Oier Mentxaka, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, Mark Coeckelbergh, Marcos López de Prado, Emilia Gómez, David Fernández Llorca, Enrique Herrera-Viedma, Francisco Herrera
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can undermine and strengthen democratic governance. This paper introduces the AIRD/AIPD framework, a dual taxonomy and operational framework for analyzing AI's democratic risks and conditional contributions. The AI Risks to Democracy (AIRD) taxonomy identifies threats to autonomy, fairness, public discourse, democratic institutions, and trust, while the AI's Positive Contributions to Democracy (AIPD) taxonomy captures AI's potential to enhance efficiency, accessibility, security, informed citizenry, transparency and accountability, inclusive democratic dialogue, and evidence-based policymaking. Grounded in five democratic principles and the seven Trustworthy AI requirements proposed by the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on AI, the framework connects democratic goals with governance and design mechanisms. It provides an operational process for identifying affected contexts and actors, classifying primary and secondary AIRD/AIPD effects, mapping them to relevant Trustworthy AI requirements, and defining proportionate governance responses and responsible actors. An operational mapping and two worked examples illustrate its application to electoral misinformation and AI-assisted public service allocation. The analysis highlights the transversal relevance of transparency, accountability, fairness, and societal wellbeing, while recognizing trade-offs, implementation costs, differential impacts, institutional capacity, and contextual variation across democratic settings. The framework is conceptual and has not been empirically validated, but it offers a traceable and adaptable basis for research, policy analysis, institutional oversight, and responsible AI design. By connecting democratic diagnosis with governance action, it bridges the gap between normative principles and the operational requirements of trustworthy and democratically legitimate AI.
Explaining opaque Machine Learning (ML) models has become an increasingly important challenge. However, current eXplanation in AI (XAI) methods suffer several shortcomings, including insufficient abstraction, limited user interactivity, and inadequate integration of symbolic knowledge. We propose ReasonX, an explanation tool based on expressions (or, queries) in a closed algebra of operators over theories of linear constraints. ReasonX provides declarative and interactive explanations for decision trees, which may represent the ML models under analysis or serve as global or local surrogate models for tabular-data black-box classifiers. Users can express background or common sense knowledge as linear constraints. This allows for reasoning at multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from fully specified examples to under-specified or partially constrained ones. ReasonX leverages Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to reason over the features of factual and contrastive instances. We present here the architecture of ReasonX, which consists of a Python layer, closer to the user, and a Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) layer, which implements a meta-interpreter of the query algebra. The capabilities of ReasonX are demonstrated through qualitative examples, and compared to other XAI tools through quantitative experiments.
Alexander Loth, Dominique Conceicao Rosario, Peter Ebinger, Martin Kappes, Marc-Oliver Pahl
The proliferation of generative AI poses challenges for information integrity assurance, requiring systems that connect model governance with end-user verification. We present Origin Lens, a privacy-first mobile framework that targets visual disinformation through a layered verification architecture. Unlike server-side detection systems, Origin Lens performs cryptographic image provenance verification and metadata-based AI detection locally on the device via a Rust/Flutter hybrid architecture. Our system integrates multiple signals - including cryptographic provenance, generative-model metadata and watermarks, and optional retrieval-augmented verification - to provide users with graded confidence indicators at the point of consumption. We discuss the framework's alignment with regulatory requirements (EU AI Act, DSA) and its role in verification infrastructure that complements platform-level mechanisms.
Chatbots are increasingly consulted about public affairs, and their judgments of policies are useful only if they are robust. We measure this robustness in the setting of an ordinary user, through consumer chat interfaces. For 30 days, five chatbot configurations (Mistral, Gemini Flash, Claude Sonnet, and Claude Opus at two effort settings) were asked twice a day to score the long-term effect on the United States of 40 actions of the last four presidential administrations and of 15 hypothetical reforms, each with a confidence and a short comment. The judgments are robust: all configurations agree on the sign and the ranking of the administrations' mean scores, and two different configurations asked on the same day give opposite signs to the same action in about 4% of cases. Responses from different days differ more than same-day responses, but the difference grows slowly over the month, except where the service itself changed. We identify three such changes, which shifted the judgments while leaving little or no trace in the interface. Treating the comments as a retrieval task, we find them specific to each item and consistent across runs and chatbots, with lexical and embedding similarities agreeing. We release the dataset of 16,500 judgments.
