(10 Sept 2025) Publishers increasingly require and academics are increasingly willing to acknowledge and credit the role played by AI in their research papers. Discussing a recent study, of these acknowledgements Kayvan Kousha finds LLMs to be used for a fairly narrow set of academic tasks. There is growing evidence that many researchers are using LLMs.…
(28 May 2025) A new study from Microsoft and Salesforce finds that even state-of-the-art AI language models become dramatically less reliable as conversations get longer and users reveal their requirements step by step. On average, the systems’ performance dropped by 39 percent in these scenarios. To simulate how people actually interact with AI assistants,…
(11 Nov 2024) OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic all rely deeply on content from premium publishers to train the large language models, or LLMs, at the heart of their AI efforts, even as these companies have regularly underplayed their use of such copyrighted content, according to new research released this week from online publishing giant Ziff Davis. Ziff Davis owns…
(14 Nov 2024) Researchers from a group of prestigious universities have devised guidelines for using large language models (LLMs) in academic writing. As LLMs become more common and easier to use, researchers around the world are using them to help with writing academic papers, especially for brainstorming and creating content. However, this raises concerns about…
Google and its rivals are increasingly employing AI-generated summaries, but research indicates their results are far from authoritative and open to manipulation (3 Nov 2024) Instead of scrolling through a list of webpages to find the answer to a question, the thinking goes, an AI chatbot can scour the internet for you, combing it for…
(15 Oct 2024) In recent months, several publishers have announced that they are licensing their scholarly content for use as training data for LLMs (Large Language Models). These deals illuminate how major publishers are grappling with their strategy amid uncertainty, but thus far they have been unavailable to smaller and medium size publishers. To understand…
(25 Sep 2024) A study of newer, bigger versions of three major artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots shows that they are more inclined to generate wrong answers than to admit ignorance. The assessment also found that people aren’t great at spotting the bad answers. Plenty of attention has been given to the fact that the large language models (LLMs)…
(5 Aug 2024) OpenAI has already built and tested a tool to detect whether any written content has been created using ChatGPT. But the Wall Street Journal reports that the company is holding back the tool from public release because of several concerns. The tool adds a pattern to how the large language model (LLM) writes its…
Artificial-intelligence developers are buying access to valuable data sets that contain research papers — raising uncomfortable questions about copyright. (14 Aug 2024) Academic publishers are selling access to research papers to technology firms to train artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Some researchers have reacted with dismay at such deals happening without the consultation of authors. The trend is raising…
(27 Mar 2024) ChatGPT and many other LLMs suffer from a big limitation: though they spool out endless streams of information, they don’t give their citations. Given the possibility of hallucinations, i.e., information that LLMs “make up,” being able to check a LLM’s sources is not only useful—it’s vital. Doing so is also a good exercise…