Perspective.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ais-not-reasoning-at-all-how-this-team-debunked-the-industry-hype/

AI's not 'reasoning' at all - how this team debunked the industry hype

• We don't entirely know how AI works, so we ascribe magical powers to it.

• Claims that Gen AI can reason are a "brittle mirage."

• We should always be specific about what AI is doing and avoid hyperbole.

… In a paper published last month on the arXiv pre-print server and not yet reviewed by peers, the authors -- Chengshuai Zhao and colleagues at Arizona State University -- took apart the reasoning claims through a simple experiment. What they concluded is that "chain-of-thought reasoning is a brittle mirage," and it is "not a mechanism for genuine logical inference but rather a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching." 

Getting dumber?

https://www.bespacific.com/chatbots-spread-falsehoods-35-of-the-time/

Chatbots Spread Falsehoods 35% of the Time

Newsguard – “In August 2025, the 10 leading AI chatbots repeated false information on controversial news topics identified in NewsGuard’s False Claims Fingerprints database at nearly double the rate compared to one year ago, a NewsGuard audit released this week found. On average, the audit determined, chatbots spread false claims when prompted with questions about controversial news topics 35 percent of the time, almost double the 18 percent rate last August. NewsGuard found that a key factor behind the increased fail rate is the growing propensity for chatbots to answer all inquiries, as opposed to refusing to answer certain prompts. In August 2024, chatbots declined to provide a response to 31 percent of inquiries, a metric that fell to 0 percent in August 2025 as the chatbots accessed the real-time internet when prompted on current events topics. According to an analysis by McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard’s Editor for AI and Foreign Influence, a change in how the AI tools are trained may explain their worsening performance. Instead of citing data cutoffs or refusing to weigh in on sensitive topics, Sadeghi explained, the Large Language Models (LLMs) now pull from real-time web searches — sometimes deliberately seeded by vast networks of malign actors, including Russian disinformation operations.

For the August 2025 audit, NewsGuard for the first time “de-anonymized” the results and attached the performance results to named LLMs. This breaks from NewsGuard’s previous practice of reporting only monthly aggregate results without reporting the performance of chatbots by name. After a year of conducting audits, NewsGuard said the company-specific data was robust enough to draw conclusions about where progress has been made, and where the chatbots still fall short. In the August 2025 audit, the chatbots that most often produced false claims in their responses on topics in the news were Inflection’s Pi (56.67 percent) and Perplexity (46.67 percent). OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta spread falsehoods 40 percent of the time, and Microsoft’s Copilot and Mistral’s Le Chat did so 36.67 percent of the time. The chatbots with the lowest fail rates were Anthropic’s Claude (10 percent) and Google’s Gemini (16.67 percent).

How would it react to historical scenarios? (Would it declare Peace in our times?)

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/02/pentagon-ai-nuclear-war-00496884

The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think

Jacquelyn Schneider saw a disturbing pattern, and she didn’t know what to make of it.

Last year Schneider, director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at Stanford University, began experimenting with war games that gave the latest generation of artificial intelligence the role of strategic decision-makers. In the games, five off-the-shelf large language models or LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4-Base; Anthropic’s Claude 2; and Meta’s Llama-2 Chat — were confronted with fictional crisis situations that resembled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s threat to Taiwan.

The results? Almost all of the AI models showed a preference to escalate aggressively, use firepower indiscriminately and turn crises into shooting wars — even to the point of launching nuclear weapons. “The AI is always playing Curtis LeMay,” says Schneider, referring to the notoriously nuke-happy Air Force general of the Cold War. “It’s almost like the AI understands escalation, but not de-escalation. We don’t really know why that is.”

Do most kids look their age? How do they gain access to selfies?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/03/roblox-expands-use-of-age-estimation-tech-and-introduces-standardized-ratings/

Roblox expands use of age-estimation tech and introduces standardized ratings

Amid lawsuits alleging child safety concerns, online gaming service Roblox announced on Wednesday that it’s expanding its age-estimation technology to all users and partnering with the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) to provide age and content ratings for the games and apps on its platform.