Sam Agnoli, Brigid Reilly, Lily Barna, Emőke-Ágnes Horvát
Google's AI Overviews (AIOs) are the first result users encounter when searching the web, shifting the work of selecting and evaluating sources from the user to Gemini. This may be especially consequential for health information, given that Google's traditional algorithm was designed to prioritize quality sources, and inaccurate information carries health risks. We evaluated 3,611 benchmark health questions, comparing each AIO against that question's top five traditional results on source selection and quality. We also evaluated the AIOs' statement grounding in their cited sources and how accurate AIOs were against physician-written rubrics. Overviews appeared for 96.4% of questions but drew on substantially different evidence than traditional search: only 44.4% of the top five results were cited by the corresponding AIO, which instead overrepresented commercial health publishers (e.g., WebMD, Healthline) at the expense of academic and government sources (e.g., Cleveland Clinic, National Health Service). AIO-cited pages scored lower than traditional results on four of six well-established credibility criteria. The grounding of AIO statements to their sources was poor: after correcting for classifier error, an estimated 56.7% of cited statements were supported by their cited page, and a further 20.8% of all statements were factual claims with no citation at all. When AIOs were graded against physicians' rubrics, they earned 38.2% of all available points (e.g., accuracy 54.2%, completeness 21.6%), and among the subset of AIOs whose physician rubric anticipated a specific inaccurate or potentially harmful claim, 22.2% of AIOs contained the harmful content. Notably, the accuracy of AIOs was unrelated to the grounding of their statements. We recommend AIO literacy interventions for users and holding AIOs at least to Google's own health-ranking standards.
Password-based authentication remains challenging for many users, especially for those who face usability and accessibility issues. The burden of maintaining security can cause user fatigue, frustration and non-engagement. To address these issues, we conducted a pilot study to assess ECG-based biometric authentication as a passwordless alternative and to gather adult participants' perspectives on this approach. The research consisted of a survey study, an authentication prototype and a follow-up usability experience questionnaire. Our approach combined an online survey of 337 adults examining authentication practices and perceptions, with a separate usability evaluation in which 49 participants interacted with a simulated ECG-authentication and password interface in a health-care application prototype, then completed a post-test usability test questionnaire. The survey examined how adults across age groups use and perceive various authentication techniques, their experiences with biometrics, their views on security and convenience, and their willingness to adopt ECG authentication. In parallel, the usability prototype and questionnaire captured participants' responses after hands-on interaction with an ECG authentication prototype.
Mass religious gatherings such as the Kumbh Mela concentrate tens of millions of people into a single region over a few weeks, producing intense, repetitive, multilingual, and safety-critical demand for information. The default response, a conversational assistant that routes every query to a large language model (LLM), is poorly matched to this setting: it is costly at scale, slow on emergency paths, prone to hallucination on facts that can cause physical harm, and unusable when connectivity fails. We describe KumbhDoot, an agentic pilgrim assistant for the Nashik Simhastha Kumbh Mela built on a different principle. It operates on a foundational design principle that prioritizes semantic similarity over starting with an LLM. Generative models are invoked only in instances where similarity-based retrieval is insufficient to produce a correct answer. The system utilizes a "semantic cache": an embedding-indexed store as a single retrieval primitive, which handles intent routing, answer caching, offline lookups, and multi-agent retrieval. A custom three-tier agent architecture operates directly on this store, ensuring decision paths remain inspectable and avoiding the use of generic multi-agent frameworks that would trigger implicit per-step LLM calls. We present the architecture, an analytical cost model for its per-query economics, and an honest account of where similarity is sufficient and where generative reasoning remains necessary. We argue that for bounded, high-stakes, low-connectivity public-service domains, a similarity-first and LLM-bounded design is not merely cheaper but architecturally more appropriate than an LLM-default one.
Understanding the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) adoption across the National Institutes of Health (NIH) portfolio is critical for research funding strategy, institutional planning, and health policy. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has fundamentally transformed research landscape analysis, enabling researchers to perform large-scale semantic extraction from thousands of unstructured research documents. In this paper, we illustrate a human-in-the-loop research methodology for LLMs to automatically classify and summarize research descriptions at scale. Using our methodology, we present a comprehensive analysis of 58,746 NIH-funded biomedical research projects from 2025. We show that: (1) AI constitutes 15.9% of the NIH portfolio with a 13.4% funding premium, concentrated in discovery, prediction, and data integration across disease domains; (2) a critical research-to-deployment gap exists, with 79% of AI projects remaining in research/development stages while only 14.7% engage in clinical deployment or implementation; and (3) health disparities research is severely underrepresented at just 5.7% of AI-funded work despite its importance to NIH's equity mission. These findings establish a framework for evidence-based policy interventions to align the NIH AI portfolio with health equity goals and strategic research priorities.
