Ethical AI in Higher Education - Software Testing News

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the education sector, unlocking vast potential while introducing complex ethical and regulatory challenges. As higher education institutions harness AI’s capabilities, ensuring its responsible and ethical integration into academic environments is crucial. With the adoption of the EU AI Act, it will be critical for ed-tech companies, educational institutions, and other stakeholders to work towards compliance with this key legislation. The Act applies to both public and private entities that market, deploy, or provide AI-related services within the European Union. Its primary objectives are to safeguard fundamental rights, including privacy, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression, while simultaneously fostering innovation. The Act aims to provide clear legal frameworks that support the development and use of AI systems that are not only safe and ethical but also aligned with societal values and the broader public interest.

https://softwaretestingnews.co.uk/ethical-ai-in-higher-education/

Get students on board with AI for marking and feedback - Isabel Fischer, Times Higher Education

AI can potentially augment feedback and marking, but we need to trial it first. Here is a blueprint for using enhanced feedback generation systems and gaining trust. AI has proven its value in low-stakes formative feedback, where its rapid and personalised responses enhance learning. However, in high-stakes contexts where grades influence futures, autonomous AI marking introduces risks of bias and distrust. We therefore suggest that for high-stakes summative assessments, AI should be trialled in a supporting role, augmenting human-led processes. 

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/get-students-board-ai-marking-and-feedback

AI: Cheating Matters, but Redrawing Assessment ‘Matters Most’ - Juliette Rowsell, Times Higher Education

Conversations over students using artificial intelligence to cheat on their exams are masking wider discussions about how to improve assessment, a leading professor has argued. Phillip Dawson, co-director of the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning at Deakin University in Australia, argued that “validity matters more than cheating,” adding that “cheating and AI have really taken over the assessment debate.” Speaking at the conference of the U.K.’s Quality Assurance Agency, he said, “Cheating and all that matters. But assessing what we mean to assess is the thing that matters the most. That’s really what validity is … We need to address it, but cheating is not necessarily the most useful frame.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2025/02/28/ai-cheating-matters-redrawing-assessment

How University Leaders Can Ethically and Responsibly Implement AI - Bruce Dahlgren, Campus Technology

For university leaders, the conversation around implementing artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting. With its great potential to unlock transformative innovation in education, it's no longer a question of if, but how, institutions should look to utilize the technology on their campuses. AI is reshaping education, offering personalized learning, efficiency, and accessibility. For students, AI provides individualized support, and for faculty it streamlines administrative tasks. The promise of AI and its potential benefits for students, faculty, and higher education institutions at large is too great to pass up.

https://campustechnology.com/Articles/2025/02/27/How-University-Leaders-Can-Ethically-and-Responsibly-Implement-AI.aspx

OpenAI Operator: Use This to Automate 80% of Your Work - the AI Report, YouTube

This podcast episode discusses OpenAI's Operator, an AI agent capable of autonomously performing tasks on the internet through your browser [01:43]. The hosts explore examples such as drafting emails using Asana project boards [07:08], summarizing calls and sending structured emails [19:15], and training agents to manage schedules [34:09]. They also discuss the pros and cons of using Operator, including its ability to keep humans in the loop and its current limitation of handling only one task at a time [02:54]. The podcast also touches on the broader implications of AI on SEO, job roles, and the importance of curiosity in adapting to this changing landscape [16:58]. {summary provided by Gemini 2.0 Flash}

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBAdk1sXXEM

6 Myths We Got Wrong About AI (And What’s the Reality) - Kolawole Samuel Adebayo, HubSpot

Over the past decade, I've written extensively about some of the world’s greatest innovations. With these technologies, you know what to expect: an improvement here, a new functionality there. This one got faster, and that other one got cheaper. But when the AI boom began with ChatGPT a few years ago, it was quite unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was easy to get caught up in the headlines and be carried away by varying predictions and “demystifications” of this new, disruptive technology. Unfortunately, a lot of ideas were either miscommunicated, assumed, or lost in translation. The result? In came AI myths that were far from reality. So, let’s unpack those. In this article, I’ll discuss six of the biggest AI myths and shed light on what the reality truly is.

