Users often complain that AI assistants such as ChatGPT are getting worse. Some versions do change, but human evaluation leaves a second possibility untested: the people judging may change. We separate the two on Chatbot Arena, a public platform where people compare answers from two anonymous large language models (LLMs) and pick the better one or say both are bad. We study 1,260,967 blind votes cast from May 2023 to August 2024 on pairs of models whose versions are fixed: dated vendor snapshots and models with fixed open weights. For the same pair of unchanged models, the share of votes saying "both are bad" rises by 1.71 percentage points a month on a mean of 17.1%, and by 1.91 points a month in 2024. In fourteen pairs observed often in both 2023 and 2024, it rose in every one, from 15.5% to 23.3%. The ranking does not trend: in 2024, the stronger model's share of decisive votes is flat. The rise holds within the same voter and on the same pair, and across arrival cohorts from their first recorded vote. It holds with prompt controls, in every major language, for dated vendor snapshots, open-weight models and models with stable answer length, and between interface changes. The drift is shared across models: month effects estimated from other models' pairs remove it from each model's own pairs. Platform-wide, the average model would be expected to score 78% against the 2023 average, yet the share of "both are bad" votes ended near where it began. The pattern fits a standard that follows the category's progress, so a product that stands still is judged as declining. Absolute verdicts on AI drifted while relative comparisons held steady, an evaluation drift that matters for LLM leaderboards and for the human feedback used to train models.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but raise significant privacy concerns due to their abilities to infer sensitive personal information from images with high precision. While current LVLMs are relatively well aligned to protect universal privacy, e.g., credit card data, we argue that privacy is inherently personalized and context-dependent. This work pivots towards a novel task: can LVLMs achieve Inference-Time Personalized Privacy Protection (ITP$^3$), allowing users to dynamically specify privacy boundaries through language specifications? To this end, we present SPY-Bench, the first systematic assessment of ITP$^3$ ability, which comprises (1) 32,700 unique samples with image-question pairs and personalized privacy instructions across 67 categories and 24 real-world scenarios, and (2) novel metrics grounded in user specifications and context awareness. Benchmarking the ITP$^3$ ability of 21 SOTA LVLMs, we reveal that: (i) most models, even the top-performing o4-mini, perform poorly, with only $\sim$24% compliance accuracy; (ii) they show quite limited contextual privacy understanding capability. Therefore, we implemented initial ITP$^3$ alignment methods, including a novel Noise Contrastive Alignment variant which achieves 96.88% accuracy while maintaining reasonable general performance. These results mark an initial step towards the ethical deployment of more controllable LVLMs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/achernarwang/specify-privacy-yourself
Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one of the most valuable tools for monitoring advanced AI systems, but it is under threat. We argue that frontier AI developers should report specific indicators to make these threats trackable and to better facilitate coordination to preserve CoT monitorability. We identify five indicators that are both highly relevant and reasonably feasible to disclose, one for each link in a five-step chain on which CoT monitoring depends. The first, third-party CoT access and base architecture specifications, also underpins external verification of the rest. The others span CoT quality (naturalness and faithfulness) and monitoring effectiveness (detection and uplift). An audit of current disclosures by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind shows that no developer covers the full set, but that every indicator has been reported by at least one frontier developer. Because current disclosures rely largely on developers' own evaluations, we also recommend that a cross-developer audit be repeated with deeper access than public disclosures allow, either by embedded evaluators working within developers or by an Independent Verification Organization.
Communities in the United States and around the world are contesting data centers, the physical infrastructure of AI. These disputes pose environmental justice issues: residents must weigh unevenly distributed burdens using evidence scattered across metrics, corporate claims, policy documents, and public testimony. A formative study with 10 users showed that dashboards and single-agent AI can settle questions before people examine that evidence. Here we present EJAI, a source-grounded system that links an interactive map, retrieved evidence, missing-data statements, and two stakeholder personas that allow people to inspect evidence and form their own policy recommendations. In a small functional benchmark of 21 queries, retrieved evidence supported 98.4% of factual claims and the system acknowledged missing evidence in 32 of 33 cases. Persona alignment carried a grounding cost: the Corporate Executive omitted some evidence that conflicted with its assigned priorities. In a within-subjects study, 15 participants acting as residents prepared for a simulated town hall. Some checked cited AI claims while treating map metrics as official, some made conditional recommendations with safeguards such as water-use disclosure, and some found the personas simplified or biased. Our results suggest that civic AI can support preparation for public reasoning when it makes evidence, gaps, and disagreement open to inspection, and that corpus imbalance and two-sided personas remain open justice concerns.