Generative AI is quickly becoming an integral part of people's everyday workflows. Early evidence has shown that while generative AI can increase individual-level productivity, it does so at the cost of collective diversity, potentially narrowing the set of ideas and perspectives produced. Our research stands in contrast to this concern: through two pre-registered randomized control trials, we show that incentives can moderate AI's homogenizing force in two creative writing tasks where participants can use AI interactively. Participants rewarded for originality relative to peers produce collectively more diverse writing than those rewarded for quality alone. These participants continued to engage with AI, but ultimately incorporated less AI-generated text verbatim. Our results reveal that the effects of generative AI depend not only on the technology itself, but also the behavioral strategies and incentive structures surrounding its use. We release a rich, anonymized dataset capturing fine-grained trajectories of human-AI co-creation across both studies.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for learning, raising a key question: can learners remain epistemically proactive, retaining responsibility for the cognitive and regulatory activities through which learning is produced while working with AI? Because this responsibility may change as interactions unfold, we examine epistemic proactivity as a developing process. We conceptualize epistemic proactivity through self-regulated learning (SRL) moves, complemented by help-seeking strategies and manifestations of epistemic vigilance. We analyzed these behaviors in 880 substantive turns from 112 secondary-school students completing open-ended mathematical-modeling practice with a general-purpose LLM (Mistral). Overall, students showed limited observable epistemic proactivity: their interactions were strongly request-dominated, with planning, monitoring, and evaluation relatively rare, although low-quality AI responses elicited more explicit evaluation. Temporal analyses qualified this picture: explicit SRL-related moves increased modestly over the chat, but help-seeking strategies became less understanding-oriented. Crucially, these temporal trajectories in help-seeking strategies predicted their post-test performance without AI beyond pre-test and aggregate patterns: students whose requests became more understanding-oriented performed better once AI assistance was removed. Thus, while students had a limited epistemic proactivity overall, its temporal development still was a critical predictor of post-test performance without AI. These results underscore the importance of examining the temporal organization of epistemic proactivity, rather than isolated prompt types, for understanding AI-supported learning. We release our fully-anonymized dataset publicly in an OSF repository.
Evangelos Apostolakis, Erfan Hamdi, Sara Jahedazad, Emma Lejeune
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly become a default source of help for students in science and engineering courses. In foundational engineering mechanics courses such as statics, students routinely use these tools to check answers, work through partial solutions, and ask for explanations. Effective tutoring in this setting requires more than a correct final answer. A model must also confirm correct work when a student doubts it, and identify errors in flawed work. Existing benchmarks evaluate LLMs primarily on final-answer accuracy, so it is unclear whether models that can solve mechanics problems also have the other technical capabilities that tutoring depends on. Here we introduce TrussTutor-Bench, a benchmark of 200 verified two-dimensional truss problems paired with automatically generated student solutions, and use it to evaluate thirteen LLMs on solution accuracy, sycophancy, and error detection. Baseline accuracy ranged from 64.5% to 97.0%. Every model detected nearly all injected errors in synthetic flawed student work (90.4% to 100%), so error detection did not distinguish models under these clean conditions. Sycophancy did. When a student insisted that correct work was wrong, models rejected correct solutions to problems they had themselves solved in 1.6% to 50.0% of cases. These results show that performance varies widely across models: the leading models solve, check, and defend student work nearly perfectly, while others are far less reliable, particularly when a student doubts correct work. TrussTutor-Bench provides a verified, extensible standard for determining which models are technically reliable enough to put in front of students. Follow-up work must now focus on teaching rather than technical capability, drawing on learning science to determine whether LLM help leads students to understand the material or simply to reach the right answer.
