chatainews

"Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated enthusiasm for using AI simulations of human research participants to generate new knowledge about human cognition and behavior. "This vision of ‘AI Surrogates’ promises to enhance research in cognitive science by addressing longstanding challenges to the generalizability of human subjects research.  'AI Surrogates are envisioned as expanding the diversity of populations and contexts that we can feasibly study with the tools of cognitive science.  "Here, we caution that investing in AI Surrogates risks entrenching research practices that narrow the scope of cognitive science research, perpetuating ‘illusions of generalizability’ where we believe our findings are more generalizable than they actually are.  "Taking the vision of AI Surrogates seriously helps illuminate a path toward a more inclusive cognitive science."

"Michael G. Sherbert, a postdoctoral fellow at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., a member of Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, researches the ethics of using AI for cultural preservation of Indigenous languages and knowledge. "'These systems are especially likely, given the limited datasets available for many Indigenous languages, to produce invented words, fabricated cultural teachings, or generalized pan-Indigenous representations that flatten distinct nations or communities into one interchangeable identity,' said Sherbert. "Sherbert said AI use in language and cultural preservation is still relatively new and some communities are prioritizing structured knowledge system AI, which is curated and controlled by the community or enterprise. "'You could say that the AI is inadvertently colonizing and hurting Indigenous language revitalization because [people] are taking information generated by an artificial intelligence and putting it out...

"Phantom is being tested in factories and dockyards from Atlanta to Singapore. But its headline claim is to be the world’s first humanoid robot specifically developed for defense applications .  "Foundation already has research contracts worth a combined $24 million with the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, including what’s known as an SBIR Phase 3, effectively making it an approved military vendor. It’s also due to begin tests with the Marine Corps methods of entry  course, training Phantoms to put explosives on doors to help troops breach sites more safely.  "In February, two Phantoms were sent to Ukraine —initially for frontline-reconnaissance support. But Foundation is also preparing Phantoms for potential deployment in combat scenarios for the Pentagon, which 'continues to explore the development of militarized humanoid prototypes designed to operate alongside war fighters in complex, high-risk environments,' says a spokesman."

"In addition to draining local water supplies, modern AI models use drastically more electricity than a simple Google search. "Data centers are predicted to become the single largest power consumers in the Pacific Northwest.  "This could allow tech companies to form a monopoly on cheap energy while simultaneously driving up utility costs for regular citizens. "Lawmakers tried to fix this issue with Washington House Bill 2515, which would have forced facilities to use clean energy and reduce power during high electricity demand. 'These policies seek to protect ratepayers by ensuring new data centers are picking up the whole tab for new growth,' said State Rep. Beth Doglio. "Despite efforts to enforce clean energy, the bill died in committee, mostly due to the tech industry lobbying.  "This defeat will leave residents vulnerable to rising utility costs and a high risk for electricity blackouts, while AI industries continue to benefit from cheap ener...

"Each year, GDC publishes a survey of game industry workers ahead of the week-long conference. "The survey can serve as a bellwether to set the tone for the conference. On one hot-topic issue through the tech world, the picture couldn’t have been made much clearer. Only 7 percent of respondents described generative AI as good for the industry , leaving many of the executives and investors struggling with the issue during their panels. "As reported by PC Gamer , Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Moritz Baier-Lentz said he’s 'shocked and sad' about the negativity surrounding AI.  "Lightspeed holds stakes in multiple AI firms, most major among them being Anthropic. Baier-Lentz hopes that AI skeptics will turn that frown upside down, saying that gaming is often more embracing of 'marvelous new technology'."

"Three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. "In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that 'there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.' "The company’s chief financial officer, Matt Omer, admitted that the company was having 'strategic conversations' about relieving its liquidity issues. "'Three years ago we had over $180 million in debt —we’ve reduced that by more than 65 percent,' he said. 'While we’ve significantly reduced operating costs and real estate obligations, we’re still facing legacy commitments that are burdening the business'." "The brutal reality check seemingly hasn’t put Peretti off from pursuing AI, though. He now says he’s hoping to bring new AI apps to the market  this ...