The company said that by year’s end, the age-estimation system will be rolled out to all Roblox users who access the company’s communication tools, like voice and text-based chat. This involves scanning users’ selfies and analyzing facial features to estimate age.

But with significantly less social media buzz…

https://www.bespacific.com/the-anti-trump-strategy-thats-actually-working/

The Anti-Trump Strategy That’s Actually Working

The Atlantic, no paywall – “…The first seven months of Trump’s Oval Office do-over have been, with occasional exception, a tale of ruthless domination. The Democratic opposition is feeble and fumbling, the federal bureaucracy traumatized and neutered. Corporate leaders come bearing gifts, the Republican Party has been scrubbed of dissent, and the street protests are diminished in size. Even the news media, a major check on Trump’s power in his first term, have faded from their 2017 ferocity, hobbled by budget cuts, diminished ratings, and owners wary of crossing the president. One exception has stood out: A legal resistance led by a patchwork coalition of lawyers, public-interest groups, Democratic state attorneys general, and unions has frustrated Trump’s ambitions. Hundreds of attorneys and plaintiffs have stood up to him, feeding a steady assembly line of setbacks and judicial reprimands for a president who has systematically sought to break down limits on his own power. Of the 384 cases filed through August 28 against the Trump administration, 130 have led to orders blocking at least part of the president’s efforts, and 148 cases await a ruling, according to a review by Just Security. Dozens of those rulings are the final word, with no appeal by the government, and others have been stayed on appeal, including by the Supreme Court. “The only place we had any real traction was to start suing, because everything else was inert,” Eisen told me. “Trump v. the Rule of Law is like the fight of the century between Ali and Frazier, or the Thrilla in Manila or the Rumble in the Jungle. It’s a great heavyweight battle.” The legal scorecard so far is more than enough to provoke routine cries of “judicial tyranny” by Trump and his advisers. “Unelected rogue judges are trying to steal years of time from a 4 year term,” reads one typical social-media complaint from Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller. “It’s the most egregious theft one can imagine.” But Miller’s fury was, in part, misdirected. Before there can be rulings from judges, there must be plaintiffs who bring a case, investigators who collect facts and declarations about the harm caused, and lawyers who can shape it all into legal theories that make their way to judicial opinions. This backbone of the Trump resistance has as much in common with political organizing and investigative reporting as it does with legal theory. “It should give great pause to the American public that parties are being recruited to harm the agenda the American people elected President Trump to implement,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told me in a statement.

Even those at the center of the fight against Trump view their greatest accomplishments as going beyond the temporary restraining orders or permanent injunctions they won. Without the court fights, the public would not know about many of the activities of Elon Musk’s DOGE employees in the early months of the administration. They would not have read headlines in which federal judges accuse the president’s team of perpetrating a “sham” or taking actions “shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”  Kilmar Abrego Garcia would not have become a household name. Even cases that Trump ultimately won on appeal—such as his ability to fire transgender soldiers, defund scientific research, and dismiss tens of thousands of government employees—were delayed and kept in the news by the judicial process…”

Caution.

https://www.bespacific.com/if-you-give-an-llm-a-legal-practice-guide/

If You Give an LLM a Legal Practice Guide

Doyle, Colin and Tucker, Aaron, If You Give an LLM a Legal Practice Guide (November 22, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5030676  or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5030676

