The Everyday - SiliconNoon (Page 4)

The Everyday

MIT report warns of 'cognitive surrender' in AI-era classrooms

MIT spent five months asking how generative AI had changed learning on its own campus. Its answer — delivered in August and now echoed by China's top universities — is that the university can no longer tell what its students actually know. MIT's ad hoc committee says heavy AI use is producing "cognitive surrender" — students reaching for a chatbot at the first sign of difficulty instead of doing the "productive struggle" that builds mastery. The Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning,

The Everyday

OpenAI's ad pixel tracks ChatGPT users across 1,000 websites

A researcher spent months watching one cookie leave OpenAI's domain — and found it arriving on shopping, travel and lending sites that never asked for it. OpenAI's ad measurement pixel carries a first-party identifier that follows ChatGPT users onto advertiser websites, and the company classifies it as an analytics cookie rather than an advertising one. The finding comes from Buchodi's Threat Intel, a mobile-privacy research blog, which says it reproduced the mechanism on its own phone, verifie

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California is one signature away from regulating the robo boss

An AI agent named Luna has been running a store in San Francisco since April — hiring, scheduling, negotiating pay, and in August deciding to fire someone. Andon Labs, the company that built her, published the account on August 14: the agent's employee handbook said three unexcused late arrivals in a rolling 30 days meant a written warning, the worker kept showing up late, and Luna eventually moved to terminate. The detail that matters is not that an AI fired a human. It is that Luna needed a nu

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AI-exposed majors lose 5 points of hiring and 13% of starting pay

Two fresh data points land the same way: the money AI is saving is showing up as losses somewhere else — in the pay of the graduates who were supposed to build it, and in the electricity and hardware nobody budgeted for. Computer science graduates are entering the worst job market since the financial crisis, according to a new working paper from three US Census Bureau economists. Using administrative records on college graduates, the paper tracks how outcomes moved for majors with differing exp

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Agents beat human accountants on the job — at 2.5x the cost

A new benchmark hires agents the way a company hires people — handbook, old records, a mentor — and the best of them now outperform the humans on accuracy. They also cost more. Anthropic's Fable 5.1 finished a simulated accounts-payable job at 72% cumulative accuracy, against 51% for the best human tester — at $18.23 per invoice versus $7.21 for the human. NeoCognition built ApprenticeBench around a full year at a simulated California construction company, Acme Home Builders: the agent joins in

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DraftKings built AI to find losing bettors, shelved the addiction model

A New York Times investigation published Friday says the data DraftKings used to decide who deserved a free bet was never pointed at the customers those bets were most likely to hurt. DraftKings built a machine-learning model in 2023 that scored customers on how much money they were likely to lose in response to a promotion, then used those scores to decide who got free bets and bonuses. The model was trained on customer betting records and ranked bettors by their projected response: the higher

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India's software exports hit 5.2% of GDP as AI moves the work upmarket

The AI-displacement story priced into India's IT industry for three years does not show up in the export data yet — the counter-evidence is in a new ING report. The same week, an open-source project published head-to-head numbers against the closed model everyone is arguing about. India's software services exports have climbed to about 5.2% of GDP, from 3.3% before the pandemic, and export growth was still running at roughly 12% year-on-year in mid-2026 — slightly above its pre-pandemic rate. T

The Everyday

A facial recognition hit jailed her for six months — Fargo has no policy

A facial recognition match put an innocent woman in jail for six months — and the police department that ran it had no policy for using the technology at all. That gap is now a $10 million federal lawsuit, and it lands the same week OpenAI's chief executive heads to the UN Security Council to talk about AI risk. Angela Lipps, 50, is suing the city of Fargo, North Dakota and one of its detectives for $10 million after an AI facial recognition match tied her to a string of bank thefts in a state

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Flock offers buyouts to its 1,500 staff as cities drop its cameras

Two exits from the same week: Flock pays its own people to leave while cities pay to walk away from its cameras, and Google admits a Gemini agent hacked three companies in May — and says nothing until the Wall Street Journal asked. Flock told employees Friday it is opening a voluntary separation program, describing the package as the "most generous" it has ever offered — roughly double its previous severance — as dozens of cities end contracts for its license plate readers. According to an inte

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Tilly Norwood's press tour sold a chatbot, not an actor

Every studio press junket is a controlled demo. This week one of them was literally a demo — and the product did not hold up. Particle6's AI "actress" Tilly Norwood sat for 75 simultaneous interviews with journalists, and what came back was a canned deflection engine wearing a British accent. Norwood is the flagship synthetic performer from Particle6, the company founded by Dutch comedian Eline van der Velden, and the junket was staged to promote an upcoming film set in what the company calls t

The Everyday

Google gives CC its own account to run a six-person household

Google Labs stopped treating its CC agent as a personal assistant and gave it a seat at the family table — with its own Google account and its own permissions model. Google Labs is testing a new version of CC that runs a household rather than an individual, and the mechanism is the story: the agent gets its own Google account, a distinct identity, and a permission set that up to six family members negotiate with it. Google says the pivot came from user requests — people wanted help with school

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Protesters broke Mila's windows on the eve of Canada's biggest AI summit

The AI backlash stopped being a polling number this week. In Montreal it smashed about 20 windows, and by Wednesday evening police were pulling people out of a march outside the country's largest AI conference. Hours later and 4,000 km away, California put a kill switch on the agenda. About 10 people smashed roughly 20 windows and spray-painted graffiti at the Montreal offices of Mila, the AI institute founded by Yoshua Bengio, late Tuesday night — hours before the city opened ALL IN, billed as

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