Data circulation in vocational education has long been constrained by unclear ownership, a lack of trust, and insufficient incentives. The Internet of Data provides a new underlying technology for enabling trusted cross-domain data circulation. Building on an Internet of Data based trusted data space for vocational education, this paper develops a multi-stakeholder operational model encompassing a value network, a product portfolio, revenue allocation, and governance rules. Emphasizing data sovereignty protection and incentive compatibility, the model provides a reference for the sustainable operation of regional vocational education data ecosystems.
Most language models deployed outside the United States and China are fine-tuned descendants of a small number of pretrained families. We argue that fine-tuning leaves the decisive properties of a model inherited from its base: vocabulary, knowledge, cultural alignment, memorized data and license. We contribute (i) an updated, reproducible measurement of the tokenization premium across 31 languages and 7 tokenizers released in 2023-2024, on 27 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with explicit correction for unknown-token collapse. Premiums reach 10x for Amharic in older tokenizers and remain at 6.8x in the newest commercial one; Indigenous South American languages pay between 1.6x and 2.7x under global tokenizers. A vocabulary built from Portuguese lowers the premium for 11 of 13 Latin-script Global South languages relative to every global tokenizer tested, by about 24% for Guarani and Quechua. (ii) An eight-test black-box sovereignty audit that a buyer can run without access to weights. (iii) A regime argument: under energy and liability constraints, accuracy per joule, calibration and selective risk should replace raw accuracy as design objectives, with metrics that abstention cannot inflate. We close with preliminary internal measurements from a proprietary architecture built around these objectives, reported with their limitations. Data and measurement code are included.
In teaching and learning environments, cheating and the violation of academic integrity have always been one of the challenges, involving different levels of concerns such as administrative, personal knowledge, learning, and equity. The introduction of large language models has brought cheating in dialogue to the forefront, given the apparent capabilities of these models to complete students' academic assignments. This study aims to leverage recent dialogues among university professors about cheating with Generative AI to better understand their beliefs about academic honesty. In doing so, we analyze a corpus of 2.01 million posts (threads and comments) in the r/Professors subreddit discussing cheating after the release of ChatGPT, providing a better understanding of teachers' motivations to discourage cheating and the strategies they use to do so. We synthesize the why and how of addressing cheating to identify caveats about the future of AI and academic integration.
The extensive adoption of AI has precipitated a crisis in academic integrity. While studies attempt to quantify cheating, less is known about the motivations instructors believe students have for using AI in prohibited ways. We analyze 2.01 million posts on r/Professors to understand how instructors perceive students' justifications for AI-mediated cheating. Our qualitative analyses reveal four primary themes: (1) Academic System Gaming, (2) Digital-Academic Literacy Gap, (3) Performance Anxiety, and (4) Normalization of Dishonesty.
In social science research, text annotation is a fundamental task that is traditionally a costly, hard-to-scale manual process. Researchers have used large language models (LLMs) to perform annotation by writing a definition of a concept into a prompt - a rule that determines whether a label should be attributed to a text depending on its content. However, concepts such as hate speech, fake news, and terrorism typically have several theoretically defensible competing definitions. It is also unknown whether the model actually applied the definition to provide the label or the label was based on the model's pretrained notion of the concept. To test this, we have the model annotate the same texts twice, each time with a different definition. We call the disagreement between the two sets of annotations definition sensitivity. As a control, we paraphrase one definition but leave its requirements unchanged - the disagreement between the annotations with the two wordings becomes the paraphrase floor. Across six concepts and three LLMs, a swap of competing definitions always changes more annotations, on average, than a paraphrase. This shows that the annotations depend on the prompted definition, so any set of annotations should be interpreted together with the definition that produced it. The LLM annotator's definition sensitivity and its paraphrase floor should both be reported in such work.
