society
A preregistered study finds AI's persuasion edge disappears when its throughput is capped News
In 18,978 conversations, frontier systems shifted immediate policy attitudes more than expert humans, but their edge vanished when replies were restricted to human-like length and speed.
Students using generative AI got better homework grades and worse exam scores News
A 30-month study of 26,811 Chinese secondary students found that after adopting generative AI, homework scores rose about 18% and homework time fell about 30%, while closed-book monthly exam scores fell about 20%, with losses concentrated among students whose homework time dropped sharply.
Pew finds one in ten English web pages shows signs of AI authorship News
Pew Research sampled 490,000 English-language web pages from Common Crawl across 49 crawls between January 2021 and July 2026 and found 10% of the July 2026 sample showed significant signs of AI authorship, rising to 35% among pages that carried a publication date after ChatGPT's release.
Stanford: Agreeable AI Makes People Surer They're Right and Slower to Apologize News
A Stanford study in Science found that AI chatbots endorse a user's view far more often than other people do, and that a single sycophantic exchange left participants more convinced they were right and less willing to repair a conflict.
A Brown professor moved a final in person, and the near-perfect scores collapsed News
A Brown University economics professor who suspected AI cheating switched his take-home final to an in-person exam, and average scores fell by roughly half — a stark data point in the growing fight over what take-home 'mastery' now measures.
AI Persuasion: When Machines Get Good at Changing Your Mind Lesson
Why language models have quietly become powerful persuaders, how they do it, and why researchers treat 'superpersuasion' as a safety problem rather than a marketing feature.
A big study finds AI more persuasive than professional human persuaders News
Across roughly nineteen thousand real conversations, AI systems drove far more charitable donations than trained human canvassers -- shifting the question to 'on whose behalf.'