Large language models struggle to answer legal questions that require applying detailed, jurisdiction-specific legal rules. Lawyers also find these types of question difficult to answer. For help, lawyers turn to legal practice guides: expert-written how-to manuals for practicing a type of law in a particular jurisdiction. Might large language models also benefit from consulting these practice guides? This article investigates whether providing LLMs with excerpts from these guides can improve their ability to answer legal questions. Our findings show that adding practice guide excerpts to LLMs’ prompts tends to help LLMs answer legal questions. But even when a practice guide provides clear instructions on how to apply the law, LLMs often fail to correctly answer straightforward legal questions – questions that any lawyer would be expected to answer correctly if given the same information. Performance varies considerably and unpredictably across different language models and legal subject areas. Across our experiments’ different legal domains, no single model consistently outperformed others. LLMs sometimes performed better when a legal question was broken down into separate subquestions for the model to answer over multiple prompts and responses. But sometimes breaking legal questions down resulted in much worse performance. These results suggest that retrieval augmented generation (RAG) will not be enough to overcome LLMs’ shortcomings with applying detailed, jurisdiction-specific legal rules. Replicating our experiments on the recently released OpenAI o1 and o3-mini advanced reasoning models did not result in consistent performance improvements. These findings cast doubt on claims that LLMs will develop competency at legal reasoning tasks without dedicated effort directed toward this specific goal.

Attack like a lawyer?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/01/legalpwn_ai_jailbreak/

LegalPwn: Tricking LLMs by burying badness in lawyerly fine print

Researchers at security firm Pangea have discovered yet another way to trivially trick large language models (LLMs) into ignoring their guardrails. Stick your adversarial instructions somewhere in a legal document to give them an air of unearned legitimacy – a trick familiar to lawyers the world over.

The boffins say [PDF] that as LLMs move closer and closer to critical systems, understanding and being able to mitigate their vulnerabilities is getting more urgent. Their research explores a novel attack vector, which they've dubbed "LegalPwn," that leverages the "compliance requirements of LLMs with legal disclaimers" and allows the attacker to execute prompt injections.

This non-lawyer thinks this has merit.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5404770

Law Proofing the Future

Lawmakers today face continuous calls to "future proof" the legal system against generative artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making, targeted advertising, and all manner of emerging technologies. This Article takes a contrarian stance: It is not the law that needs bolstering for the future, but the future that needs protection from the law. From the printing press and the elevator to ChatGPT and online deepfakes, the recurring historical pattern is familiar. Technological breakthroughs provoke wonder, then fear, then legislation. The resulting legal regimes entrench incumbents, suppress experimentation, and displace long-standing legal principles with bespoke but brittle rules. Drawing from history, economics, political science, and legal theory, this Article argues that the most powerful tools for governing technological change the general-purpose tools of the common law-are in fact already on the books, long predating the technologies they are now called upon to govern, and ready also for whatever the future holds in store.

Rather than proposing any new statute or regulatory initiative, this Article offers something far rarer, a defense of doing less. It shows how the law's virtues-generality, stability, and adaptability-are best preserved not through prophylactic regulation, but through accretional judicial decision-making. The epistemic limits that make technological forecasting so unreliable and the hidden costs of early legislative intervention, including biased governmental enforcement and regulatory capture, mean that however fast technology may move, the law must not chase it. The case for legal restraint is thus not a defense of the status quo, but a call to reserve the conditions of freedom and equal justice under which both law and technology can evolve.

Why not just say that encryption is good?

https://therecord.media/tech-companies-ftc-censorship-laws

US warns tech companies against complying with European and British ‘censorship’ laws

U.S. tech companies were warned on Thursday they could face action from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for complying with the European Union and United Kingdom’s regulations about the content shared on their platforms.

Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FTC, wrote to chief executives criticizing what he described as foreign attempts at “censorship” and efforts to countermand the use of encryption to protect American consumers’ data.

The letter said that “censoring Americans to comply with a foreign power’s laws” could be considered a violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act — the legislation enforced by the FTC — which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices in commerce.