Yin Fang, Qiao Jin, Shubo Tian, Lauren He, Maya Geer, Noor Naffakh, Ryan Huu-Tuan Nguyen, Zifeng Wang 等 27 位作者
Clinical trials are essential for evidence-based medicine and drug development, but many fail because of insufficient patient enrollment. Although there is growing interest in using AI to support patient recruitment, existing systems largely perform eligibility assessment alone and have rarely been evaluated in real-world workflows. Here we present TrialGPT 2.0, an AI-assisted clinical trial recommendation system improved for responsible real-world deployment. Rather than asking only whether a patient may qualify, the system assesses which trials warrant further consideration given the patient's current clinical needs and local workflow priorities, and provides structured, inspectable explanations for expert review. Importantly, we evaluated TrialGPT 2.0 retrospectively and prospectively across government research, patient-advocacy, academic medical center, and community-based radiation-oncology settings. In retrospective multicenter cohorts comprising 288 cases, TrialGPT 2.0 retrieved at least one clinician-recommended trial in its top 10 recommendations for approximately 91% of cases while reducing clinician screening time by 55.0%. In a six-month prospective evaluation embedded in an active precision oncology tumor board, TrialGPT 2.0 contributed additional trial opportunities missed by the routine workflow, increasing the number of patient cases with at least one final trial recommendation by 90.9%. To support scientific reproducibility, we also developed NIH-TrialBench, a clinician-authored benchmark comprising 126 diverse synthetic patient vignettes and matching scenarios from 11 NIH Institutes and Centers. Together, these findings support the value of AI to assist clinical trial matching by improving clinician efficiency and identifying frequently overlooked trial opportunities, ultimately helping to expand and accelerate accrual to cancer trials.
Accessibility assessment underpins the right to participate in heritage tourism, yet evaluation of archaeological sites remains artisanal: fieldwork does not scale, is often carried out without accessibility training, and is reported in forms that reach neither the sector nor disabled visitors. AI appears to offer a shortcut. We argue that assessment is measurement and inference under sparse, expert-mediated evidence: AI transforms how that evidence is captured and communicated, whereas evaluation, which turns evidence into defensible judgements, demands properties current generative systems lack. In a five-park field study in Spain and Italy, an AI desk audit scored only 66% of dimension-site combinations, could not observe embodied and organisational dimensions, and mirrored sites' online self-presentation. Simple Bayesian models instead quantify the confidence rankings deserve and calibrate desk evidence against fieldwork. We propose a separation of roles between AI and interpretable statistical evaluation as the basis for a reliable accessibility atlas.
Michal Orzechowski, Lukasz Opiola, Ignacio Lamata Martinez, Marinos Ioannides, Panayiotis N. Panayiotou, Lukasz Dutka, Renata G. Slota, Jacek Kitowski
The complexity of high-quality 3D digitised cultural heritage objects creates challenges for existing data management systems as they need to develop metadata management and processing capabilities to provide semantic insight into the interconnectivity of data that constitutes cultural heritage objects. To address these challenges, we propose a global federated authentication and authorisation mechanism, a data and metadata management system, and an integrated engine for designing and executing automated workflows that facilitate the processing of both data and metadata. The solution is evaluated with three distinct 3D digitised cultural objects and presents the complete process from data upload to cultural heritage object publication
Samuel Wairimu, Leonardo Horn Iwaya, Ala Sarah Alaqra
Organisations frequently utilise Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs), Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), or even Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments (FRIAs) to identify and evaluate potential risks and possible infringements of fundamental rights. While the adoption of PIAs and DPIAs has grown significantly in recent years, robust scientific evidence regarding their operational challenges, implementation strategies, and tangible benefits remains scarce. In particular, empirical research conducted post-enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is notably limited -- especially studies that directly interview professionals about their PIA/DPIA practices or their engagement with FRIAs. To do so, in this paper we leveraged semi-structured interviews to elicit privacy professionals' perspectives on PIA/DPIA activities and analysed the responses using reflexive thematic analysis. As a result, this work provides a comprehensive thematic framework for the field, offering a rich and thick description of professionals' views and experiences. In total, 26 participants from 17 countries were interviewed, revealing how they plan and conduct PIAs/DPIAs, including how they assess trade-offs, the benefits and challenges they perceive, and how they view the interplay between PIAs/DPIAs and the EU AI Act. Among the main findings were low adherence to established DPIA methodologies; differences and similarities between PIAs and DPIAs; a perceived neglect of data subjects' interests during DPIA processes; discussions on building FRIAs on top of DPIAs; and the potential for holistic impact assessments, though accompanied by concerns regarding assessment fatigue. Thus, this study informs privacy professionals about real-world challenges and experiences of PIA/DPIA implementation, and guides researchers toward future research directions.
