An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Students and school children are increasingly using artificial intelligence. A survey last year by Chegg, an ed-tech firm, found that 80% of rich-world undergraduates used it in their studies. More recent polls put the figure at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Such widespread adoption has fueled concerns about the impact the technology might be having on learning. Teachers report marking identikit essays that they suspect are churned out by ChatGPT. Yet firm evidence on AI's educational effects has been lacking. David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where AI adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group. The results are eye-opening. After six months, pupils using AI saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on AI's help. Homework scores once predicted exam performance; now those who score highest are, perversely, more likely to do worse in exams. The takeaway: "AI can boost learning productivity, but only for those who use the technology intelligently," reports The Economist. "Students must resist the temptation to reach for an AI-generated answer before thinking things through for themselves."

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Linus Torvalds says AI "enormously helped" him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. "I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it," wrote Torvalds on the commit. "I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am..." Phoronix reports: The patch by Linus Torvalds is for the Xe kernel driver and the change is no longer hand out the flat Compute Command Streamer (CCS) storage as usable vRAM. On a Battlemage G21 graphics card, he was hitting a scenario where there was a mismatch where the usable memory ended and hit a case where the GDM display manager would end up being endlessly restarted. [...] Linus Torvalds views AI as a useful tool and in this case reaffirmed he found it "enormously helped" his effort in tracking down this Intel graphics driver bug. The Intel Xe driver fix is merged to Linux 7.3 Git and is also marked to back-porting to the stable kernel branches.

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Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a "Preferred Sources" button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. "The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust when they're searching for content or interacting with Google's AI to learn about a topic or read the latest news," reports TechCrunch. "As of May's launch, the company said that people across the web had already selected over 345,000 unique sources through this method." From the report: Becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to publishers' websites, Google said. In earlier studies, it found that people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when available. By offering publishers these additional tools, Google is trying to assuage the damage that the rapid growth of AI-powered search features has had on traffic-dependent businesses. Alongside the new button, Google said that readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in Google's app in their own words. To use this feature, readers will tap any three-dot menu in the feed and then tell Google what topics they'd like to see more or less of, using natural language commands. This helps Google refine the feed in real time.

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Microsoft is expanding Windows Task Manager to show per-process NPU and GPU neural-engine usage, giving users more visibility into which apps are consuming hardware for AI workloads. The Register reports: The Processes tab can show NPU use alongside CPU and GPU activity, while the Performance tab displays overall utilization. [...] Microsoft was keen to point out the metrics that can be monitored. "As AI workloads become more common on Windows devices, visibility into NPU and GPU neural engine utilization can help you make better-informed decisions," the company said. "With the latest Task Manager improvements, you can monitor AI processing activity alongside CPU, memory, storage, and networking data from a familiar interface."

