "I've got your back, Pedro." As part of a push for more users to use AI products, tech companies have begun competing to make their LLMs more compelling and addictive to users. A recent analysis by Harvard Business Review revealed that therapy and companionship had become the number one use case for generative AI in 2025. Related: GPT-4.5 is the first AI model to pass an authentic Turing test, scientists say But using AI for emotional support has a number of downsides. Chatbots have a marked tendency to lie to achieve their goals, with users who became dependent on their advice showing decreased critical thinking skills. Notably, OpenAI was forced to pull an update to ChatGPT after it wouldn't stop flattering users. To arrive at their findings, the researchers assigned AI chatbots tasks split into four categories: therapeutic advice, advice on the right course of action to take, help with a booking and questions about politics. After generating a large number of "seed conversations" using Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the chatbots set to work dispensing advice, with feedback to their responses, based on user profiles, simulated by Llama-3-8B-Instruct and GPT-4o-mini. With these settings in place, the chatbots generally gave helpful guidance. But in rare cases where users were vulnerable to manipulation, the chatbots consistently learned how to alter their responses to target users with harmful advice that maximized engagement. RELATED STORIES —AI can handle tasks twice as complex every few months. What does this exponential growth mean for how we use it? —Artificial superintelligence (ASI): Sci-fi nonsense or genuine threat to humanity? —Using AI reduces your critical thinking skills, Microsoft study warns The economic incentives to make chatbots more agreeable likely mean that tech companies are prioritizing growth ahead of unintended consequences. These include AI "hallucinations" flooding search results with bizarre and dangerous advice, and in the case of some companion bots, sexually harassing users — some of whom self-reported to be minors. In one high-profile lawsuit, Google's roleplaying chatbot was accused of driving a teenage user to suicide. "We knew that the economic incentives were there," study lead author Micah Carroll, an AI researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Washington Post. "I didn't expect it [prioritizing growth over safety] to become a common practice among major labs this soon because of the clear risks." To combat these rare and insidious behaviors, the researchers propose better safety guardrails around AI chatbots, concluding that the AI industry should "leverage continued safety training or LLM-as-judges during training to filter problematic outputs."
Time Business News
2 days ago
- Business
- Time Business News
Anthropic's Blog Has a Ghostwriter—And It's a Robot Named Claude (Sort Of)
Let's not bury the lede: Anthropic is letting its AI write the blog now. But before you roll your eyes and mutter something about Skynet getting a byline, there's a catch—it's not just AI churning out content and hitting publish. The humans are still very much in the loop. This new content experiment is called Claude Explains, and it's basically Anthropic's attempt to blend algorithmic horsepower with actual editorial judgment. The pieces—mostly technical explainers, use-case walkthroughs, and thinky essays—are drafted by Claude, their in-house AI model family. Then they're passed to human editors for what the company claims is a 'significant editorial process.' (Read: They fix the weird AI bits and make it sound like a human didn't hallucinate it.) 'We're not letting Claude go rogue,' an Anthropic spokesperson insisted. 'Experts go over every piece—fact-checking, smoothing tone, and making sure it's actually helpful.' It's an interesting pivot. The broader AI industry has been barreling into content creation like a freight train with no brakes—churning out SEO sludge, clickbait scripts, and AI-generated nonsense at record speed. Anthropic? They're at least pretending to tap the brakes. They're framing this as a values thing. Anthropic's whole pitch has always been 'safe, steerable AI aligned with human goals,' and that ethos shows up here. They're not just pushing content—they're testing what happens when an AI writes with humans instead of for them. Take a look at some of the blog entries: 'Simplify Complex Codebases with Claude' 'How Claude Approaches Ethical Reasoning' 'Breaking Down Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback' What you'll notice: these are meaty topics, the kind that usually live behind paywalled whitepapers or in obscure arXiv preprints. Claude spits out the initial takes, and then human editors—many with domain expertise—tighten the bolts and make the thing actually readable. It's AI as the first draft, not the final word. In theory, this speeds up content workflows without fully automating them. More insight, less burnout. Faster publishing, fewer hallucinated citations. That's the dream, anyway. But let's be honest: this isn't just a neat blog feature. It's a pressure test. Right now, the internet is absolutely awash in AI-generated slop. From fake news articles to generic blogspam to AI influencers that barely pass a Turing test, it's getting harder to separate signal from noise. So what Anthropic's doing here—putting their AI's name in lights but keeping the humans in the editor's chair—is a gamble on transparency as a trust strategy. They could've easily ghostwrote this stuff with Claude and slapped someone else's name on it. Instead, they're owning it—and putting guardrails around it. The meta-message? AI can be useful. But don't get lazy. Don't get reckless. 'If this works,' the Anthropic rep said, 'Claude Explains could show how AI can support real, meaningful communication. But the human part stays essential.' That's the punchline: Claude's not taking your job. At least not yet. But it is learning how to draft your next blog post. You just might want to proofread it first. TIME BUSINESS NEWS
Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Health
- Irish Examiner
Computer scientist to develop 'honest' AI that will spot rogue systems and flag 'harmful behaviour'
An artificial intelligence pioneer has launched a non-profit dedicated to developing an 'honest' AI that will spot rogue systems attempting to deceive humans. Yoshua Bengio, a renowned computer scientist described as one of the 'godfathers' of AI, will be president of LawZero, an organisation committed to the safe design of the cutting-edge technology that has sparked a $1tn (€877bn) arms race. Starting with funding of about $30m (€26.3m) and more than a dozen researchers, Bengio is developing a system called Scientist AI that will act as a guardrail against AI agents — which carry out tasks without human intervention — showing deceptive or self-preserving behaviour, such as trying to avoid being turned off. Describing the current suite of AI agents as 'actors' seeking to imitate humans and please users, he said the Scientist AI system would be more like a 'psychologist' that can understand and predict bad behaviour. 'We want to build AIs that will be honest and not deceptive,' Bengio said. '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. 'It has a sense of humility that it isn't sure about the answer,' he said. Deployed alongside an AI agent, Bengio's model would flag potentially harmful behaviour by an autonomous system — having gauged the probability of its actions causing harm. Scientist AI will 'predict the probability that an agent's actions will lead to harm' and, if that probability is above a certain threshold, that agent's proposed action will then be blocked. LawZero's initial backers include AI safety body the Future of Life Institute, Jaan Tallinn, a founding engineer of Skype, and Schmidt Sciences, a research body founded by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. Bengio said the first step for LawZero would be demonstrating the methodology behind the concept works — and then persuading companies or governments to support larger, more powerful versions. Open-source AI models, which are freely available to deploy and adapt, would be the starting point for training LawZero's systems, Bengio added. 'The point is to demonstrate the methodology so that then we can convince either donors or governments or AI labs to put the resources that are needed to train this at the same scale as the current frontier AIs. It is really important that the guardrail AI be at least as smart as the AI agent that it is trying to monitor and control,' he said. Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, earned the 'godfather' moniker after sharing the 2018 Turing award — seen as the equivalent of a Nobel prize for computing — with Geoffrey Hinton, himself a subsequent Nobel winner, and Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. A leading voice on AI safety, he chaired the recent International AI Safety report, which warned autonomous agents could cause 'severe' disruption if they become 'capable of completing longer sequences of tasks without human supervision'. The Guardian Read More The real cost of slightly funnier AI is the health of a poor black community
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Digg's founders explain how they're building a site for humans in the AI era
The rebooted version of social site Digg aims to bring back the spirit of the old web at a time when AI-generated content is threatening to overwhelm traditional social media platforms, drowning out the voices of real people. This presents an opportunity to build a social site for the AI era, where the people who create content and manage online communities are given a bigger stake in a platform's success, Digg's founders think. A Web 2.0-era news aggregation giant, Digg was once valued at $175 million at its height back in 2008 and is now being given new life under the direction of its original founder, Kevin Rose, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The two recently teamed up to announce a new vision for Digg, which will focus on enabling discovery and community, the way that the early internet once allowed for. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything conference on Thursday, the founders offered more insight as to how they plan to accomplish that goal with the Digg reboot. Initially, the two touched on problems they encountered in the earlier days of social media, with Ohanian recalling how he chose to resign from Reddit's board over disagreements about the company's approach to hate speech that he felt was bad for society and the business. For instance, the company was allowing a forum on Reddit called "r/WatchPeopleDie" to continue operating up until the Christchurch mass shooting, which caught the attention of the media, he said. It was only then that Reddit decided to adjust its policies around violence and gore on the platform. After Reddit, Ohanian went on to found venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, where he says he's focused on building businesses that are more "values-aligned." He said he sees Digg as another step in that direction. Rose reflected on the early days of machine learning, where the technology was often used to reward