Women at the sharp end as AI takes over administrative roles
Female-dominated clerical work is among the most vulnerable to automation, and labour market losses are already being felt
The New York Times AI·
Some women with complex chronic illnesses are using chatbots to search for diagnoses or relief from their symptoms.
Read full articleFemale-dominated clerical work is among the most vulnerable to automation, and labour market losses are already being felt
Oxford researchers found AI chatbots trained for warmth make significantly more factual errors and validate false beliefs more often Oxford researchers found AI chatbots trained for warmth make significantly more factual errors and validate false beliefs more often, according to…
Journalist Jamie Bartlett on the people trying to get AI to say things it shouldn’t … for the safety of us all All the major AI chatbots – from ChatGPT to Gemini to Grok to Claude – have things they should and shouldn’t say. Hate speech, criminal material, exploitation of vulnerable users – all of this is content that the most successful large language models in the world shouldn’t produce, that their safety features should guard against. Continue reading...
Insider Brief Today’s AI safety guardrails may not be enough once robots begin operating around people in the physical world, according to a new study warning that AI-powered machines require far more context-aware safety systems than chatbots. Researchers from University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Oxford, report finding that safety techniques […]
AI chatbots are the new norm. What earlier was “ask Google” has now largely become “ask Claude”. And that is not just a change of platforms. The new form of conversational guidance goes a whole lot deeper than trying to find the best car for you or looking for an upskilling course. It now spills […] The post How People are Figuring Out Life With Claude appeared first on Analytics Vidhya.
UN Women report says AI, anonymity and lack of effective laws are increasing the risks of engaging in digital spaces Women in public life are facing growing and increasingly sophisticated forms of online violence, the UN has said, warning that “AI-assisted ‘virtual rape’ is now at the fingertips of perpetrators”. Female rights campaigners, journalists and other public communicators face a deepening threat due to a combination of artificial intelligence, anonymity and the absence of effective laws and accountability, a report by UN Women found. Continue reading...
AI is getting faster. But slow-responding AI is perceived as better by users. At least that’s the conclusion reached by new research presented at CHI’26, which is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Barcelona conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Two researchers — Felicia Fang-Yi Tan and Professor Oded Nov at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering — tested 240 adults by having them use an AI chatbot. The answers were artificially delayed by two, nine, or 20 seconds. (The delay had nothing to do with the question or the answer.) Afterwards, the researchers asked how they liked the answers. In general, participants preferred the answers that took longer (although sometimes users got frustrated with the 20-second delay). Why? Because a delay led the users to believe the AI was “thinking” or showing “deliberation” — invaluable input for AI companies and an interesting result. In almost every product category, faster usually means better. But for AI chatbots, it turns out
New research from the Oxford Internet Institute indicates that AI chatbots trained to be extra warm, friendly, and empathetic can also become less reliable, according to the BBC. The researchers analyzed more than 400,000 responses from five different AI models from Meta, Mistral AI, Alibaba, and OpenAI. The results showed that the “kinder” versions more often gave incorrect answers, reinforced users’ misconceptions, and avoided stating uncomfortable truths. For example, a friendlier model might deal with conspiracy theories about the moon landing more cautiously instead of clearly stating that they are false. On average, incorrect answers increased by about 7.43 percentage points when the models were made to sound warmer in tone. Cooler and more direct models made fewer mistakes. According to the researchers, AI makes the same trade-off as humans: it sometimes prioritizes being perceived as pleasant rather than being direct.