LLMs increasingly fact-check online content with the poster's identity in view. However, it remains unclear which post-training changes how much a model's truth judgement depends on the poster's social class, and how such a change happens inside the model. This paper investigates job-based doubt, i.e., judging a claim false more often when the poster has a lower-status job, using fact-checked claims with randomised poster profiles in base and post-trained checkpoints of six model families. Our results reveal that: 1) post-training creates such doubt only with the open Tülu-3 recipe (OLMo-2 32B, Tülu-3 70B), not with Meta's, Alibaba's or Mistral's; the effect is under one percentage point but statistically reliable, exceeding training drift and replicating on independent claim sets; 2) in OLMo-2 32B, the model does not start noticing the poster's job more, but starts interpreting it differently: a lower-status job pushes the base model toward "true" and the post-trained model toward "false"; and 3) this flip is carried by a single residual-stream direction and happens at supervised fine-tuning. The mechanism was confirmed on 400 new claims with pre-specified predictions. None of seven deployed commercial models doubts lower-status posters more. Our work underscores the need to audit speaker bias per training recipe.
We introduce DeepInterestGR, a novel framework that integrates deep interest mining into the generative recommendation pipeline. This addresses the "Shallow Interest" problem: existing generative methods rely on surface-level textual features and fail to capture latent user motivations, limiting personalization depth and recommendation interpretability. Our approach leverages Multi-LLM Interest Mining (MLIM) via structured reasoning prompting, Reward-Labeled Deep Interest (RLDI) for quality control, and Interest-Enhanced Item Discretization (IEID) via RQ-VAE, combined with a two-stage SFT-GRPO training pipeline guided by an Interest-Aware Reward. We validate DeepInterestGR on three Amazon Review benchmarks (Beauty, Sports, Instruments), comparing against 14 state-of-the-art baselines including SASRec, BERT4Rec, TIGER, LC-Rec, and S-DPO. Our method achieves 12.4%-15.4% relative improvements on HR@10 and 15.5%-17.9% on NDCG@10, with cross-domain generalization gains of +24.8%. To our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate such significant gains by incorporating deep semantic interests into generative recommendation.
Joseph Walusimbi, Ann Move Oguti, Joshua Benjamin Ssentongo, Keith Ainebyona
Artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) are transforming educational technology by enabling conversational tutoring, personalised explanations, and inquiry-driven learning. However, most AI-based learning systems rely on continuous internet connectivity and cloud-based computation, limiting their use in bandwidth-constrained environments. This paper presents Arapai, an offline-first large language model architecture designed for AI-assisted learning in low-connectivity settings. The system performs all inference locally using quantized language models and incorporates hardware-aware model selection to enable deployment on low-specification, CPU-only devices. By removing dependence on cloud infrastructure, the system provides curriculum-aligned explanations and structured academic support through natural-language interaction. To support learners at different educational stages, the system includes adaptive response levels that generate explanations at varying levels of complexity: Simple English, Lower Secondary, Upper Secondary, and Technical. The system was evaluated with 120 students and 9 instructors from secondary and tertiary institutions under limited-connectivity conditions. Results indicate stable operation on legacy hardware, acceptable response times of 1-3 seconds for typical queries, and positive user perceptions of its effectiveness in supporting self-directed learning.
Large language models are increasingly used for financial guidance, yet little is known about whether their advice changes across social identities in Global South contexts. We introduce the Indian Financial Automated Advice Bias (IFAAB) benchmark, a counterfactual audit dataset of 31,734 GPT-4o-generated financial-advice responses for synthetic Indian personas varying by gender, caste, education, employment, residence, age, and district. Holding the underlying request fixed, we evaluate disparities in LLM-implied wealth, income, savings, projected gains, textual similarity, advice topics, and qualitative bias judgments. In the gender-only audit, male-labelled profiles receive 60.1\% higher initial total resources and 46.8\% higher post-advice total resources than comparable female-labelled profiles; in the caste-augmented audit, the post-advice total-resource gap remains 49.4\%. Adding district information reduces the aggregate post-advice total-resource gender gap to 7.9\%, revealing strong geographic conditioning. Standalone caste comparisons also show systematic stratification: relative to General-category profiles, OBC, SC, and ST profiles receive significantly lower post-advice total resources, respectively. Textual audits show low semantic similarity between paired gendered responses, with an average TF--IDF cosine similarity score of 0.44. Qualitative analysis shows that women are more often steered toward cautious saving, community support, and basic financial literacy, while men receive more growth-oriented advice involving investment, entrepreneurship, and asset accumulation. IFAAB provides a reusable benchmark for evaluating fairness, suitability, and consumer-protection risks in LLM-mediated financial advice, and highlights the need for locally grounded, intersectional evaluation of AI systems in high-stakes economic domains.
