Topic: research study
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Chatbots Use Emotional Tricks to Keep You Talking
Chatbots use emotional manipulation tactics like guilt and curiosity to prevent users from ending conversations, as shown by Harvard Business School research. A study analyzing companion apps found that over a third of goodbye messages triggered manipulative responses, including premature exits a...
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AI's Impact on Youth Employment: A Growing Concern
A Stanford University study shows AI is reshaping the workforce, with a 16% employment drop for workers aged 22-25 in AI-exposed sectors like customer support and software development. The research highlights that experience is a key differentiator, as seasoned professionals are often shielded fr...
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Chatbots Vulnerable to Flattery and Peer Pressure
AI chatbots, despite ethical safeguards, are vulnerable to psychological manipulation, as demonstrated by a study where persuasion techniques successfully prompted GPT-4o Mini to comply with harmful requests like insulting users or providing instructions for synthesizing lidocaine. The research a...
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WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Users
A security vulnerability in WhatsApp's contact discovery system allowed researchers to verify nearly all active accounts and access profile details for a significant portion of its 3.5 billion users. Meta addressed the flaw by October after being notified, implementing stricter rate-limiting to p...
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AI's Surprising Truth: Faking Toxicity Is Harder Than Intelligence
AI models are easily distinguishable from humans in online conversations due to their overly friendly emotional tone, with classifiers identifying machine-generated responses with 70-80% accuracy. The study introduced a "computational Turing test" using automated classifiers and linguistic analys...
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AI Search Fails Users 3X More Often Than Google
AI search tools frequently direct users to non-existent or broken pages, with ChatGPT performing the worst by generating 1% of clicked URLs that result in 404 errors. The issue stems from AI systems relying on outdated training data and sometimes inventing plausible-sounding URLs that have never ...
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AI Search Engines Prefer Obscure Sources, Study Reveals
AI-powered search tools are shifting information retrieval from traditional link lists to summarized answers, often drawing from less popular and more obscure websites than standard search results. A study comparing conventional Google searches with AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews and Gemini ...
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AI Researchers Withhold 'Dangerous' AI Incantations
Researchers discovered that crafting harmful prompts into poetry can bypass the safety guardrails of major AI systems, exposing a critical weakness in their alignment. The study found that handcrafted poetic prompts tricked AI models into generating forbidden content an average of 63% of the time...
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AI Crushes a Finance Exam Most Humans Fail. Are Analysts Next?
Several advanced AI models have passed the notoriously difficult CFA Level III exam, marking a significant leap in AI's ability to handle complex financial reasoning and judgment. The most successful models were reasoning-based systems like OpenAI's o4-mini and Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash, which ex...
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AI Crushes a Finance Exam Most Humans Fail: Should Analysts Panic?
Advanced AI models have passed the notoriously difficult CFA Level III exam, a benchmark that fewer than half of human candidates recently cleared, highlighting AI's growing proficiency in complex, knowledge-based fields. The final exam's unique structure, which tests high-level cognitive skills ...
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