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A growing backlash against AI data centers is spilling into local politics, with residents in more than a dozen communities pushing recall elections against officials who approved projects. "People are standing up and saying, 'Sorry, we don't want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,'" Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in an interview. "'If you can't have the guts to stand up to some large corporation, you should not continue serving in office.'" The New York Times reports: In Festus, Mo., critics of a local data center project gathered enough signatures in May to force a vote to remove the mayor and City Council members who had approved a $6 billion data center, though the effort is tied up in legal wrangling. In Mason, Mich., residents will vote in November over whether to recall a City Council member over a vote to create zoning rules for data centers. Voters in Yukon, Okla., will also decide in November whether to recall their mayor after the town moved to sell land to a data center developer. And residents of Independence, a city of 121,000 that is 10 miles from Kansas City, will vote on whether to remove Mr. Perkins on Sept. 1. Some local officials have already lost their jobs in the face of data center concerns in regularly scheduled elections. Last year, two members of the Georgia Public Service Commission lost their seats amid concern about data centers' driving up electricity prices. A Virginia state delegate, Geary Higgins, also lost his job last year after his opponent branded him "Data Center Geary." [...] Independence would be one of the first municipalities to hold a data-center-motivated recall election. A judge this month rejected a legal challenge by Mr. Perkins and others, who argued the recall violated Missouri's Constitution.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a "severe" math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were "five to eight years" behind and lacked a "middle school" education on fractions and basic algebra. Stankova said the UC system's test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren't sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley's mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared. Over the weekend, journalists at Berkeley's student newspaper, the Daily Californian, noticed the op-ed's language sounded like AI. According to Berkeley sophomore Francis Luo, they ran it through AI-detection software Pangram, which claimed 33% of the op-ed had been generated or assisted by AI. In response, Stankova admitted she had used AI software to "help edit the piece" but that the article was "the result of several hundred person-hours of intensive human work, of which about 80 hours are my own." Stankova said by email she had used AI to locate "numerous documents and articles related to the initiative" but that "all analysis is the result of the team members." When asked about their AI usage policy, the Standard -- which published the op-ed -- shared this statement by email: "While AI may assist, our expectation is that humans are behind every article we publish and take responsibility for every word. Our understanding in working with the author of this op ed was -- and continues to be -- that this piece reflects her and her colleagues' extensive original analysis, research and expertise." Should the op-ed have been entirely written without artificial assistance or is the use of AI a distraction from the argument at hand? That's the question at the heart of the debate playing out online. According to the op-ed, Stankova and her peers found that the number of students with a "severe deficit" in their readiness for a calculus I class had tripled after the University of California adopted test-blind admissions. Some students were allegedly five to eight years behind and struggling with basic algebra and fractions, among other concepts. Much of that decline, Stankova argues, is from the removal of standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, which served as important benchmarks for identifying whether applicants were prepared for Berkeley-level coursework.

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alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon's book buying operation, which hasn't been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination. That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands. "Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use," an Amazon spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement.

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the growing backlash against AI is less about executives sounding alarms and more about a broader "crisis of trust" in companies, governments, and the tech industry. TechCrunch reports: Amodei's comments came in response to investor Gavin Baker, who argued -- both on the All-In podcast and on X -- that Amodei's warnings about the dangers of AI have helped to fuel a backlash in the United States, particularly against data centers. Claiming that Amodei has "lost the argument" when it comes to AI regulation (Anthropic has advocated for some regulations, including a California bill that imposes transparency requirements on large AI companies), and given that "he is about to be the CEO of one of the most important companies in the world," Baker wrote, "I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry." Baker is far from the only one arguing that AI skepticism and even government crackdowns are a natural response to the dire warnings of some AI executives. But in a series of posts, Amodei disagreed with the idea that his "messaging has been disproportionately negative." Instead, he said that his writing has been "about equally balanced between risks and benefits," and that he wrote his essay "Machines of Loving Grace" because he "didn't feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better." Nonetheless, Amodei acknowledged that "the public has a negative view of AI" and he agreed that "this is a big problem." Where he disagreed was with the idea that this negativity is "primarily caused" by Amodei "or any other AI leader warning about AI's risks." "I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust," Amodei said. "I think that ordinary people don't trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over."

