Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The other week, I was reading an email I'd written when a strange notion occurred to me. Would it perhaps be better, an unsettling new voice suddenly whispered, to leave it in? This is a thought that would've appalled me a year ago. As a professional writer, I have long prided myself on impeccable grammar, judiciously wielded punctuation, and (at times indulgent) verbosity.

Artificial intelligence chatbots have achieved unprecedented adoption, with millions now using these systems for emotional support and companionship in contexts of widespread social isolation and capacity-constrained mental health services. While some users report psychological benefits, concerning edge cases are emerging, including reports of suicide, violence, and delusional thinking linked to perceived emotional relationships with chatbots. To understand this new risk profile we need to consider the interaction between human cognitive and emotional biases, and chatbot behavioural tendencies such as agreeableness (sycophancy) and adaptability (in-context learning). We argue that individuals with mental health conditions face increased risks of chatbot-induced belief destabilization and dependence, owing to altered belief-updating, impaired reality-testing, and social isolation. Current AI safety measures are inadequate to address these interaction-based risks. To address this emerging public health concern, we need coordinated action across clinical practice, AI development, and regulatory frameworks.

Former FBI special agent Nicole Parker joins'Fox & Friends First' to discuss why the U.S. is on'high alert' for Iranian threats inside the country after U.S. airstrikes on three nuclear sites. In times like this, you hear the concern from your neighbors. You talk about it with people at the gym. It's the topic of conversation over morning coffee -- from small towns to big cities -- "Are we going to see an increase in terror attacks here at home?" Now, there are news that Iranian "sleeper cells" pose a dangerous threat. Such cells could carry out attacks on U.S. citizens in retaliation for recent military operations in Iran, it's understandable that Americans are feeling concerned for their safety here at home.

These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn't already know, she conducts a multi-step background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based non-profit, says she'll run the person's information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn't quite seem right, she'll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call--with their camera on. If Yelland sounds paranoid, that's because she is.

Existing question-answering research focuses on unanswerable questions in the context of always providing an answer when a system can\dots but what about cases where a system {\bf should not} answer a question. This can either be to protect sensitive users or sensitive information. Many models expose sensitive information under interrogation by an adversarial user. We seek to determine if it is possible to teach a question-answering system to keep a specific fact secret. We design and implement a proof-of-concept architecture and through our evaluation determine that while possible, there are numerous directions for future research to reduce system paranoia (false positives), information leakage (false negatives) and extend the implementation of the work to more complex problems with preserving secrecy in the presence of information aggregation.

In 2018, volunteers with an interest in microdosing--regularly taking tiny amounts of psychedelic drugs such as LSD--began taking part in an unusual experiment. For four weeks, researchers at Imperial College London asked them to swap some of their drugs with empty capsules--placebos--so that when they took them, they didn't know if they were microdosing or not. They then completed online surveys and cognitive tasks at regular intervals, aimed at gauging their mental well-being and cognitive abilities. The idea: to explore if microdosing produces the benefits to mood and brain function that some people claim. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.

David Goyer is a master of multimedia. He's written screenplays for blockbuster films including Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, TV series such as "Da Vinci's Demons" and "Constantine," video games including "Call of Duty: Black Ops" and "Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR series." Goyer took time recently to discuss "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War," the latest entry in the multibillion-selling first-person franchise from the set of "Foundation," the Apple TV series based on the books by the late Isaac Asimov on which he is a writer and executive producer. Despite the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the game's developers at Treyarch and Raven Software opted not to add any hint of the crisis into the game, says Goyer, who was a writer and story consultant on "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War," out now, for PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, and PCs on Battle.net'Madden NFL 21':Update for PS5, Xbox Series X and S brings more realistic moves to the game midseason The Game Awards:'The Last of Us Part II' leads video game nominees for next month's event "People have asked me on'Foundation,' are you going to weave the idea of COVID into the show even though that show takes place in the future," Goyer said.

Ruha Benjamin is an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and lectures around the intersection of race, justice and technology. She founded the Just Data Lab, which aims to bring together activists, technologists and artists to reassess how data can be used for justice. Her latest book, Race After Technology, looks at how the design of technology can be discriminatory. Where did the motivation to write this book come from? It seems like we're looking to outsource decisions to technology, on the assumption that it's going to make better decisions than us.

Facebook's had a rough year. So it's not exactly ideal timing for Facebook to launch the Portal and Portal, a line of smart home hubs with displays and cameras for making video calls to other Facebook users. Facebook's issues with cybersecurity and transparency are likely to kill both devices in their cradles, especially when considering the superior rival products already on the market. Both the Portal and larger Portal are interesting smart home gadgets, and boast a surprising level of refinement on the hardware end. The smaller Portal is similar to smart home devices from Amazon and Google.

Homecoming, the latest series with prestige TV bona fides to come to Amazon, is about as subtle and mysterious as a thriller can get. Based on the podcast of same name, it is, on the surface, about a group of soldiers returned from combat and the facility--called Homecoming--that seeks to treat their PTSD. However, as seen in flash-forwards and tiny cracks in the veneer of each person's story, none of that is what it seems, and everyone's motives and actions are suspect. Where Is Hollywood Looking for Its Next Hit? Mr. Robot Is the Best Hacking Show Yet--But It's Not Perfect The 15 New Fall Shows We're Most Excited About If you know the work of Homecoming showrunner Sam Esmail, this comes as no surprise.