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Abusers using AI and digital tech to attack and control women, charity warns

The Guardian

Women's groups are calling for tech developers to take into account women's safety. Women's groups are calling for tech developers to take into account women's safety. Domestic abusers are increasingly using AI, smartwatches and other technology to attack and control their victims, a domestic abuse charity says. Record numbers of women who were abused and controlled through technology were referred to Refuge's specialist services during the last three months of 2025, including a 62% increase in the most complex cases to total 829 women. There was also a 24% increase in referrals of under-30s.


Application of CARE-SD text classifier tools to assess distribution of stigmatizing and doubt-marking language features in EHR

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Introduction: Electronic health records (EHR) are a critical medium through which patient stigmatization is perpetuated among healthcare teams. Methods: We identified linguistic features of doubt markers and stigmatizing labels in MIMIC-III EHR via expanded lexicon matching and supervised learning classifiers. Predictors of rates of linguistic features were assessed using Poisson regression models. Results: We found higher rates of stigmatizing labels per chart among patients who were Black or African American (RR: 1.16), patients with Medicare/Medicaid or government-run insurance (RR: 2.46), self-pay (RR: 2.12), and patients with a variety of stigmatizing disease and mental health conditions. Patterns among doubt markers were similar, though male patients had higher rates of doubt markers (RR: 1.25). We found increased stigmatizing labels used by nurses (RR: 1.40), and social workers (RR: 2.25), with similar patterns of doubt markers. Discussion: Stigmatizing language occurred at higher rates among historically stigmatized patients, perpetuated by multiple provider types.


When a Video Game Developer Gets Outed as Abusive, What Happens Next?

WIRED

Jonathan's actions were irrefutable: Over the course of nearly a decade, while working at a video game developer, he sexually assaulted industry colleagues. One victim came forward, posting their story to social media; others followed with stories of their own. Colleagues, friends, and peers disavowed him. He stepped away from his job and retreated from the public eye. Jonathan, who asked that WIRED not reveal his identity, no longer works in the video game industry.


Column: California says its new gun law is about public safety. But what about these women?

Los Angeles Times

Kismet Jackson used to carry her handgun just about everywhere in San Bernardino County. To get her nails done. To pick up her prescription. To hang out with her grandchildren. For her, it was all about staying safe. "Being out and about, you just want to protect yourself," explained Jackson, an Air Force veteran and member of the National African American Gun Assn.


Wolverhampton grandmother's abusers caught by hidden camera

BBC News

Two sisters hid a camera in their grandmother's care home to find out why she was covered in bruises.


Safety Alignment in NLP Tasks: Weakly Aligned Summarization as an In-Context Attack

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent developments in balancing the usefulness and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised a critical question: Are mainstream NLP tasks adequately aligned with safety consideration? Our study, focusing on safety-sensitive documents obtained through adversarial attacks, reveals significant disparities in the safety alignment of various NLP tasks. For instance, LLMs can effectively summarize malicious long documents but often refuse to translate them. This discrepancy highlights a previously unidentified vulnerability: attacks exploiting tasks with weaker safety alignment, like summarization, can potentially compromise the integraty of tasks traditionally deemed more robust, such as translation and question-answering (QA). Moreover, the concurrent use of multiple NLP tasks with lesser safety alignment increases the risk of LLMs inadvertently processing harmful content. We demonstrate these vulnerabilities in various safety-aligned LLMs, particularly Llama2 models and GPT-4, indicating an urgent need for strengthening safety alignments across a broad spectrum of NLP tasks.


Homeland Security to explore using AI to detect fentanyl shipments

FOX News

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Friday announced the creation of a task force that will assess the ways artificial intelligence can be used to detect shipments of dangerous fentanyl to the U.S., screen cargo and take on other tasks aimed at shoring up U.S. national security. "I am directing the creation of our department's first Artificial Intelligence Task Force that will drive specific applications of AI to advance our critical homeland security missions," Mayorkas said Friday. "Countering the multi-faceted threat posed by the PRC, learning from major cyber incidents, and harnessing the power of AI to advance our security will draw on the entirety of the capabilities and expertise the 260,000 personnel of DHS bring to bear every single day," he said. "It will require continued investment in our operational cohesion, our ability to work together in ways our founders never imagined." HAWLEY GRILLS MAYORKAS ON REPORTS OF FORCED CHILD MIGRANT LABOR: 'WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE IMPEACHED FOR THIS?' Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Friday his department is looking at how to harness AI to boost U.S. national security.


Detection of Abuse in Financial Transaction Descriptions Using Machine Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Since introducing changes to the New Payments Platform (NPP) to include longer messages as payment descriptions, it has been identified that people are now using it for communication, and in some cases, the system was being used as a targeted form of domestic and family violence. This type of tech-assisted abuse poses new challenges in terms of identification, actions and approaches to rectify this behaviour. Commonwealth Bank of Australia's Artificial Intelligence Labs team (CBA AI Labs) has developed a new system using advances in deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) to create a powerful abuse detector that periodically scores all the transactions, and identifies cases of high-risk abuse in millions of records. In this paper, we describe the problem of tech-assisted abuse in the context of banking services, outline the developed model and its performance, and the operating framework more broadly.


The Signal for Help I Created Went Viral. Now It Could Be Misused

WIRED

In 2020, I helped create the Signal for Help, a hand signal that communicates to friends, family, and bystanders that "I need you to check in on me in a safe way." Our team promoted the Signal for Help across social media, anticipating a pandemic-related rise in already high rates of gendered violence, and it went viral in November 2021 during a charged time of anxiety, stay-at-home directives, and the proliferation of video calling. ANDREA GUNRAJ is vice president of public engagement at the Canadian Women's Foundation. She has worked in gender-based violence prevention and intervention, equity and inclusion, systemic anti-racism practice, human rights, and sexual and reproductive health. She has a passion for intersectional feminism and innovative public education and is a trainer, public speaker, and author. Cases of women and girls using the Signal for Help to get help in dangerous situations have made the news.


Is the video games industry finally reckoning with sexism?

The Guardian

Over the last two years, in a protracted and devastating #MeToo movement for the video games industry, hundreds of women have spoken out about the manipulative and predatory behaviour they have experienced in their video game careers. A 2018 investigation by games website Kotaku led to legal action at California developer Riot Games, where five former employees sued the company over workplace harassment and discrimination and hundreds more joined walkouts to protest. The company promised to overhaul its workplace culture and a settlement was made in 2019. Then, last summer saw a wave of stories on Twitter about people in the games industry generally being plied with drinks and pressured into sex at industry parties, belittled and gaslit at work by male bosses, stalked, groomed, harassed, or treated with contempt when a senior man's advances were spurned. In the past month there has been another surge of allegations against men from all areas of the video game world - developers to the games media, Twitch streamers and YouTubers to competitive players.