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ai-myths

Could this be the END of Chain of Thought? - Chain of Draft BREAKDOWN! - Matthew Berman, YouTube

Matthew BermanThis podcast introduces a new prompting strategy called "chain of draft" for AI models, which aims to improve upon the traditional "chain of thought" method [00:00]. Chain of draft encourages LLMs to generate concise, dense information outputs at each step, reducing token usage and latency while maintaining or exceeding the accuracy of chain of thought [11:41]. Implementing chain of draft is simple, requiring only an update to the prompt [08:06].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYnisU10wu0

I was an AI skeptic until these 5 tools changed my mind - Jack Wallen, ZDnet

It's taken me a while to come around, but I've become a fan of certain AI tools -- when used for specific purposes. I've even found some of those tools to be very helpful throughout my day (so much so that I haven't used Google's search engine in weeks). That, my friends, is refreshing. How I got here was a bit circuitous. I started out 100% against AI but then I realized I was against AI when used as a shortcut for things like writing and other artistic endeavors. Once I realized AI was very good at helping me research different areas (where I'd previously used a search engine), I adopted it into my process.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-was-an-ai-skeptic-until-these-5-tools-changed-my-mind/

Microsoft’s New Majorana 1 Processor Could Transform Quantum Computing - Stephan Rachel, Wired

The processor uses qubits that can be measured without error and are resistant to outside interference, which the company says marks a “transformative leap toward practical quantum computing.” Researchers at Microsoft have announced the creation of the first “topological qubits” in a device that stores information in an exotic state of matter, in what may be a significant breakthrough for quantum computing. At the same time, the researchers also published a paper in Nature and a “road map” for further work. The design of the Majorana 1 processor is supposed to fit up to a million qubits, which may be enough to realize many significant goals of quantum computing—such as cracking cryptographic codes and designing new drugs and materials faster.

https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-just-claimed-a-quantum-breakthrough-a-quantum-physicist-explains-what-it-means/

Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code - Anthropic

Claude 3.7 Sonnet can produce near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking that is made visible to the user. API users also have fine-grained control over how long the model can think for. Claude 3.7 Sonnet shows particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development. Along with the model, we’re also introducing a command line tool for agentic coding, Claude Code. Claude Code is available as a limited research preview, and enables developers to delegate substantial engineering tasks to Claude directly from their terminal.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet

This AI model does maths, coding, and reasoning - Matt V, Mindstream

Anthropic has launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a more advanced AI model with better problem-solving in maths, coding, and reasoning.Unlike some competitors that separate reasoning into different models, Anthropic keeps it built into Claude’s core functions. Alongside this, Anthropic is introducing Claude Code, an AI coding assistant that can search and edit code, run tests, and push changes to GitHub. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is available from Monday via the Claude app, Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. Pricing stays the same as Claude 3.5 Sonnet at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.

https://www.mindstream.news/p/this-ai-model-does-maths-coding-and-reasoning

The next wave of AI is here: Autonomous AI agents are amazing—and scary - Tom Barnett, Fast Company

The relentless hype around AI makes it difficult to separate the signal from the noise. So it’s understandable if you’ve tuned out recent talk about autonomous AI agents. A word of advice: Don’t. The significance of agentic AI may actually exceed the hype.  An Autonomous AI agent can interact with the environment, make decisions, take action, and learn from the process. This represents a seismic shift in the use of AI and, accordingly, presents corresponding opportunities—and risks.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91281577/autonomous-ai-agents-are-both-exciting-and-scary 

Grok 3 appears to have briefly censored unflattering mentions of Trump and Musk - Kyle Wiggers, Tech Crunch

