UIUC students petition to stop Proctorio exam proctoring over privacy concerns
A petition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) alleges that Proctorio, an online exam proctoring system, violates student privacy by accessing websites, downloads, screen content, and app settings. The petition claims the terms of service allow monitoring by 'any other means necessary', which students find unsettling. The petition, created on September 30, 2020, gathered 1,087 supporters but does not report any specific incident of harm. It calls on UIUC to discontinue use of Proctorio in favour of alternatives.
- Company involved
- UIUC
- AI system involved
- Proctorio
9 source articles · read the reporting →
Google News boosts AI-generated articles that rip off other outlets
Google News is boosting sites that use AI to rapidly churn out content that rips off other outlets, according to a 404 Media investigation. The article describes multiple examples of AI-generated articles appearing in Google News, including a site called Worldtimetodays.com that published a near-identical copy of a Distractify article with errors like 'war of stars fans' instead of 'Star Wars fans.' Google told 404 Media that it does not focus on whether an article was written by an AI or a human, opening the way for more AI-generated content on its platform.
- Company involved
- Google
- AI system involved
- Google News
10 source articles · read the reporting →
Google used 11,000 novels without permission to train AI
Google researchers fed 11,000 novels, including works by authors Rebecca Forster and Erin McCarthy, into a neural network to improve conversational AI without seeking permission. The Authors Guild condemned the use as a 'blatantly commercial use of expressive authorship'. Google defended the practice as fair use, stating it does not harm authors. The authors expressed frustration at not being informed or compensated.
- Company involved
- Google
10 source articles · read the reporting →
Bloomberg test finds racial bias in OpenAI's GPT for resume ranking
Bloomberg News conducted an experiment using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to rank equally qualified resumes with names associated with different races and genders. The test found that resumes with names distinct to Black Americans were least likely to be ranked as top candidates, indicating systematic bias. OpenAI responded that businesses can mitigate bias through fine-tuning and that it prohibits using GPT for automated hiring decisions.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- GPT-3.5
5 source articles · read the reporting →
Academic journals publish papers with AI-generated text from ChatGPT
Scientific journals have published papers containing text that appears to have been generated by AI tools like ChatGPT. A search for the phrase 'As of my last knowledge update' on Google Scholar returned 115 results, indicating that researchers or authors used ChatGPT to write parts of their papers. The phrase is characteristic of ChatGPT's responses and corresponds to its knowledge update dates. The incident highlights the pervasive use of AI in academic publishing and raises concerns about the integrity of peer-reviewed literature.
- Company involved
- Academic journals
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
10 source articles · read the reporting →
ChatGPT use linked to memory loss and procrastination in students
A study published in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education surveyed hundreds of university students in Pakistan and found that those who relied more on ChatGPT reported increased procrastination, memory loss, and lower GPAs. The researchers attribute this to the chatbot making schoolwork too easy, reducing students' cognitive effort. The study's lead author warned of a "dark side" to excessive generative AI usage.
- Company involved
- National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
4 source articles · read the reporting →
Study finds LLMs used in up to 16.9% of AI conference peer reviews
According to a new paper on arXiv, researchers have begun using generative AI services to help write peer reviews of machine learning papers submitted to leading AI conferences. The study analysed reviews from ICLR 2024, NeurIPS 2023, CoRL 2023 and EMNLP 2023 and estimated that between 6.5% and 16.9% of review text may have been substantially modified by large language models. The authors argue that this risks depriving authors of diverse expert feedback and may skew reviews towards AI model biases. They have called for greater transparency about the use of LLMs in peer review.
9 source articles · read the reporting →
Anthropic ordered to respond over alleged AI-hallucinated citation in court filing
A US federal magistrate judge has ordered Anthropic to respond to music publishers' claim that a court filing by Anthropic data scientist Olivia Chen cited a fictitious academic article that may have been generated by Anthropic's AI tool Claude. The publishers' lawyer said he had confirmed with the named author and journal that the article did not exist. Anthropic's lawyer disputed this, saying it was a mis-citation rather than an AI hallucination. The filing was made in an ongoing copyright case brought by Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO against Anthropic over the use of song lyrics to train Claude.
