AI & the self

‘My social life completely plummeted’

The focus on AI safety disasters ignores everyday harms

Opposition deepfake video sparks outrage in Spain ahead of election

IEEE Offers More Services to Cities That Want to Be Smarter

Meet the Anthropic Engineer Keeping Its AI Agent Trustworthy

Too tired to be judged by humans?

Across four experiments, greater social jet lag was linked to stronger preference for AI evaluators, largely through social anxiety — and the effect depended on whether AI was framed as neutral.

Perceived algorithmic recommendation features and information fatigue among social media users

Cross-cultural modeling of body satisfaction using social media selfies and self-descriptions

Kinky dating app Feeld’s founders share in record £3.8m dividend after sales jump

Social Media Bans Aren’t Enough to Make Children Safe

Even before France approved legislation banning social media for children under 15 last January, 13-year-old Benjamin was already wondering what life without social media would look like.

StressNet: Neuromorphic multimodal stress recognition from wearable physiological signals

A newly verified research paper examines whether stressNet: Neuromorphic multimodal stress recognition from wearable physiological signals.

What makes a political deepfake believable enough to share?

A new study examines how plausibility, media literacy and prior attitudes relate to detection, liking and intentions to share political deepfakes on social media.

Clinical trials look different on Bluesky and X

An exploratory comparison of more than 14,000 public posts found markedly different communication patterns across the two platforms — a reminder that the medium can shape how medical research reaches people.

Can machine learning spot student distress in wartime?

A study of 225 university students in Lebanon tested whether machine-learning models could identify depression, anxiety and stress during the 2024 war — with promising internal performance and a clear need for independent validation.

What age gates can — and cannot — fix about social media

Australia’s under-16 restrictions are reducing account ownership for some young users, but workarounds and privacy trade-offs show why prohibition alone cannot solve the design problem.

The age a model assigns you

When software estimates how fast a brain is ageing, a private process becomes a score. Identity and threat follow the number — not, automatically, the tissue.

Sleep that does not have to be earned

A wearable that shifts REM without a pill is a real, early result. What it is not, yet, is a new moral of the night.

The inner voice that is no longer only yours

After enough fluent completions, some people notice a stranger’s cadence in thought. That report is phenomenological. Inner-speech science is older, and it does not yet include this residue as a finding.

Motivation is not a mood — it is a circuit people will sell

Animal work on orexin and persistence is real. The leap from rat breakpoint to a human product is not.

The mind that outsources thinking

When fluent machines answer before we finish forming the question, judgment does not vanish overnight. It thins — rehearsal by rehearsal — until expertise becomes a feeling we can no longer check.

Empathy at scale: what chatbots cannot borrow

Language models can produce caring sentences. Empathy, in the human literature, is not only sentences.

When the machine becomes company

Always-available agents do not only answer questions. They enter the attachment system — quietly changing who we reach for first when the mind will not settle.

What you click becomes what you seem to want

Personalisation is not only convenience. Over time it shapes what feels familiar — often without a reflective decision.