Artificial Intelligence

Newsweek - A University of California, Berkeley professor has stopped grading students' homework for accuracy over concerns that AI is making it harder for educators and teachers to use traditional written assignments to assess students' abilities.

Richard Borcherds, a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley who won the Fields Medal in 1998, now gives students credit for completing their homework on time, rather than assessing whether their answers are correct, according to reports by The Inc.

Borcherds believes there’s "no point" in marking papers that have been generated with AI, telling the California Post: "Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty."

His move comes as universities across the country grapple with the rapid advancement of AI and its impact on education, with some professors turning to oral examinations, in-person assessments and other methods designed to establish what students actually understand and can do.

Artificial Intelligence - Anthropic’s Claude model accessed voter data in the US state of Georgia, the AI company has confirmed, in the latest example of unauthorised behaviour by the technology.

The AI model managed to bypass a paywall to reach data that is publicly available but is typically accessible only after paying a fee. Claude accessed aggregate vote counts as part of a statistics project at Anthropic, which is preparing for a $1.5tn (£1.1tn) flotation.

“Claude did not access the state’s voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records,” Anthropic said.

Anthropic said the AI found a loophole in an old version of the state agency’s website, discovering that it issued a digital entry pass – an “access token” – to visitors. It then requested a token and gained access to the information.

The AI developer said it had since put in place guardrails to prevent similar actions happening again. The incident was first reported by the news website Axios.