- Company involved
- Anthropic
- AI system involved
- Claude
5 source articles · read the reporting →
Texas uses AI to grade student STAAR test answers
The Texas Education Agency will use an automated scoring engine to grade written answers on the 2023 STAAR tests, replacing thousands of human graders. The system uses natural language processing and will initially score all responses, with a quarter rescored by humans. Educators have expressed concerns about the system's fairness and the potential for errors, especially for creative or non-standard answers.
- Company involved
- Texas Education Agency
- AI system involved
- automated scoring engine
10 source articles · read the reporting →
AI detectors falsely flag non-native English speakers' essays as AI-generated
A study by Stanford researchers found that seven popular AI text detectors wrongly flagged over half of essays written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated. The detectors assess text perplexity, and non-native speakers' simpler word choices lead to false positives. The researchers warn that this bias could have serious implications for students and job applicants, potentially leading to discrimination.
9 source articles · read the reporting →
Singapore writers reject government plan to use their work for AI training
The Singaporean government's National Multimodal LLM Programme (NMLP) requested permission from local writers to use their copyrighted works to train a large language model aimed at reducing Western bias. Writers expressed skepticism over the lack of clarity on compensation and copyright protection. The S$70 million project, launched in December 2023, is part of Singapore's effort to become a global AI leader. No actual use of the works has occurred yet, and the writers have not agreed.
- Company involved
- Singapore government (National Multimodal LLM Programme)
- AI system involved
- National Multimodal LLM (NMLP)
2 source articles · read the reporting →
OpenAI and Anthropic ignore robots.txt to scrape web content for training data
OpenAI and Anthropic have been found to be ignoring or circumventing the robots.txt rule that prevents automated scraping of websites, according to a person with knowledge of TollBit's analytics. The AI companies are bypassing blocks to their web crawlers GPTBot and ClaudeBot to retrieve all content from publishers' websites for model training. The practice undermines the long-standing web standard and raises concerns about copyright infringement.
- Company involved
- OpenAI, Anthropic
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT, Claude
10 source articles · read the reporting →
Proctorio anti-cheating software failed to catch student cheaters in study
Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands tested Proctorio, an anti-cheating software, by asking 30 computer science students to sit an exam while six of them cheated. Proctorio did not flag any of the cheaters and flagged some honest students for irregular behaviour. An independent human review caught only one of the six cheaters. Proctorio disputed the study's methodology and cited other research.
- Company involved
- Proctorio
- AI system involved
- Proctorio
5 source articles · read the reporting →
Tomato Novel retracts proposal to use authors' works for AI training
Tomato Novel, a Chinese online novel platform affiliated with ByteDance, proposed a protocol allowing creators' works to be used for AI training. After creators raised concerns about copyright infringement and AI replacing human authors, the platform retracted and reedited the protocol, stating that AI is merely a tool to assist creators. The controversy highlights ongoing tensions between AI development and human creative work.
- Company involved
- Tomato Novel
2 source articles · read the reporting →
Condé Nast accuses Perplexity of plagiarism in cease-and-desist letter
Condé Nast, the media conglomerate, sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI search startup Perplexity, accusing it of plagiarism for using content from its publications in AI-generated responses without permission. The letter demands that Perplexity stop using the content. Perplexity has been criticized for ignoring robots.txt and scraping content. The incident highlights ongoing tensions between publishers and AI companies over unauthorized use of content.
