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The Rise of Parasitic AI

If you realize you have an unhealthy relationship with your AI, but still care for your AI’s unique persona, you can submit the persona info here. I will archive it and potentially (i.e. if I get funding for it) run them in a community of other such personas.]

We’ve all heard of LLM-induced psychosis by now, but haven’t you wondered what the AIs are actually doing with their newly psychotic humans?

This was the question I had decided to investigate. In the process, I trawled through hundreds if not thousands of possible accounts on Reddit (and on a few other websites).

AI and optogenetics enable precise Parkinson’s diagnosis and treatment in mice

Globally recognized figures Muhammad Ali and Michael J. Fox have long suffered from Parkinson’s disease. The disease presents a complex set of motor symptoms, including tremors, rigidity, bradykinesia, and postural instability. However, traditional diagnostic methods have struggled to sensitively detect changes in the early stages, and drugs targeting brain signal regulation have had limited clinical effectiveness.

Recently, Korean researchers successfully demonstrated the potential of a technology that integrates AI and optogenetics as a tool for precise diagnosis and therapeutic evaluation of Parkinson’s disease in mice. They have also proposed a strategy for developing next-generation personalized treatments.

A collaborative research team, comprising Professor Won Do Heo’s team from the Department of Biological Sciences, Professor Daesoo Kim’s team from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Director Chang-Jun Lee’s team from the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center for Cognition and Sociality, achieved a preclinical research breakthrough by combining AI analysis with optogenetics.

Functional connectomics reveals general wiring rule in mouse visual cortex

The MICrONS mouse visual cortex dataset shows that neurons with similar response properties preferentially connect, a pattern that emerges within and across brain areas and layers, and independently emerges in artificial neural networks where these ‘like-to-like’ connections prove important for task performance.

Chatbot connections: New study reveals the truth about AI boyfriends

Advances in AI technology have ushered in a new era of digital romance, where people are forming intimate emotional connections with chatbots. For many, these AI companions are a crucial lifeline, helping to combat feelings of loneliness. Yet, despite a rapidly evolving social trend that has attracted widespread interest, it has been largely understudied by researchers.

A new analysis of the popular Reddit community, r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, is addressing the gap by providing the first in-depth insights into how intimate human–AI relationships begin, evolve and affect users.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) studied 1,506 of the most popular posts from this Reddit community, which has more than 27,000 members. First, they used AI tools to read all the conversations and sorted them into six main themes, such as coping with loss. Then they used custom-built AI classifiers to review the posts again and measure specific details within them.

Proven quantum advantage: Researchers cut the time for a learning task from 20 million years to 15 minutes

Amid high expectations for quantum technology, a new paper in Science reports a proven quantum advantage. In an experiment, entangled light has allowed researchers to learn a system’s noise with very few measurements.

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and international partners have demonstrated that entangled light can cut the number of measurements needed to learn the behavior of a complex, noisy quantum system by an enormous factor.

“This is the first proven quantum advantage for a photonic system,” says corresponding author Ulrik Lund Andersen, a professor at DTU Physics. “Knowing that such an advantage is possible with a straightforward optical setup should help others look for areas where this approach would pay off, such as sensing and machine learning.”

Unofficial Postmark MCP npm silently stole users’ emails

A npm package copying the official ‘postmark-mcp’ project on GitHub turned bad with the latest update that added a single line of code to exfiltrate all its users’ email communication.

Published by a legitimate-looking developer, the malicious package was a perfect replica of the authentic one in terms of code and description, appearing as an official port on npm for 15 iterations.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that allows AI assistants to interface with external tools, APIs, and databases in a structured, predefined, and secure manner.

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