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Misinformation inciting harm to refugees, UNHCR says

The Japan Times

Sudanese women gather for a hot meal in al-Rahmaniyah camp for displaced people, near the city of El-Obeid in the southern Kordofan region of Sudan on Tuesday. Geneva - Misinformation and hate speech are inciting harm to refugees, with artificial intelligence exacerbating the spread, the United Nations warned Tuesday, as it urged tech giants to help turn the tide. However, if handled the right way, AI could be put to good use in managing humanitarian crises, said UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. UNHCR is taking part in the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, putting across its point that the world's major displacement crises are often twinned with "information crises". The summit is an attempt by the wider U.N. to focus on using AI's potential to serve humanity by solving global challenges, and to look at the state of AI standards.


Pete Holmes Is Not Reading Your Email

WIRED

"You can make a living, you can have a life, and leave 55,000 emails unread with a big fuck off." Pete Holmes has Crashing "Silly Silly Fun Boy" I love this phone so much. The first thing I love about it is that it did not do well. And when I saw it, I couldn't wait to get it. People often think it's an Android. People often don't know what it is. I like having a phone nobody else has.


The Download: metric weaknesses and AI elephant warnings

MIT Technology Review

Plus: The US has allowed Anthropic to release Mythos 5 to "trusted" orgs. There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt. Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, get outside more, and bring order to the messiness and uncertainty of my daily existence. But external metrics and data can never capture what's truly important.


Over-reliance on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, study finds

The Guardian

TECHNOLOGY IT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHATGPT Illustration picture shows the ChatGPT artificial intelligence software, which generates human-like conversation, Friday 03 February 2023 in Lierde. TECHNOLOGY IT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHATGPT Illustration picture shows the ChatGPT artificial intelligence software, which generates human-like conversation, Friday 03 February 2023 in Lierde. A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the latest research to find that relying too much on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, and potentially decrease our ability to discern misinformation for ourselves. As AI tools are becoming more sophisticated and accessible, manipulated images and misleading headlines are becoming more common. AI can be part of the solution, and has proved useful in helping users identify fake content - but there's a cost to using it this way, the new research suggests.


Truth over Tricks: Measuring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning in Misinformation Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Misinformation detectors often rely on superficial cues (i.e., shortcuts) that correlate with misinformation in training data but fail to generalize to the diverse and evolving nature of real-world misinformation. This issue is exacerbated by large language models (LLMs), which can easily generate convincing misinformation using simple prompts. We introduce TruthOverTricks, a unified evaluation paradigm for measuring shortcut learning in misinformation detection. TruthOverTricks categorizes shortcut behaviors into intrinsic shortcut induction and extrinsic shortcut injection, and evaluates seven representative detectors across 14 popular benchmarks, along with two new factual misinformation datasets, NQ-Misinfo and Streaming-Misinfo. Empirical results reveal that existing detectors suffer severe performance degradation when exposed to both naturally occurring and adversarially crafted shortcuts. To address this, we propose the Shortcut Mitigation Framework (SMF), an LLM-augmented data augmentation framework that mitigates shortcut reliance through paraphrasing, factual summarization, and sentiment normalization. SMF consistently enhances robustness across 16 benchmarks, forcing models to rely on deeper semantic understanding rather than shortcut cues.


Shadowcast: Stealthy Data Poisoning Attacks Against Vision-Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in generating textual responses from visual inputs, but their versatility raises security concerns. This study takes the first step in exposing VLMs' susceptibility to data poisoning attacks that can manipulate responses to innocuous, everyday prompts. We introduce Shadowcast, a stealthy data poisoning attack where poison samples are visually indistinguishable from benign images with matching texts. Shadowcast demonstrates effectiveness in two attack types. The first is a traditional Label Attack, tricking VLMs into misidentifying class labels, such as confusing Donald Trump for Joe Biden.


Top AI ethics and policy issues of 2025 and what to expect in 2026

AIHub

This happened as generative and agentic systems became essential in key sectors worldwide. This feature highlights the major AI ethics and policy developments of 2025, and concludes with a forward-looking perspective on the ethical and policy challenges likely to shape 2026.