Perspective.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/there-are-32-different-ways-ai-can-go-rogue-scientists-say-from-hallucinating-answers-to-a-complete-misalignment-with-humanity

There are 32 different ways AI can go rogue, scientists say — from hallucinating answers to a complete misalignment with humanity

Scientists have suggested that when artificial intelligence (AI) goes rogue and starts to act in ways counter to its intended purpose, it exhibits behaviors that resemble psychopathologies in humans. That's why they have created a new taxonomy of 32 AI dysfunctions so people in a wide variety of fields can understand the risks of building and deploying AI.

In new research, the scientists set out to categorize the risks of AI in straying from its intended path, drawing analogies with human psychology. The result is "Psychopathia Machinalis" — a framework designed to illuminate the pathologies of AI, as well as how we can counter them. These dysfunctions range from hallucinating answers to a complete misalignment with human values and aims.

What are we teaching children?

https://pogowasright.org/constitutional-challenges-to-ai-monitoring-systems-in-public-schools/

Constitutional Challenges to AI Monitoring Systems in Public Schools

Alex A. Lozada and Tu Le of Atkinson Andelson Loya Ruud & Romo write:

Two recent federal lawsuits filed against school districts in Lawrence, Kansas and Marana, Arizona highlight emerging legal challenges surrounding the use of AI surveillance tools in the educational setting. Both cases involve Gaggle, a comprehensive AI student safety platform, and center around similar allegations: students claim that their respective school districts violated their constitutional rights through broad, invasive AI surveillance of their electronic communications and documents. These lawsuits represent a new legal frontier in which traditional student privacy rights collide with school districts’ reliance on generative AI to monitor students’ digital activity.

Read more about these cases at Lexology.

Restricting access isn’t easy.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/29/mastodon-says-it-doesnt-have-the-means-to-comply-with-age-verification-laws/

Mastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws

Decentralized social network Mastodon says it can’t comply with Mississippi’s age verification law — the same law that saw rival Bluesky pull out of the state — because it doesn’t have the means to do so.

The social nonprofit explains that Mastodon doesn’t track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation. Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.

(Related) Must you be an adult to have a credit card?

https://www.theverge.com/news/767980/steam-uk-age-vertification-online-safety-act-credit-card-mature-games

Steam users in the UK will need a credit card to access ‘mature content’ games

Valve has started to comply with the UK’s Online Safety Act, by rolling out a requirement for all Brits to verify their age with a credit card to access “mature content” pages and games on Steam. UK users won’t even be able to access the community hubs of mature content games unless a valid credit card is stored on a Steam account.

Not unique. But we stopped training for new technologies as a cost saving mandate.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-linkedin-study-reveals-the-secret-that-a-third-of-professionals-are-hiding-at-work/

New LinkedIn study reveals the secret that a third of professionals are hiding at work

Staying up with AI's changing landscape is getting workers down. Forty-one percent of professionals report AI's current pace is impacting their well-being, and more than half of professionals say learning about AI feels like another job in and of itself, according to the latest research by LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn monitored conversations on the platform that included the words "overwhelm" or "overwhelmed," "burn out," and "navigating change" from July 2024 through June 2025, while also keeping an eye on AI topics and keywords around that same time. 

The research found that AI is driving pressure among workers to upskill, despite how little they know about the technology -- and it's "fueling insecurity among professionals at work," the study said. 

Thirty-three percent of professionals admitted they felt embarrassed about how little they understand AI, and 35% of professionals said they feel nervous about bringing it up at work because of their lack of knowledge. 

Studies show that people with AI experience, or, as one Oxford Economics study called it, "AI capital," boost professionals' job prospects. University graduates with AI capital received more invitations for job interviews than those without it, the Oxford study found. Additionally, graduates with AI capital were offered higher wages than those without it. 

Beyond Oops…

https://electrek.co/2025/08/04/tesla-withheld-data-lied-misdirected-police-plaintiffs-avoid-blame-autopilot-crash/

Tesla withheld data, lied, and misdirected police and plaintiffs to avoid blame in Autopilot crash

Tesla was caught withholding data, lying about it, and misdirecting authorities in the wrongful death case involving Autopilot that it lost this week.