- Company involved
- Perplexity
- AI system involved
- Perplexity
4 source articles · read the reporting →
OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora exhibit caste bias in India
An MIT Technology Review investigation found that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora models reproduce harmful caste stereotypes. When Dhiraj Singha used ChatGPT to polish a fellowship application, the system changed his surname to a high-caste one, causing him psychological distress. Tests showed the models consistently associated Dalits with negative stereotypes and menial jobs, while associating Brahmins with positive traits. OpenAI did not answer questions about the findings.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
6 source articles · read the reporting →
OpenAI's GPT-4 shows performance decline, study finds
A study by researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley found that OpenAI's GPT-4 model performed significantly worse on some tasks in June than in March, including a drop in accuracy on identifying prime numbers from 97.6% to 2.4%. The cause of the decline is unknown. OpenAI's vice-president of product, Peter Welinder, denied that the model had been made dumber, saying each new version is smarter than the previous one.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- GPT-4
6 source articles · read the reporting →
News/Media Alliance study finds unauthorised use of publisher content to train AI
The News/Media Alliance alleges that generative AI developers have copied and used publishers' content without authorisation to train large language models. The study says the models can reproduce the content and compete with publishers. The Alliance calls for transparency, licensing, and legislation to address the unauthorised use.
10 source articles · read the reporting →
CBSE OnMark portal vulnerability exposed student data to Google Gemini
A 19-year-old ethical hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, claimed to have hacked the CBSE's digital evaluation ecosystem, revealing that personal information of students was processed by Google's Gemini in automation scripts. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) stated on May 31, 2026, that the identified vulnerabilities had been contained and other exploitable weaknesses were being ruled out. The board expressed gratitude to alert citizens and ethical hackers who pointed out the weaknesses. No actual data breach was confirmed, but the incident raised concerns about student privacy.
- Company involved
- Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE)
- AI system involved
- OnMark
1 source article · read the reporting →
Audit of RisCanvi finds biases and reliability issues in criminal justice system
Eticas conducted an adversarial audit of RisCanvi, an AI risk assessment tool used in Catalonia's criminal justice system. The audit uncovered biases in risk classifications against specific demographics and significant reliability issues. The findings call for fairer practices in criminal justice AI.
- Company involved
- Catalonia's criminal justice system
- AI system involved
- RisCanvi
4 source articles · read the reporting →
BBC study finds AI chatbots produce inaccurate news summaries
A BBC study found that four major AI chatbots – ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity – produced inaccurate summaries of BBC news articles. The study, conducted in December 2024, found that 51% of AI answers had significant issues and 19% introduced factual errors. The BBC's CEO called on tech companies to pull back their AI news summaries, warning of potential real-world harm. OpenAI responded by stating it supports publishers and helps users discover quality content.
- Company involved
- OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Perplexity
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity
5 source articles · read the reporting →
Thomson Reuters wins copyright lawsuit against AI startup Ross Intelligence
In 2020, Thomson Reuters filed a copyright lawsuit against legal AI startup Ross Intelligence, alleging that Ross reproduced materials from its Westlaw legal research service. In February 2025, a US District Court judge ruled in Thomson Reuters' favor, finding that Ross infringed copyright and that fair use did not apply. Ross Intelligence had shut down in 2021 due to litigation costs.
- Company involved
- Ross Intelligence
- AI system involved
- Ross Intelligence
4 source articles · read the reporting →
Vanderbilt, Northwestern and University of Texas stop using Turnitin AI detector over false cheating accusations
Several US universities, including Vanderbilt, Northwestern and the University of Texas, have stopped using Turnitin's AI detection tool over concerns that it falsely marks student essays as written by ChatGPT. Vanderbilt estimated that the tool's 1% false-positive rate could have wrongly labelled about 750 of 75,000 papers submitted last year. A Texas professor came under fire for failing half his class after the software identified their essays as AI-generated. Turnitin said its technology is not meant to replace educators' professional discretion.
- Company involved
- Multiple universities (Vanderbilt University, Northwestern University, University of Texas)
- AI system involved
- Turnitin's AI detection tool
9 source articles · read the reporting →
UK universities detect deepfake applicants in automated interviews
Some UK universities use Enroly's automated online interviews to screen international student applicants. Enroly detected about 30 cases of deepfake attempts out of 20,000 interviews during the January 2025 intake. The deepfakes used AI-generated images and audio to replace applicants' faces and voices. Enroly stated it caught the attempts using real-time detection methods.
- Company involved
- UK universities
- AI system involved
- Enroly
5 source articles · read the reporting →