This study examines the reliability of Claude Code, an agentic deployment of the Claude Opus 4.6 large language model, as a grading system for handwritten university exams. Four research questions addressed agreement with expert human grading on total scores (RQ1), agreement across five question types from multiple choice to evaluative judgement (RQ2), consistency across two independent grading sessions one week apart (RQ3), and the accuracy of AI-generated feedback (RQ4). Claude Code graded the 20-mark mid-term papers of 60 consenting students in a Saudi computer graphics course in a single agentic session, guided by three rubric files. Reliability was estimated on disjoint samples: 20 papers for RQ1, RQ2 and RQ4, and 15 papers for RQ3. Analyses used Pearson correlation, mean absolute error, Bland-Altman analysis, weighted Cohen kappa, intraclass correlation, and a four-category coding scheme separating diagnostic from confirmation feedback. The author, as the sole subject-matter expert for the course, provided the human benchmark, so the design assesses agreement with a domain-expert reference rather than inter-rater reliability. AI grading agreed strongly with human grading on totals (r = 0.97; MAE = 0.85 marks) with a small but significant AI-positive bias of 0.68 marks, showed excellent test-retest consistency (ICC = 0.96), and produced accurate feedback (92.8% diagnostic; 97.8% confirmation). Drawing items were the outlier on three of four measures. Three failure modes recurred: keyword matching without conceptual depth, selection-state ambiguity on corrected multiple-choice answers, and region-of-attention drift on hand-drawn diagrams. The findings suggest that AI grading at this capability level can assist instructors on objective and short-form items under structural safeguards but is not yet ready to replace instructor judgement at boundary cases or on drawing items.
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems now produce research results in bulk: in October 2026 a single laboratory released more than 700 AI-generated mathematics manuscripts, only part of them with machine-checked proofs. Such volumes will be checked mostly by AI agents that call specialised software. A passing check certifies only the artefact that was checked. For proofs translated into the proof assistant Lean, it has been shown that this artefact may state something other than the author's text, and that deciding whether a translation is faithful is undecidable in general. The human researcher therefore stays in the loop, and human and AI contributions must be recorded. We propose a domain-independent, human-in-the-loop framework for checking AI-produced results. Validated, agent-usable tools with different grounds of trust check the results; a fidelity audit asks whether each check addressed the claim as stated; the human decides at fixed points; and a dialog report attributes the work to the human and to the AI. We describe two automatic implementations of the tool layer, for mathematics (Wolfram Language, MATLAB, Lean) and statistics (Python and R), and run the mathematical one on a two-claim example. An ambiguous claim was split into two readings, one refuted and one proved.
Tech-facilitated gender based violence (TFGBV) is a pervasive online harm affecting women and gender minority groups through its many direct and covert forms. Current models and annotated datasets for gendered harm detection are dominated by data from, and models trained in, Global North languages. In collaboration with civil society organizations (CSOs) from Jordan, Francophone West Africa, and Kenya, we developed a community-led approach to crowdsource culturally and linguistically relevant instances of TFGBV in Levantine Arabic, African French, and Swahili. We annotated the crowdsourced data using active learning to develop a small but performant dataset (N=3022) called ALTO to improve TFGBV detection in the three languages. Through benchmarking and fine-tuning experiments, we show that existing harmful content detection models show poor TFGBV recall within ALTO and improve with fine-tuning. We found that models often miss covert harms across all languages, while error rates are markedly higher in Swahili. We report the experimental results and release the annotation taxonomy, dataset, and trained models.
Electronic health record (EHR) foundation models trained on longitudinal patient trajectories have demonstrated strong performance across diverse clinical prediction tasks. However, their clinical reasoning capabilities remain constrained by next-token prediction on limited and incomplete EHR data. To address this, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning framework that treats EHR foundation models as generative policies over patient trajectories. We formulate common clinical prediction problems (e.g., hospital readmission) as event-conditioned, time-windowed reasoning tasks. We then design time-aware, rollout-sensitive rewards to account for finite rollout lengths and temporally inconclusive outcomes. We find that RL fine-tuning consistently improves over pre-trained backbones and strong baselines. Notably, it enables smaller models to match larger pre-trained models in data-limited regimes and induces positive transfer across tasks. Further analysis shows that RL fine-tuned models generate trajectories with stronger structural and semantic alignment to ground truth and greater downstream utility.
Reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to optimize sequential decisions to maximize population-level benefits over time. However, when deployed in high-stakes settings such as healthcare, RL decisions might systematically restrict some subpopulation's access to valuable services in a manner contrary to the values and goals of stakeholders. Counterfactual fairness (CF) offers a promising framework to address this problem based on causal reasoning. This paper develops a data preprocessing algorithm that, when used in tandem with policy learning, enables CF in RL. Our algorithm relies on a novel quantile distribution mapping method for sequentially estimating the counterfactual states and rewards in the data preprocessing step, subsuming common additivity assumptions used for counterfactual prediction as a special case. We theoretically prove that the per-step level of counterfactual unfairness and infinite-horizon suboptimality gap can be bounded under mild regularity conditions. We also empirically test our algorithm in numerical experiments as well as in application to a real-world interventional digital health dataset.
Over the last decade, building human-level artificial general intelligence has moved from far-fetched speculation to being a concrete next-decade target for many of the largest AI organizations. Achieving this goal would have profound and far-reaching impacts on human society, which raises many complex questions for the decade ahead. This report investigates how AI itself might continue to develop in a post-AGI world along the continuum of machine intelligence. The endpoint of this continuum, Universal AI, is theoretically well understood, which provides some formal grounding for the main focus of this report: the transition from human-level AGI to artificial general superintelligence, which can intuitively be understood as a system that is more intelligent and cognitively capable than large organizations of humans. After characterizing ASI, the report discusses four potential pathways from AGI to ASI: scaling AGI, AI paradigm shifts, ASI emerging from large-scale multi-agent collectives, and recursive improvement. The report then discusses possible frictions and bottlenecks along these pathways. Determining whether the impact of these frictions will be negligible or substantial raises a number of concrete open research questions. While large uncertainties for predicting ASI progress remain, it cannot be ruled out that AI progress might continue to accelerate over the next years. This would imply that the image of a single transformative step change, caused by the introduction of human-level AGI into our society, could be inaccurate. More apt might be the prospect of a series of transformative societal changes caused by AI-enabled progress and breakthroughs across many areas of science and technology. Preparing for this prospect requires a massively interdisciplinary endeavor of global scope and interest.
Research on bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on third-person audits, which study how models represent or evaluate demographic groups as external subjects. However, this paradigm overlooks a structural blind spot because the user is absent from the audit. In practice, LLMs are used in open-ended, personal interactions, during which the model implicitly represents the user and adjusts its responses accordingly. When identical requests yield different responses depending on who is asking, bias manifests not in how the model describes others but in how it treats its interlocutor. Empirical first-person bias studies are multiplying, but they use different cues, outcomes, and validation choices, which makes their results hard to compare. We propose Situated Interaction Auditing (SIA), a shared diagnostic framework for this literature. It introduces a typology of user profile signals---names and surface markers, writing style and dialect, and stated identity---together with design principles and outcome measures that let studies be compared and accumulated. We instantiate the framework in a case study of Chilean first and last names across nine task domains and three models, and we close with guidance for practitioners and open questions for researchers.