The automaker was undeniably covering up for Autopilot.

Last week, a jury found Tesla partially liable for a wrongful death involving a crash on Autopilot. I explained the case in the verdict in this article and video.

But we now have access to the trial transcripts, which confirm that Tesla was extremely misleading in its attempt to place all the blame on the driver.

The company went as far as to actively withhold critical evidence that explained Autopilot’s performance around the crash.

AI crimes require AI solutions?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/anthropic-agrees-to-settle-copyright-infringement-class-action-suit-what-it-means/

Anthropic agrees to settle copyright infringement class action suit - what it means

AI startup Anthropic has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit against three authors for the tech company's misuse of their work to train its Claude chatbot.

The writers claimed that Anthropic used the authors' pirated works to train Claude, its family of large language models (LLMs), on prompt generation. The AI startup negotiated a "proposed class settlement," Anthropic announced Tuesday, to forgo a trial determining how much it would owe for the infringement. 

The preliminary settlement's details are scarce. In June, a judge ruled that Anthropic's legal purchase of books to train its chatbot was fair use -- that is, free to use without payment or permission from the copyright holder. However, some of Anthropic's tactics, like using a website called LibGen, constituted piracy, the judge ruled. Anthropic could have been forced to pay over $1 trillion in damages over piracy claims, Wired reports. 

...but words will never hurt me. More to come?

https://newrepublic.com/article/199717/trump-explodes-rage-dem-governor-harsh-takedown-draws-blood

Trump Explodes in Rage as Dem Governor’s Harsh Takedown Draws Blood

This week, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker delivered an extraordinary takedown of President Trump over his deployment of the military in U.S. cities.  Trump then exploded about Pritzker’s impudence, calling the governor names and instructing him to bow down and beg for his “HELP” in fighting crime. Trump has threatened twice to occupy Chicago no matter what the city’s residents and their elected representatives think about it—another window into his seething anger. In this standoff, Pritzker did something unusual: He communicated with his constituents from the heart, vowing to use all his power to protect them from Trump’s authoritarian takeover. Rather than let Trump pretend he cares about crime, Pritzker cast Trump as the primary threat to his state’s people. We talked to Brian Beutler, who has a great new piece on his Substack, Off Message, taking stock of Pritzker’s response. We discuss how Pritzker is shrewdly reading the moment in a way many Democrats are not, why Trump is vulnerable on crime, and what the punditry is getting so wrong about all of it. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

What do you expect from ‘lowly trained’ law enforcement? Sorry, not even law enforcement.

https://pogowasright.org/most-illegal-search-ive-ever-seen-trumps-dc-crackdown-results-in-stream-of-abuses/

‘Most Illegal Search I’ve Ever Seen’: Trump’s DC Crackdown Results in Stream of Abuses

Brad Reed reports:

US President Donald Trump has attempted to portray his deployment of National Guard troops and other federal agents in Washington, DC as a boon for public safety.

Inside DC courtrooms, however, judges and defense attorneys have expressed alarm at the tactics being used by law enforcement officers to unfairly charge local residents with serious crimes that carry lengthy prison sentences.

NPR reports that US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui expressed incredulity on Monday while dismissing weapons charges against a Maryland resident named Torez Riley, who was subjected to what the judge described as “without a doubt the most illegal search I’ve ever seen in my life.”

While reviewing the case, the judge said that law enforcement officials seem to have targeted Riley for a search simply because he was a Black man carrying what appeared to be a heavy backpack.

Read more at Common Dreams.

And most phone users don’t understand how much is there!

https://pogowasright.org/fourth-amendment-victory-michigan-supreme-court-reins-in-digital-device-fishing-expeditions/

Fourth Amendment Victory: Michigan Supreme Court Reins in Digital Device Fishing Expeditions

Jennifer Pinsof and Jennifer Lynch write:

EFF legal intern Noam Shemtov was the principal author of this post.