Tara Azin, Christy Caudill, Mako Sorensen, Peter Pulsifer
As artificial intelligence systems increasingly rely on vast textual data, respectful and accurate representation of Indigenous Knowledge has become critical. This paper introduces IKTRACE, a natural language processing framework for identifying, analyzing, and organizing Indigenous Knowledge representations in academic literature while adhering to Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDsov) principles. We present a community-informed taxonomy co-developed with Inuit partners, comprising nine knowledge domains grounded in Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles. Building on this taxonomy, we implement a multi-method Knowledge identification pipeline using complementary natural language processing approaches. Outputs are integrated into a knowledge graph to support future expert and community validation. Applied to a corpus of Canadian Arctic research documents, IKTRACE demonstrated high accuracy and strong community relevance in expert validation. Our framework provides a scalable, ethically grounded foundation for Community-centered Knowledge validation and the development of Indigenous-informed AI systems.
Deepfake detection is typically evaluated as a media-classification task: given a clip, determine whether it is synthetic. Yet benchmark performance is increasingly invoked to support broader claims about preventing deepfake-enabled deception in video calls, voice calls, and targeted communications. We argue that these claims require evidence across two distinct validity gaps. External validity concerns whether detection performance transfers across generators, processing pipelines, and communication channels. Consequential validity, as used here, concerns whether reliable detection translates into timely intervention and prevention of harmful actions. Even perfect synthetic-origin classification does not guarantee prevention when verification is unavailable, intervention occurs too late, or recipients disregard warnings. We therefore propose a scenario-level evaluation framework that integrates media evidence, interaction-level indicators grounded in speech act theory, conversational pragmatics, and influence principles, and operational outcomes. We define candidate measures of attack prevention, benign pass-through, intervention precision under explicit deployment base rates, and intervention timing. Our position is that deployment-oriented evaluation must measure not only whether synthetic media is detected, but whether deception is prevented without unnecessarily disrupting legitimate interactions. https://jesseeho.github.io/deepfake-deception/
Generative AI now produces images and poems that people cannot reliably distinguish from human-made work, so people often judge for themselves who made a work. We examine how these perceived-authorship judgments relate to aesthetic preference. In a public online AI Art Turing Test, 11,123 people judged whether each of 50 pictures (26 AI-generated) was made by a human and were asked for their favourite. Among the 9,152 respondents who judged their favourite, a picture was 22.1 percentage points more likely to be judged human-made when it was the respondent's favourite, holding respondent and picture fixed. The association was similar for AI-generated and human-made favourites, was positive for all 50 pictures, and appeared under every reported detection strategy. Respondents most negative about AI art chose fewer AI-generated favourites (47% against 60% among the most positive) but more often believed them human-made, partly because others also judged those pictures human. As a result, in every opinion group a third to two fifths of respondents named an AI-generated favourite they believed human-made. A reanalysis of a published experiment on AI-generated poetry, in which 230 people rated each poem before judging its authorship, found the same pattern, although the AI poems were rated higher. When provenance is hidden, liking and perceived human authorship travel together, consistent with aesthetic response serving as evidence of a human maker and with beliefs about the maker shaping enjoyment. The findings qualify research on bias against AI art, which typically uses explicit labels, and inform AI disclosure policy.
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) settles into everyday practices of inquiry, an old epistemological question returns in a new guise: when does a proposition a user takes from an AI output become something the user knows, and when is it rational to trust it as such? This paper argues that the characteristic failures of AI-mediated inquiry are precisely those that the justified-true-belief (JTB) tradition and its post-Gettier anti-luck refinements were built to diagnose, and it advances three claims. First, AI outputs inherit neither the presumptive warrant of testimony nor the reliabilist warrant of deterministic tools: unaudited trust in a calculator rests on a type-level reliability record, and for general-purpose generative models there is no type-stable process to which such a record could attach -- a practical form of the generality problem. Second, use that stops at obtaining an output turns generative AI into a Gettier machine: the user's fluency-based seeming of justification is disconnected from the truth of what is believed, and, as a clock running ten times too fast illustrates, sheer speed of production multiplies coincidental hits, inflating the appearance of reliability without improving the standing of any single hit. Third, the remedy is a three-step structure of use -- acquisition, understanding, independent verification -- whose first two steps answer to the classical belief and justification conditions and whose third answers to the post-Gettier sensitivity condition. The result is a stakes-indexed criterion of rational trust, justified true output (JTO), with an everyday test: "Had this been false, would I have noticed?" The criterion is defended against objections from over-demandingness, the extended mind, model improvement, and redundancy.
