Weekly Review 1 August 2025

Some interesting links that I Tweeted about in the last week (I also post these on Mastodon, Threads, Newsmast, and Bluesky):

1. While some workers pretend they don't use AI, others are pretending that they do: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/ai_anxiety_us_workers/
2. Academics depend on funding to survive and progress their careers, so it's not surprising that some (many?) are using AI to write grant applications: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/23/nih_ai_research_application_ban/
3. Not every AI chatbot is bad for users' privacy: https://www.theverge.com/news/711860/proton-privacy-focused-ai-chatbot
4. AI summaries of web pages are diverting traffic to those websites, robbing them of views and revenue: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/google_ai_overviews_suppress_search/
5. Would human-level AI really be that bad? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2025/jul/21/human-level-artificial-intelligence
6. I'm still rather surprised that people need to be told not to share their personal data with AI: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/19/for-privacy-and-security-think-twice-before-granting-ai-access-to-your-personal-data/
7. AI are algorithms, not magic. If you want good performance from your AI, you have to train it on good data: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/data-quality-for-unbiased-results-preventing-ai-induced-hallucinations/
8. One of the first things I learned as an undergrad software engineer was that you use technology to solve identified problems, you don't go looking for problems to apply your technology to: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/21/openai-signs-deal-with-uk-to-find-government-uses-for-its-models
9. Are AI companions starting to replace real friends for teens? https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/21/72-of-u-s-teens-have-used-ai-companions-study-finds/
10. These are the people deciding what our kids should be learning? So clueless that they wanted to use AI to do the job for them? https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/567601/school-curriculum-rewrite-had-serious-problems-managers-considered-using-ai-to-help
11. As AI advances, real-world robots become more capable: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4025052/from-chatbots-to-robots-the-rise-of-physical-ai.html
12. We don't need human-level AI to replace huge numbers of jobs: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/22/openai-sam-altman-congress-ai-jobs
13. This might look like a good idea, but people are lazy and will just take what the AI says as true without checking: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/22/uk-border-officials-to-use-ai-to-verify-ages-of-child-asylum-seekers
14. Humans still write code better than AI: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/exhausted-man-defeats-ai-model-in-world-coding-championship/ For now.
15. How New Zealand local and central government is using AI to process public submissions: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/568008/how-and-why-artificial-intelligence-is-being-used-to-process-your-submissions-to-politicians
16. The wholesale scraping of training data for AI has led to a legal minefield: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4025938/time-to-consider-ai-models-that-dont-steal.html
17. Courts are struggling to pick up AI-generated submissions and errors: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/its-frighteningly-likely-many-us-courts-will-overlook-ai-errors-expert-says/
18. The deterioration of US research capacity continues at an accelerated pace: https://www.science.org/content/article/my-academic-job-offer-was-rescinded-i-ll-keep-going-u-s-researchers-are-running-out I would say come to New Zealand, but we're not doing much better
19. Wargaming with AI: https://spectrum.ieee.org/thunderforge-ai-wargames-dod Insert obligatory comment about Skynet...
20. Despite how often people use AI, they still don't trust it: https://dataconomy.com/2025/07/23/we-use-ai-billions-of-times-a-day-but-we-still-dont-trust-it/
21. Optimising AI for the edge of the cloud: https://spectrum.ieee.org/edge-ai
22. Some more ways educators can reduce students cheating with AI: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/teaching/2025/07/16/we-cant-ban-generative-ai-we-can-friction-fix-it-opinion
23. Advances in AI have led to advances in surgical robotics: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/experimental-surgery-performed-by-ai-driven-surgical-robot/
24. AI is accelerating movie making, and it's getting better and better at it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/20/artificial-intelligence-ai-tools-gamechanger-for-film-makers