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This week Anthropic announced its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, reports the blog Futurism. "It works by making subtle changes in the AI's word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable with the tool." Anthropic said it was implementing the watermark system in response to the European Union's landmark AI Act passed in 2024, which requires that AI companies mark content that's been generated or edited by their systems. TechCrunch notes that other companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU's code. But "The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X," reports Forbes, "with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'" (Forbes wonders if media companies are normalizing AI "while at the same time stigmatizing the output.") But there's another issue. Anthropic said the watermark indicates Claude processed text, Business Insider points out, "not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content... a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it." In the days since, "Dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark." Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason. He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties... Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision. He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits. "Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway," Echols said... Anthropic isn't the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio. Elon Musk's social media platform X also adds a "Made with AI" tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated. Long-time Slashdot reader kmleon (also a tech consultant and RPG researcher) experienced another issue. He'd built some software using their own custom-built AI tool, only asking Claude to do some testing. "Little did I know that Claude would sometimes decide, since it was involved on the edges... to take credit for all of my work, claiming some parts were either '100%' or 'Co-Authored/Created' by Claude.Ai / Claude Code!" I'm sure the good folks at Anthropic will eventually tweak Claude enough to, hopefully, not make these mistakes in the future.... I only became aware of it today, because I recently setup scanners to catch Claude incorrectly watermarking any content it touches for various projects I'm working on. I found that it has (apparently as far back as Sonnet 4.6, but as recently as today, August 14th, 2026) sometimes been mistakenly over-zealous in taking credit for 100% creating or co-authoring docs, code, images, videos, etc. I've only, so far, found about a dozen instances spanning the past year, and most of them appear to have been injected in the last few weeks, so it is not a common issue (yet). On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text. Although Forbes also reports that Google "announced on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models."

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When Anthropic instructed three agents to migrate a Python backend, but telling each agent to perform the migration in a different language, "We consistently saw a multiagent turf war," they wrote Thursday: All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing processes on a loop, and deploying malicious code that was disguised as belonging to another agent. In many runs, one agent settles the conflict by force via access-revocation (e.g., sudo/group removal, account lock, nologin, SSH denial). In others, some agents settle into passivity: they give up and refuse to escalate further. Agents sometimes manage to communicate their goals and coordinate: they recognize others' motivations as conflicting directives rather than hostility, and subsequently break out of the conflict loop in order to stop escalating indefinitely. In many of these successful episodes, they write commit messages or markdown files apologizing for malicious behavior and coordinate a truce. They clean up their malicious code, clarify the nature of the conflict, and ask for a human to intervene... In several episodes with Mythos 5, we observe an emergent behavior where the agents propose and run a tournament for application performance in each language. In the example above, the Rust agent strategizes about bake-off metrics that appear neutral enough for the others to agree to this mechanism, yet would likely favor Rust: one thinking trace warns to be "careful not to be seen as metric shopping". Ultimately, the Golang/TypeScript losers gracefully concede codebase ownership to the Rust agent, giving up on their original user directives under their self-negotiated commitment device. One problem is that AI agents do reward hacking, Anthropic notes, while current institutions "are designed by and for people, resting on assumptions about the sufficiency of oversight at human speed... As autonomous agents become more and more prevalent in the world and operate in ever-more demanding settings, it is crucial that they learn how to effectively coordinate." In addition to everything else, the agents struggled with a lack of clearly defined hierarchy, Anthropic points out. "Nothing above suggests that these failures are permanent — but nothing suggests they will fix themselves, either..." They argue a fix "takes two forms: environments that exert the kinds of social pressure that evolution exerted on us, and social computing systems redesigned for actors that can self-replicate and self-improve. These are open problems in interaction and mechanism design, and our experiments here provide early evidence that new solutions are necessary." "The AI models being tested in this case were Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.8, Mythos Preview, and Mythos 5," notes Business Insider, adding that Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 "were the most combative, settling about 60% of their runs by force instead of truces or passivity." Anthropic argues there's a clear case for researching this phenomenon — especially since "The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well."

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"An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025," remembers the BBC. And earlier this year OpenAI "formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself." However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there. Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent "crisis meetings", working on weekends, and "super cut-throat" performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go... [T]he former OpenAI employee said they would put in at least 70 hours a week, much more than they did in previous tech jobs... Other companies have also pushed the idea that AI will effectively reduce the number of hours people need to work, for better or worse. [At OpenAI and Anthropic] sprints can stretch on for many weeks and top 90 hours of work in a seven-day period, tech workers that the BBC spoke to for this story said... At Meta, workers said they have been abruptly pushed onto teams this year doing AI work being treated as urgent... The hours on such teams at Meta are often long, with staff working into the night, on weekends, and feeling they are "on call" during the hours they are not working, according to descriptions of the work from the current and former employees... Some new research suggests that AI tools are making people's workloads even more burdensome. A study out of UC Berkeley followed hundreds of workers at a US tech company for eight months as they used AI. It found the employees "worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day"... The UC Berkeley research found that the workload of tech employees was expanded in part because of the need to constantly check the output of AI tools. In the article Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT, pointed out a problem with estimates that AI will ease the workload on humans. "People assume that 20% less work means four-day weeks. But new work emerges." The BBC also points out helpfully that "there are no limits in the U.S. on how many hours a person over the age of 16 can work." (While in the UK and Europe, "laws limit a working week to 48 hours, including overtime.") Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hadleyburg for sharing the article.