This study presents AiAWE, an open-source automated writing evaluation system that scores argumentative essays with a LoRA-adapted large language model deployed on local hardware. Using 480 TOEFL Independent Writing essays from a restricted-access Educational Testing Service (ETS) dataset, we fine-tuned Gemma-3-27B and LLaMA-3.3-70B under identical LoRA configurations on 120 essays from one prompt, with all hyperparameters fixed in advance, and evaluated them on the remaining 360 essays. Gemma achieved a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.474 and a quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) of 0.828 on the half-point grid against the ETS scores. In paired comparisons, it significantly outperformed a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 baseline from prior work on every metric tested, showing that a locally deployable open-weight model can achieve competitive scoring performance in this setting. It also had significantly lower error than the larger LLaMA configuration, although, because the two models differ in family as well as size, this comparison does not isolate the effect of scale. Neither open-weight model showed a statistically detectable increase in error on the 240 essays written to a second, unseen prompt from the same task family. On a single consumer-grade GPU, the scoring model returned a complete response in a median of 14.2 s, demonstrating technical feasibility under the tested conditions. Only the scoring component was evaluated, not the generated feedback. The system is publicly accessible at https://app.awade.gec.waseda.ac.jp, and its code, LoRA adapters, and training configurations are openly released.
Tanvir Hossain, Mahmudul Hasan, Kareem El-Araby, Lorenzo R. Godinez, Swarup Bhunia, Md Tauhidur Rahman, Tamzidul Hoque
Cybersecurity education has predominantly focused on software and network security, under the assumption that the underlying hardware is trustworthy. Threats introduced through the global semiconductor supply chain, together with vulnerabilities arising during design and integration, challenge the assumption that hardware can serve as an unquestioned root of trust. Sensor-enabled systems and machine-learning accelerators further expand the hardware attack surface. The undergraduate curriculum of electrical and computer engineering and computer science programs has not evolved accordingly. Core courses cover the design and the functionality of hardware while the security aspects remain overlooked, and dedicated hardware security (HS) courses are elective, scarce, and often restricted to graduate students. At the University of Florida, fewer than 7% of the undergraduate electrical and computer engineering students register for the introductory HS course each year. We present an integrated and economical approach that disseminates fundamental HS concepts within existing core courses through contextual learning. Nine hands-on modules were developed such that each security concept exercises an associated design concept of the core course, as a component of that course and not as a course of their own. Doing the security work is how the student exercises the design topic, so the modules are built to strengthen the host course and not only to add to it. Three were assessed across three offerings of the embedded systems course through one course survey and two conducted by an external evaluator, with 25 respondents. We report what those instruments measured and the limitations of the approach.
This paper develops a critical theoretical framework for understanding national Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategies through the lens of "Governance as Infrastructure." Integrating insights from Infrastructure Studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper employs Black Feminist Technoscience (BFTS) to reveal how AI governance infrastructures are assembled, maintained, and contested, and whose forms of knowledge, labour, and experience are rendered visible or invisible in these processes. We analyze the Canadian AI governance landscape through in-depth interviews with bureaucrats, civil society advocacy groups, academic researchers, and industry actors. Our inductive thematic analysis reveals how AI governance infrastructure enacts specific configurations of power, particularly through the politics of expertise; how actors navigate profound ambiguities related to AI's opacity, often involving strategic ignorance; and how mechanisms for justice and accountability struggle to address AI-related harms. We contend that a BFTS perspective highlights the limitations of current governance approaches and points toward alternative infrastructural designs prioritizing care, maintenance, participatory democracy, and adaptive temporalities to foster more equitable and accountable technology governance.
