Numerama's weekly cyber roundup covers a hack that raised temperatures in the chilled aisles of hundreds of French supermarkets. It also features Andrej Karpathy describing a widening gap between the AI the public knows and what labs see, and a drop in Russian bot traffic that deserves nuance.
Anthropic's offensive research team reported building a malicious AI program that spread on its own through internet-connected smart TVs and could do the same on other everyday devices. The company says such worms need more capability on weaker hardware, but that current trends could make this feasible by the end of the year.
Clubic examines how chatbot suggestions might steer users away from some ideas even as they help find others. As these tools enter daily life, the diversity of how people think, create and see the world could be affected.
In experiments, a few AI-edited photos and a fake AI summary of an accident video led hundreds of volunteers to remember invented details. In one test, participants answered wrongly even though they knew the text had been machine-generated.
Anthropic is working with law firms on norms for AI agents that would negotiate prices, settle complaints or improve contracts for users. It is also recruiting lawyers and humanities scholars as 'Conceptual Reasoning Fellows' to strengthen Claude where good training data is scarce.
In an op-ed for Le Monde, AI specialists push back against the idea that warnings about AI are 'fear marketing' serving the industry. They argue this view ignores the real threats AI poses to humanity.