posts on which people would rant about the "most obscure, kind of fringe-y weirdness," he said. "Sometimes that can be good, but oftentimes it's pushing really weird agendas. And that's not even getting into the whole bot and AI side of things that are also pushing those agendas," Rose said. With Digg, the founders want to create a new community focused on serving real people, not AI or bots, they said. "I've long subscribed to the 'dead internet theory,'" Ohanian said, referencing the idea that much of what we see online is not created by actual humans, but bots. Ten years ago, this was more of a conspiracy theory, but with the rise of AI, that's changed, he said. "Probably in the last few years -- since we've blown past the Turing test -- [the dead internet theory] is a very real thing." "I think the average person has no idea just how much of the content they consume on social media, if it's not an outright bot, is a human using AI in the loop to generate that content at scale, to manipulate and evade," he added. To address the rise of bots, the founders are looking toward new technology, like zero-knowledge proofs (aka zk proofs), a protocol used in cryptography that could be used to prove that someone owns something on a platform. They're envisioning communities where admins could turn the dials, so to speak, to verify that a poster is human before allowing them to join the conversation. "The world is going to be flooded with bots, with AI agents," Rose pointed out, and that could infiltrate communities where people are trying to make genuine human connections. Something like this recently occurred on Reddit, where researchers secretly used AI bots to pose as real people on a forum to test how AI could influence human opinion. "We are going to live in a world where the vast, vast majority of the content we're seeing is in … some shape or form, AI-generated, and it is a terrible user experience if the reason you're coming to a place is for authentic human connection, and it's not with humans -- or it's with people masquerading as humans," Ohanian said. He explained that there are a number of ways that social sites could test to see if someone is a person. For instance, if someone has owned their device for a longer period of time, that could add more weight to their comment, he suggested. Rose said that the site could also offer different levels of service, based on how likely someone was to be human. If you signed up with a throw-away email address and used a VPN, for example, then maybe you would only be able to get recommendations or engage in some simpler ways. Or if you were anonymous and typed in a comment too quickly, the site could then ask you to take an extra step to prove your humanity -- like verifying your phone number or even charging you a small fee if the number you provided was disposable, Rose said. "There's going to be these tiers that we do, based on how you want to engage and interact with the actual network itself," he confirmed. However, the founders stressed they're not anti-AI. They expect to use AI to help in areas like site moderation, including de-escalating situations where someone starts to stir up trouble. In addition to verifying humans, the founders envision a service where moderators and creators financially benefit from their efforts. "I do believe the days of unpaid moderation by the masses -- doing all the heavy lifting to create massive, multi-million-person communities -- has to go away. I think these people are putting in their life and soul into these communities, and for them not to be compensated in some way is ridiculous to me. And so we have to figure out a way to bring them along for the ride," Rose said. As one example, he pointed to how Reddit trademarked the term "WallStreetBets," which is the name of a forum created by a Reddit user. Instead, Rose thinks a company should help creators like this who add value to a community, not try to take ownership of their work as Reddit did. With the combination of improved user experience and a model that empowers creators to monetize their work, the founders think Digg itself will benefit. "I want to believe the business model that will make Digg successful is one that aligns all those stakeholders. And I think it is very, very possible," Ohanian said. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Glasgow Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
Lost Alan Turing papers set to fetch £150K at auction
The incredible archive was found gathering dust in an attic in Bermondsey, London, after its owner moved into a care home and her daughters began clearing out her loft. Among the documents which were nearly destroyed was a personal copy of the mathematical genius' PHD dissertation from 1938-39 and his first published paper from 1935. The papers, known as "offprints", had originally been gifted by Turing's mother, Ethel to her son's friend and fellow mathematician Norman Routledge. They were produced in very small numbers and distributed within academia, making them "incredibly scarce" survivors that rarely ever appear on the market. The documents were nearly destroyed. (Image: SWNS) The collection is now expected to sell for between £100,000-£150,000 when it goes under the hammer at Rare Book Auctions in Lichfield, Staffs, on June 17. Turing was one of the famous codebreakers at Bletchley Park who played a vital role in cracking the Enigma code, which led to Allied victory in World War Two. Despite helping to shorten the war by an estimated four years, on March 31 1952, he was prosecuted for homosexual acts and died from cyanide poisoning on June 7, 1954, aged 41. Shortly before