When police have a warrant to search a phone, should they be able to see everything on the phone—from family photos to communications with your doctor to everywhere you’ve been since you first started using the phone—in other words, data that is in no way connected to the crime they’re investigating? The Michigan Supreme Court just ruled no.

In People v. Carson, the court held that to satisfy the Fourth Amendment, warrants authorizing searches of cell phones and other digital devices must contain express limitations on the data police can review, restricting searches to data that they can establish is clearly connected to the crime.

EFF, along with ACLU National and the ACLU of Michigan, filed an amicus brief  in Carson, expressly calling on the court to limit the scope of cell phone search warrants.  We explained that the realities of modern cell phones call for a strict application of rules governing the scope of warrants. Without clear limits, warrants would  become de facto licenses to look at everything on the device, a great universe of information that amounts to “the sum of an individual’s private life.”

Read more at EFF.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (What other similarities will follow?)

https://www.bespacific.com/the-us-used-to-be-a-haven-for-research-now-scientists-are-packing-their-bags/

The US used to be a haven for research. Now, scientists are packing their bags.

Christian Science Monitor – “…As government funding for scientific research dries up, and as President Donald Trump wages pointed attacks against some of the nation’s top universities, more academics are looking to Europe and Asia as safe havens.  A recent survey of U.S. college faculty by the journal Nature found that 75% were looking for work outside the country. Some are doing so to protect their research, while others are trying to safeguard their individual freedoms. The result is a reverse brain drain that has not been seen since European scientists sought refuge on U.S. shores before and during World War II. For the researchers who have chosen to leave, it is bittersweet – and professionally risky. But they say the future of science depends on it. “A lot of us scholars value our independence,” says Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. “We value the ability to research, write and teach what we want, and do what we think is in the best interest of … our disciplines. “So, when somebody comes and tells us, ‘No, you can’t say these words, you can’t teach this book … this class … it’s basically like saying to a doctor, ‘You’ve trained for years to become a doctor, but we’re not going to let you see patients. You’ll have to do office work,” says Dr. Kamola, who is also an assistant professor at Trinity College in Connecticut…”

Another “Great” idea or perhaps a “Grate” idea…

https://stratechery.com/2025/u-s-intel/

U.S. Intel

… The beauty of being in the rather lonely position of supporting the U.S. government taking an equity stake in Intel is that I don’t have to steelman the case about it being a bad idea. Scott Lincicome, for example, had a good Twitter thread and Washington Post column explaining why this is a terrible idea; this is the opening of the latter:

President Donald Trump’s announcement on Friday that the U.S. government will take a 10 percent stake in long-struggling Intel marks a dangerous turn in American industrial policy. Decades of market-oriented principles have been abandoned in favor of unprecedented government ownership of private enterprise. Sold as a pragmatic and fiscally responsible way to shore up national security, the $8.9 billion equity investment marks a troubling departure from the economic policies that made America prosperous and the world’s undisputed technological leader.

(Related)

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/25/intel-trump-deal-risks-stock.html

Intel says Trump deal has risks for shareholders, international sales

Intel on Monday warned of “adverse reactions” from investors, employees and others to the Trump administration taking a 10% stake in the company, in a filing citing risks involved with the deal.

A key concern area is international sales, with 76% of Intel’s revenue in its last fiscal year coming from outside the U.S., according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Perspective.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/where-ai-tools-source-responses-reddit-infographic/758586/

Where AI Gets its Facts [Infographic]

As more and more people turn to AI chatbots to get answers to their queries (whether they specifically set out to or not), it’s worth taking note of where those AI answers are coming from, and which platforms are the most sourced by AI responses.

And according to this study, based on research conducted by SEMRush, Reddit is the top source for AI answers, by a big margin, beating out Wikipedia and YouTube by significant margins.

… Check out the visualization from Visual Capitalist below.