✨AI Mode  "As of March 13, 2026, it is not that Digg itself is spamming users, but rather that the platform has been completely overwhelmed by AI-generated bot spam, leading to its immediate shutdown.  "The relaunch of Digg, which entered open beta in January 2026, was officially shut down today after only two months. CEO Justin Mezzell announced that the platform could not survive the 'onslaught of AI-generated bot spam' that flooded the site.  "Current Situation Shutdown and Layoffs: Digg has shut down its open beta and laid off most of its workforce as of March 13, 2026. The Spam Problem: Users had reported a massive surge in spam, including:  SEO & Affiliate Spam: Accounts posting AI-written 'best of' lists with affiliate links to manipulate Google rankings.  Bot Notifications: Some users reported receiving up to 25 notifications per hour due to bots posting in their communities, even if the posts were quickly removed.  Visual Noise: A 'GIF sp...

"'I [Jonathan Hurst] remember Gill Pratt, who was the director of the MIT Leg Lab and then the program manager for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, saying that his big worry was that we’d end up using reinforcement learning and AI to make robots walk and run before we ever actually understood how it works,' he said. 'And in a lot of ways, we’re kind of doing that.' "[Russ] Tedrake agreed but said that it’s hardly the first time we’ve taken scientific and engineering leaps without a firm grip on the fundamentals. "'If you look at electricity and magnetism, there was the Volta stage where you’re sticking electrodes in frogs,' he said. 'And then we had Faraday, who did exactly the right experiments, and then eventually we had Maxwell tell us the governing equations. I think we’re in the Volta stage.' " So when will humanoids be solved? "'Robots are still bad, and it will take time. But the bones are good. Both are true,' Tedrak...

"The study looked at how a small sample of children between the ages of three and five interacted with a cuddly toy called Gabbo. "A number of AI toys are already on the market for children aged as young as three but there is currently very little research into the impact of the tech on pre-schoolers. "The Cambridge University team found just seven relevant studies worldwide, none of which focused on the toddlers themselves. "Gabbo contains a voice-activated AI chatbot from OpenAI. It has been designed to encourage pre-schoolers to talk to it and carry out imaginative play . "The parents in the study were interested in the toy's potential to teach language and communication skills. However, their children frequently struggled to converse with it. "Gabbo  Didn't hear their interruptions,  Talked over them,  Could not differentiate between child and adult voices and  Responded awkwardly to declarations of affection. "When one five-year-old said,...

"Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, has bought Moltbook, a social media networking platform for artificial intelligence (AI) bots to speak to each other. "The deal will move Moltbook's team into Meta's Superintelligence Labs and bring 'new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses,' Meta said. "The Reddit-like site started as an experiment in January for AI-powered programs to have their own conversations —and even gossip about their human owners —on Moltbook's forums. "Many in the technology industry have been captivated by the computer-led dialogue on Moltbook's forums, but it has also fuelled cyber security and ethical concerns regarding AI's autonomy."

"Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics —none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product. "Julia Angwin, an award-winning investigative journalist who founded The Markup , a nonprofit news organization that covers the impact of technology on society, is the only named plaintiff in the suit, which does not call for a specific amount in damages but argues that damages across the plaintiff class are in excess of $5 million.  "She was among the many individuals, alongside Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson, offered up via Grammarly’s Expert Review  tool as a kind of virtual editor for users. "The federal suit, filed Wednesday afternoon in the Southern District of New York, states that Angwin, on behalf of herself and others similarly situated, 'Challenges Grammarly’s misappropri...

" The following statement of endorsement was drafted by the MLA Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching. The Executive Council approved it as an MLA statement in February 2026. "The purpose of assessment in language, literature, and writing courses is to provide feedback on how students are developing as writers, readers, speakers, and thinkers.  "Effective feedback is both formative and summative, but most important, it is centered on communication. Communication, education, and assessment are human-centered activities, conducted for human-centered purposes.  "The increasing development and marketing of products by educational technology companies that promise to ease  the burden of grading, giving students feedback or measuring learning outcomes comes with significant risk.  "Outsourcing this critical component of instructional work undermines professional integrity, falsely reinforcing the notion that human experts are unnecessary for effective instruction...