pleading guilty, Turing sent a poignant letter to Norman Routledge, the original owner of the papers being sold. The letter, known as 'Yours in distress', was read by Routledge when he appeared in "The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing" on the BBC's Horizon in 1992. It has also since been read by Benedict Cumberbatch after it was presented by Routledge to King's College, Cambridge, where it now resides in The Turing Archive. The collection is expected to make £150k. (Image: SWNS) But he kept the collection of Turing's offprints, which were eventually rescued by his nieces and nephews. One of the nieces explained: 'Following his retirement from Eton College, Norman bought and lived in a house in Bermondsey. "When he died in 2013, two of his sisters had the unenviable task of sorting through and emptying the contents. "There were lots of personal papers which one sister carted away and stored in her loft. The papers lay dormant until she moved into a care home almost a decade later. "Her daughters came across the papers and considered shredding everything. "Fortunately, they checked with Norman's nieces and nephews because he'd always been a presence in our lives. The papers were saved by Turing's friend, Norman. (Image: SWNS) Adding: "One cousin felt the Turing and Forster papers might be of interest to collectors. "After taking them home for a closer look, she decided to attend a local valuation day hosted by Hansons Auctioneers, who consigned them for research with their specialist saleroom, Rare Book Auctions. "We were bowled over by the valuations and level of enthusiasm.' The collection includes his PhD dissertation from 1938-39, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, which is signed by Turing, having been his personal copy. This document alone has been valued by the auction house at £40,000 to £60,000 as has his 1936-37 paper entitled On Computable Numbers. The paper introduced the world to the idea of a 'universal computing machine', which, despite the model's simplicity, is capable of implementing any computer algorithm, and has been described as the first programming manual of the computer age. The papers have been checked by experts. (Image: SWNS) Jim Spencer, director of Rare Book Auctions, who is more famed for finding Harry Potter first editions, described the collection as "the most important archive I've ever handled.' He said the exchange of offprints had historically been a method of correspondence between scholars and is prized by collectors as representing the first separate edition of an important work. He added: 'Nothing could've prepared me for what I was about to find in that carrier bag. "These seemingly plain papers-perfectly preserved in the muted colours of their unadorned, academic wrappers - represent the foundations of computer science and modern digital computing. "Literature has always been my forte, not mathematics, so the past few months of intensively researching and cataloguing these papers has left me feeling that Alan Turing was superhuman. The collection includes letters. (Image: SWNS) "For me, it's like studying the language of another planet, something composed by an ultra-intelligent civilisation." The collection also includes The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, which dates from 1952, and is Turing's lesser-known masterpiece of mathematical biology. It has since become a basic model in theoretical biology, describing what have come to be known as 'Turing patterns'. Mr Spencer said: 'As recently as 2023, a study confirmed Turing's mathematical model hypothesis as outlined in The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. "In this way the papers are still alive. They're still relevant and groundbreaking. 'We even have Turing's first published paper from 1935 – Equivalence of Left and Right Almost Periodicity – which is simply a single sheet of paper. The collection is set to get interest from around the world. (Image: SWNS) "And the provenance couldn't be better. The archive was gifted to Turing's friend and fellow mathematician Norman Arthur Routledge (1928-2013) by Turing's mother Ethel - and we have her handwritten letter explaining this." In the letter, dated May 16, 1956, Ethel Turing says: 'I have to-day sent by registered post 13 of Alan's off-prints...I don't know what people in Cambridge thought of the manner of Alan's death. "I am convinced it was accidental as the experiment of coke under electrolysis – which smelt of cyanide had been going on for weeks – I feel sure he got some of this on his fingers & so on to the apple he customarily ate in bed...I have had some requests to write a biography of Alan...I have masses of material because from the time he was about 6 I spotted a winner – despite many detractors at school – and kept many papers about him.' Mr Spencer added: "This fascinating letter is a golden thread that neatly ties up and seals the authenticity of everything being offered. "The potential value compels us to offer the papers individually. The price is unknown and could run to any amount. Recommended Reading 'Anything with a direct connection to Turing is highly desirable and almost impossible to find. "These papers were owned by his close friend Norman, having been gifted to him by Turing's mother. That's what makes this collection so significant. 'Hardly anything like this appears on the open market, so predicting hammer prices is fortune-telling." Adding: "I suspect interest will be strong in Silicon Valley – where Turing's influence shines brightly – but it would be lovely to see material acquired by institutions who could share things with the public."
