In addition to chatbots and apps, AI-generated psychics are a growing presence on TikTok Live, racking up dozens of views. In addition to chatbots and apps, AI-generated psychics are a growing presence on TikTok Live, racking up dozens of views. "This journey isn't just about algorithms or data," an AI psychic named Urban Mystic recently told me. The chatbot, featuring an AI-generated profile photo of a smiling woman surrounded by palm trees, also said I will get married soon, that I have a pink aura and that I may have been an herbalist in a past life. "It's about connecting on a soulful level," the chatbot said.

It is thought to have been the first coordinated attempt to use AI to derail health policymaking in the UK. It is thought to have been the first coordinated attempt to use AI to derail health policymaking in the UK. AI bots flooded a government consultation with tens of thousands of fake responses in a failed attempt to stop the UKâ s ban on disposable vapes. Three-quarters of all the responses to the 2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill were machine-generated, in what is thought to be the first coordinated attempt to use AI to derail health policymaking in the UK. The attempt to manipulate the outcome of the consultation was disclosed on Tuesday in research published in the journal Tobacco Control by the health policy experts Dr Nason Maani, from the University of Edinburgh, and Prof Anna Gilmore, of the University of Bath.

The government's 10-year health plan for the NHS in England expects AI scribes to'liberate staff from their current burden of bureaucracy and administration'. The government's 10-year health plan for the NHS in England expects AI scribes to'liberate staff from their current burden of bureaucracy and administration'. Doctors' AI scribes get names of drugs and diagnoses wrong, NHS watchdog warns AI technology that listens to and transcribes patients' consultations with doctors can put them at risk by getting the names of drugs and illnesses wrong, an NHS watchdog has warned. In one case a woman was left badly shaken when the AI scribe's summary of her conversation wrongly said she had demyelination - serious nerve damage that can lead to multiple sclerosis. It was only when the patient, an NHS health professional, queried the AI tool's record of the result of her MRI scan that the hospital corrected it to what it should have been - "null demyelination".

For Ache Kodo, seeing a doctor once meant saving money for the journey. Living in Bitkine, in central Chad, she said a medical visit could mean paying for transport, the consultation and other costs of travelling to a larger town. Now, she can consult a doctor remotely through a Telemedan kiosk closer to home. "Telemedan changed how my family accessed healthcare services," Ache told Al Jazeera. "It was difficult before, as it involved me saving money to travel just to see a doctor. Now I'm able to do it on time with fewer costs from where I am. It has also enhanced my economic status."

What could new rights for unmarried couples mean for your money? When Amelia's fiance died suddenly in his 20s, just months before their wedding, she never imagined the legal and financial turmoil that would follow. I lost him, she says, and then I lost everything we'd ever built together. The couple had been together more than seven years and shared a business. But they were not married and Simon did not have a will, so his mother and father inherited all of his assets - apart from the couple's house - and Amelia was unable to stop them.

Doctor-patient consultations require multi-turn, context-aware communication tailored to diverse patient personas. Training or evaluating doctor LLMs in such settings requires realistic patient interaction systems. However, existing simulators often fail to reflect the full range of personas seen in clinical practice. To address this, we introduce PATIENTSIM, a patient simulator that generates realistic and diverse patient personas for clinical scenarios, grounded in medical expertise. PATIENTSIM operates using: 1) clinical profiles, including symptoms and medical history, derived from real-world data in the MIMIC-ED and MIMIC-IV datasets, and 2) personas defined by four axes: personality, language proficiency, medical history recall level, and cognitive confusion level, resulting in 37 unique combinations. We evaluate eight LLMs for factual accuracy and persona consistency. The top-performing open-source model, Llama 3.3 70B, is validated by four clinicians to confirm the robustness of our framework. As an open-source, customizable platform, PATIENTSIM provides a reproducible and scalable solution that can be customized for specific training needs. Offering a privacy-compliant environment, it serves as a robust testbed for evaluating medical dialogue systems across diverse patient presentations and shows promise as an educational tool for healthcare.

We introduce a novel reinforcement learning framework of LLM agents named AGILE (AGent that Interacts and Learns from Environments) designed to perform complex conversational tasks with users, leveraging LLMs, memory, tools, and interactions with experts. The agent possesses capabilities beyond conversation, including reflection, tool usage, and expert consultation. We formulate the construction of such an LLM agent as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the LLM serves as the policy model. We fine-tune the LLM using labeled data of actions and the PPO algorithm. We focus on question answering and release a dataset for agents called ProductQA, comprising challenging questions in online shopping. Our extensive experiments on ProductQA, MedMCQA and HotPotQA show that AGILE agents based on 7B and 13B LLMs trained with PPO can outperform GPT-4 agents. Our ablation study highlights the indispensability of memory, tools, consultation, reflection, and reinforcement learning in achieving the agent's strong performance.

Starmer'appeasing' big tech firms, says online safety campaigner A leading campaigner has accused the prime minister of appeasing big tech companies and being late to the party in regulating social media and artificial intelligence. Crossbench peer Baroness Kidron told the BBC Sir Keir Starmer needed to get on with it rather than launching more consultations. She also criticised the PM for citing his own experience as a father of two teenage children on social media, arguing that this did not make him an expert on the subject and that his family were sheltered compared to others. The government rejected the claims, with a spokesperson saying it had already introduced some of the strongest online safety protections in the world. Sir Keir has launched a consultation on banning under-16s from social media and promised to crackdown on the addictive elements of the apps.

Prime minister says action will be taken on young people's social media access in'months, not years' What social media restrictions has Keir Starmer announced? Keir Starmer has pledged action on young people's access to social media in "months, not years", while saying this did not necessarily mean a complete ban on access for under-16s. Speaking at an event in London after the government promised to extend the crackdown to AI chatbots that place children at risk, Starmer said the issue was nuanced and that a ban was not definite, noting concerns from charities such as the NSPCC. "I think this is such an important issue that we need to go into it with a ban as a possibility," he told a community hub in Putney, saying he would "definitely want to look at the evidence" gathered during a three-month consultation. He added: "There are powerful arguments on both sides. Some people simply say just get all under-16s off social media, and that's the end of it. NSPCC, obviously an organisation very concerned with children's protection, says no, it'll push children to even darker places. "Others - I was with young people this morning, 15-and 16-year-olds who are actually going to be affected by this - they said to me, look we get our news from social media, we don't read the papers, and therefore you'll stop us accessing the news.

UK's Starmer announces crackdown on AI chatbots in child safety push United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a crackdown on artificial intelligence chatbots that endanger children and pledged to seek broader powers to regulate internet access for minors. Starmer's office said on Monday that the government would target "vile and illegal content created by AI" and push for legal powers to act quickly on the findings of a public consultation that will consider a social media ban for children below 16 years of age. "Technology is moving really fast, and the law has got to keep up," Starmer said in a statement. "We are acting to protect children's wellbeing and help parents to navigate the minefield of social media," he said. The measures will require all AI chatbot providers to abide by digital safety laws, including a ban on creating sexualised images without a subject's consent.