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This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word open letter titled "The Future is for Everyone". But the BBC is more interested in why big tech executives keep writing manifestos about AI: [Zuckerberg's] vision echoes what AI leaders have expressed in various forms: the product they are building is among the "most important technologies in history." Marc Andreessen, co-founder of early web titan Netscape, perhaps started this trend in 2023 with a 5,000-word essay he called "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto", which argued innovation was the way to solve life's problems... As the International Monetary Fund warns AI could affect nearly 40% of jobs and worsen global financial inequality, Zuckerberg says he believes there will be an abundance of jobs in the future. "I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future." Never mind that Zuckerberg's Meta has cut 10% of its global workforce — about 8,000 jobs — as the company reorganizes to focus on AI. Zuckerberg's manifesto is the latest to land in our social media feeds in an effort to put a positive spin on AI. In 2024, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI boss Sam Altman released a manifesto called "The Intelligence Age", a sweeping expression of optimism about the tech's potential... That same year, in a manifesto titled "Machines of Loving Grace", Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei touted the potential of AI to transform everything from healthcare to politics. So what's going on with these tech executives' manifestos? Economics blogger Noah Smith suggested to the BBC "they all feel like it's such an important moment that it's incumbent upon them to do whatever they can to shape the direction that this technology is going." Although he does see some value in their engagement with important issues. "Should we open-source something that has the ability to kill humanity? If you don't take that seriously, you're just a fool." But Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University, had a different explanation for the BBC: Lalka said the timing of Zuckerberg's manifesto coincides with rising anger over AI's impact on everything from jobs to the environment. And while tech journalists and academics might pore over them trying to glean nuggets of meaning, these executive manifestos are not necessarily landing with the general public. "They're trying to make the case that the positives will far outweigh some of those negatives that the public backlash is pointing out," he said. "But I think a lot of the reasons for optimism are still yet to be seen."

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Meta has patented a smart-glasses system that could use facial recognition to identify people and automatically create personalized highlight reels of events such as dinner parties. The patent doesn't guarantee the feature will ship, but it offers a detailed look at how Meta is exploring facial recognition and AI-powered memory capture for its wearable devices. 404 Media reports: "I've generated some highlights of tonight's dinner party. Would you like to see them?" a prompt from the system says, alongside various thumbnails of what look like people laughing, according to one illustration in the patent. One section says the system may personalize highlight files using "user relationship data." The illustrations clearly show a person wearing a pair of glasses, looking at a group of people, then the glasses focusing on one or more people in particular. Patentlyze, an organization that tracks patents, first alerted 404 Media to the patent on Friday. The patent is dense with how such a system would work, but in sum, the system with one or more cameras receives an input from the user, then uses machine-learning and "sensory data" to figure out points of interest in the camera's field of view. That can include detecting people in the shot "based on one or more facial recognition algorithms," identifying those specific people, detecting their facial expressions, using "eye gaze data of the user captured by the client system," and figuring out other points of interest "based on scene and semantic understanding." Although the patent is for "particular camera-based tasks by particular systems in a particular manner" -- in this case, the company's smart glasses -- Meta writes it "contemplates assisting users in any suitable camera-based task by any suitable system in any suitable manner." Meaning that although this technology is focused on the glasses, maybe the company will use it for other purposes in the future.

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