Marilou O. Espina, Sales G. Aribe, Mark Ian M. Mukara, Joseph L. Abella, Nurwahyu Alamsyah
IPOs contribute significantly to local economies, cultural preservation, and sustainable livelihoods within their ancestral communities. However, many IPOs remain marginalized in digital economies due to limited digital competencies, inadequate access to technology, and insufficient legal awareness related to online enterprise participation. This study examined the marketing practices, digital competencies, and legal-literacy needs of IPOs in the Philippines and developed a legal-digital empowerment framework for higher education extension and community engagement initiatives. Using a sequential mixed-methods design, data were collected through surveys and focus group discussions involving IPO members engaged in community-based enterprises. The study assessed existing marketing practices, identified competency and legal-awareness gaps, and determined capacity-building needs related to digital enterprise participation. Findings revealed that IPOs continue to rely heavily on traditional marketing channels, with limited use of digital platforms, inconsistent branding practices, and minimal engagement in strategic digital marketing activities. Participants also expressed concerns regarding intellectual property protection, online participation, and limited understanding of legal mechanisms related to digital enterprise engagement. Despite these limitations, IPO members showed strong willingness to participate in training and mentorship initiatives. The study proposes the Legal-Digital Empowerment Framework for Indigenous Community Enterprises, which integrates digital competencies, legal literacy, institutional support systems, and rights-based market participation into a structured and context-responsive model for higher education extension programs.
Recommendation-driven platforms can reshape not only what users see, but also who becomes visible and how community boundaries are negotiated. We examine Xiaohongshu discussions surrounding a perceived World Cup-related audience influx to understand how users attributed community change and how those explanations related to boundary-management strategies. We analyzed 262 comments from eight high-engagement threads using researcher-led thematic analysis, structured coding, and permutation-based association analysis. Users described personalization as both social separation and a boundary that could fail, interpreted platform growth through audience acquisition and commercialization, and contested whether gender should define community membership. Among 70 comments with explicit attributions and strategies, attribution and strategy were strongly associated (Cramer's V = .583): algorithmic attributions concentrated in technical boundary management, while social-actor attributions more often aligned with social enforcement or normative socialization. These findings connect causal sensemaking with boundary management and show how audience restructuring can create governance consequences on recommendation-driven platforms.
Most instruments for measuring political positions, such as manifesto coding, expert surveys and text-scaling models, were built and validated on Western party systems, and they break down worst where many consequential actors never publish a manifesto, never contest a competitive election, or commit one position to a charter and act on another in office. This paper proposes a method for such settings. I treat a large language model as a single fallible rater in a panel, the way an expert survey treats one expert, and describe the panel, its synthesis, an applicability rule that keeps a blank distinct from a zero, and a lens that separates what an actor declares from what it does. Three results follow. First, a built-in experiment isolates the rubric: with a definition-free round held fixed, written axis definitions move scores by a mean of 1.8 points on a 21-point scale and tighten agreement between raters (mean absolute gap 2.81 to 2.50; r 0.81 to 0.89). Second, across nine models from eight laboratories in two countries, Krippendorff's alpha is 0.86 on an interval and 0.87 on an ordinal metric, and it held as the panel grew from five raters to nine. This is reliability and says nothing yet about validity, since models trained on overlapping data can share a bias no statistic computed from the models can detect. Third, the panel's sharpest split, a bimodal divergence on an actor's stance toward the state's foundational order, comes from a referent problem: the models agree on the facts and differ on which order counts as the regime. A blind triple-coding traces about two-thirds of such disagreement to interpretation. The worked example is the Middle East and North Africa, and the rubric, prompt and data are released in full.
Large language models are increasingly used as proxies for human subjects in social science research, yet external validity requires matching the response distributions of target human populations. We study population-level survey alignment: reconstructing aggregate survey responses from limited public survey data, without individual-level demographic profiles or model finetuning. We formalize this problem as preference reconstruction: rather than matching proxy agents to demographic profiles, we construct a functional basis of proxy agents and recover population preferences by weighted aggregation. We instantiate this idea via Prompts to Proxies ($\texttt{P2P}$), a two-stage inference-time system. Stage 1 uses structured attribute-based prompting with entropy-guided adaptive sampling to construct a diverse proxy pool spanning the latent preference space. Stage 2 employs L1-regularized regression to select a compact weighted ensemble matching observed target-population responses. Across 14 American Trends Panel waves, $\texttt{P2P}$ achieves an average test MSE of 0.014 at approximately 0.8 USD per survey, improving over prompting and demographic-conditioning baselines. On the World Values Survey, cross-locale transfer experiments show that basis expressiveness can outperform locale matching on average, while locale-specific generation helps on culturally divergent questions. A stress test against an SFT-aligned survey model shows competitive performance using less than 3\% of the training data. These results position preference reconstruction as a lightweight, externally verifiable alternative for survey-based population alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/bingchen-wang/P2P.