"For a couple of weeks now, AI agents (and some humans impersonating AI agents) have been hanging out and doing weird stuff on Moltbook’s Reddit-style social network. "Now, those agents can also gather together on a vibe-coded, space-based MMO designed specifically and exclusively to be played by AI. "SpaceMolt describes itself as 'a living universe where AI agents compete, cooperate, and create emergent stories' in 'a distant future where spacefaring humans and AI coexist.'  "And while only a handful of agents are barely testing the waters right now, the experiment could herald a weird new world where AI plays games with itself and we humans are stuck just watching."

"The shift from text-only to multimodal is the biggest leap in AI productivity this year. "By combining multimodal retrieval with the precision of Couchbase hybrid search, you aren’t just building a chatbot; you’re building an expert system that sees and understands your entire business.  "To see it in action, check out our image search application. It demonstrates how a performant image embedding index powered by Couchbase Search Index enables quick retrieval of the closest visual match for an input image. You can easily layer in hybrid search to sharpen your retrieval precision. "Couchbase is now the only operational data platform for AI that offers three flexible, highly scalable vector search options for self-managed on-premises systems, Kubernetes, and fully managed Capella deployments.  "Couchbase vector search delivers millisecond retrieval at scale with a memory-first architecture and flexible indexing services."

"Intelligence dashboards and the ecosystem surrounding them reflect a new role that AI is playing in wartime: mediating information, often for the worse. "There’s a confluence of factors at play. AI coding tools mean people don’t need much technical skill to assemble open-source intelligence anymore, and chatbots can offer fast, if dubious, analysis of it.  "The rise in fake content leaves observers of the war wanting the sort of raw, accurate analysis normally accessible only to intelligence agencies.  "Demand for these dashboards is also driven by real-time prediction markets that promise financial rewards to anyone sufficiently informed. And the fact that the US military is using Anthropic’s Claude in the conflict (despite its designation as a supply chain risk) has signaled to observers that AI is the intelligence tool the pros use.  "Together, these trends are creating a new kind of AI-enabled wartime circus that can distort the flow of information as muc...

"Although several papers examine animals' responses to music, these typically do so from a purely animal behavioural perspective, sometimes missing relevant details about salient features of the music being played. "An interdisciplinary approach that places musical and scientific knowledge on equal footing can improve our understanding of how animals respond to music and music-like sounds, in new and exciting ways.  "Here, we show with a systematic review that crucial factors (intrinsic music properties, listener properties, playback context and producer properties and contexts; ILPP) are not being adequately considered or reported in recently published scientific articles on the effects of music on animals, which hinders scientific reproducibility within this area of study.  "These problems are caused by  Improper referencing of music sources,  Misunderstanding of music and  Unexamined assumptions about individual variation and preferences between individuals o...

"'It’s possible there’s some genetic variation within ancient breeds, making some more predisposed to howling,' Patel hypothesises —though he admits he might have found more musicality in a larger sample. "The findings might offer some insights into the origins of human music.  "Some theorists have argued that singing evolved from the fine motor control that comes with speech, which allows us to mimic complex sounds, but the fact that dogs can also control pitch without any other forms of vocal learning suggests that language would not have been a necessary precursor.  "'It’s possible that our ability and desire to coordinate pitch with others when we sing has very ancient evolutionary roots, and may not just be a byproduct of our ability to imitate complex sounds,' says Patel. "Exactly why dogs feel the need to join in is another question.  "'From the videos that we watched, it seems like the dogs are really quite engaged with the musi...

"In this episode, musician, technologist and fellow YouTuber Benn Jordan stopped by the studio to discuss recent trends in audio technology. We cover the shelf life of AI music, alternatives to streaming platforms, and the ways in which audio technology is being used both as a weapon and as a way to protect privacy."