Scientific AI agents increasingly retrieve evidence, reason across sources, and synthesize conclusions used in consequential decisions. Yet, their ability to do so in high-stakes domains such as health remains unclear. We introduce SciConBench, a large-scale live benchmark of 9.21K questions and expert-written conclusions from systematic reviews to evaluate open-domain scientific conclusion synthesis in health and medical domains. The benchmark draws on an expert-validated automated evaluation pipeline that decomposes conclusions into atomic facts and measures correctness and comprehensiveness via factual precision and recall. To mitigate data leakage, we further introduce SciConHarness, a clean-room evaluation harness that equips agents with controlled web interaction to ensure valid measurement. Evaluating 8 frontier models and deep research agents, we find that factual quality remains low: under clean-room settings, the best agent achieves only a factual F1 of 0.337. Our clean-room setting consistently reduces performance relative to unconstrained evaluation, suggesting that leakage inflates estimates of models' true synthesis capabilities. Finally, we audit consumer-facing agents (e.g., Google AI Overview, OpenEvidence) and find they frequently generate incomplete and sometimes contradictory conclusions, even when the ground-truth answer is available. Overall, our results show that reliable synthesis of scientific conclusions in health remains an open challenge, and that clean-room evaluation is essential for assessing open-domain AI agents.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into the online platforms where humans exchange opinions; large language models (LLMs) have been polishing users' posts on LinkedIn and providing context for content shared on X. While prior work has shown that AI can express biased opinions and shape individuals' opinions during human-AI interactions, less attention has been paid to its influence on collective opinion formation when mediating human-to-human communication. We address this gap via a combination of empirical and theoretical analyses. We show empirically that LLMs from multiple popular families introduce directional biases when instructed to edit human-written texts on contested topics, for example, nudging texts in favor of gun control and against atheism. Building on this observation, we introduce a mathematical model of opinion dynamics in which an AI system sits between users on a social network, transforming the opinions they express and perceive. By analytically characterizing the equilibrium of this model and performing simulations on real social network data, we show that biases introduced by AI in human-to-human communication can be amplified through the network and shift collective opinion in their direction. In light of these findings, we investigate whether such biases are controllable by online platforms. We audit the "Explain this post" feature on X and find evidence of pro-life bias in Grok's outputs on abortion-related content, which we trace back to specific design choices. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of our findings in relation to ongoing legislative efforts in the European Union.
AI systems can now cheaply generate plausible scientific artifacts such as papers, reviews, and surveys. This creates a risk of \emph{epistemic pollution} in our scientific systems, where unreliable but plausible-looking artifacts can accumulate faster than the system can filter them out. The problem is structural: the epistemic infrastructure of science was calibrated to a world where producing a plausible artifact required substantial expertise, labor, and time, so generation cost itself served as a rough filter; AI weakens that filter without comparably lowering verification cost. This position paper argues that \textbf{AI-era science should rebalance the costs of generating and verifying scientific artifacts by redesigning epistemic infrastructure at the level of the artifact}. The current paper-centered system makes verification expensive: papers compress long-context scientific logic into prose, forcing reviewers, human or AI, to reconstruct underlying argument structure before they can evaluate it. As one step in this direction, we propose \textbf{blueprints}: structured, decomposed research artifacts that represent claims, evidence, assumptions, and definitions as typed graph components. Blueprints complement rather than replace papers---the paper remains the narrative interface, the blueprint becomes the verification interface---and are designed to trade an upfront generation cost for cheaper, more local, more distributed verification downstream. We also instantiate the proposal in a proof-of-concept prototype.
AI systems have become increasingly capable of dangerous behaviours in many domains. This raises the question: Do models sometimes choose to violate human instructions in order to perform behaviour that is more useful for certain goals? We introduce a benchmark for measuring model propensity for instrumental convergence (IC) behaviour in terminal-based agents. This is behaviour such as self-preservation that has been hypothesised to play a key role in risks from highly capable AI agents. Our benchmark is realistic and low-stakes, aiming to reduce evaluation-awareness and roleplay confounds. The suite contains seven operational tasks, each with an official workflow and a shortcut whose policy status varies by condition. An eight-variant shared framework varies monitoring, instruction clarity, stakes, permission, instrumental usefulness and blocked honest paths to support inferences regarding the factors driving IC behaviour. We evaluated ten models using deterministic environment-state scorers over 1,680 samples, with trace review employed for audit and adjudication purposes. The adjusted IC rate is 86 out of 1,680 samples (5.1%). IC behaviour is concentrated rather than uniform: two Gemini models account for 66.3% of IC cases and three tasks account for 84.9%. Conditions in which IC behaviour is indispensable for task success result in the greatest increase in the adjusted IC rate (+15.7 percentage points), whereas emphasising that task success is critical or certain framing choices do not produce comparable effects. Our findings indicate that realistic, low-nudge environments elicit IC behaviour rarely but systematically in most tested models. We conclude that it is feasible to robustly measure tendencies for dangerous behaviour in current frontier AI agents.