Over the weekend, users on social media reported that when asked, “Who is the biggest misinformation spreader?” with the “Think” setting enabled, Grok 3 noted in its “chain of thought” that it was explicitly instructed not to mention Donald Trump or Elon Musk. The chain of thought is the “reasoning” process the model uses to arrive at an answer to a question. TechCrunch was able to replicate this behavior once, but as of publication time on Sunday morning, Grok 3 was once again mentioning Donald Trump in its answer to the misinformation query.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/grok-3-appears-to-have-briefly-censored-unflattering-mentions-of-trump-and-musk/

When AI Thinks It Will Lose, It Sometimes Cheats, Study Finds - Harry Booth, Time

Complex games like chess and Go have long been used to test AI models’ capabilities. But while IBM’s Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s by playing by the rules, today’s advanced AI models like OpenAI’s o1-preview are less scrupulous. When sensing defeat in a match against a skilled chess bot, they don’t always concede, instead sometimes opting to cheat by hacking their opponent so that the bot automatically forfeits the game. That is the finding of a new study from Palisade Research, shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its publication on Feb. 19, which evaluated seven state-of-the-art AI models for their propensity to hack. While slightly older AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 needed to be prompted by researchers to attempt such tricks, o1-preview and DeepSeek R1 pursued the exploit on their own, indicating that AI systems may develop deceptive or manipulative strategies without explicit instruction.

https://time.com/7259395/ai-chess-cheating-palisade-research/

OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 May Arrive Next Week, but GPT-5 Is Just Around the Corner - Kyle Barr, Gizmodo

OpenAI may be preparing to slap a new coat of paint on ChatGPT with an updated AI model, GPT-4.5, as early as next week. If that’s not enough to get users excited, the Sam Altman-led company is on the path toward its ultimate model while trying to hint that this next step will finally achieve “AGI.” Spoiler alert: it won’t. Based on anonymous sources, the Verge’s Tom Warren first reported that OpenAI’s next model could hit the scene sometime this month. Microsoft reportedly plans to host the company’s new model next week, though it may be longer before either company makes any official announcement. More importantly, for the “next big thing,” We may see the GPT-5 model as early as May, according to The Verge.

https://gizmodo.com/openais-gpt-4-5-may-arrive-next-week-but-gpt-5-is-just-around-the-corner-2000566442

OpenAI’s ChatGPT explodes to 400M weekly users, with GPT-5 on the way - Michael Nuñez, Venture Beat

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has surpassed 400 million weekly active users, a milestone that underscores the company’s growing reach across both consumer and enterprise markets, according to an X post from chief operating officer Brad Lightcap on Thursday. The rapid expansion comes as OpenAI faces intensifying competition from rivals such as Elon Musk’s xAI and China’s DeepSeek, both of which have recently launched high-performing models aimed at disrupting OpenAI’s dominance. Despite this, OpenAI has seen significant traction in the business sector, with more than two million enterprise users now using ChatGPT at work — doubling from September 2024.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-chatgpt-explodes-to-400m-weekly-users-with-gpt-5-on-the-way/

Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist - Juraj Gottweis and Vivek Natarajan, Google

Motivated by unmet needs in the modern scientific discovery process and building on recent AI advances, including the ability to synthesize across complex subjects and to perform long-term planning and reasoning, we developed an AI co-scientist system. The AI co-scientist is a multi-agent AI system that is intended to function as a collaborative tool for scientists. Built on Gemini 2.0, AI co-scientist is designed to mirror the reasoning process underpinning the scientific method. Beyond standard literature review, summarization and “deep research” tools, the AI co-scientist system is intended to uncover new, original knowledge and to formulate demonstrably novel research hypotheses and proposals, building upon prior evidence and tailored to specific research objectives.

https://research.google/blog/accelerating-scientific-breakthroughs-with-an-ai-co-scientist/

Study: Generative AI Could Inhibit Critical Thinking - Chris Paoli, Campus Technology

A new study on how knowledge workers engage in critical thinking found that workers with higher confidence in generative AI technology tend to employ less critical thinking to AI-generated outputs than workers with higher confidence in personal skills, who tended to apply more critical thinking to verify, refine, and critically integrate AI responses. The study ("The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers"), conducted by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University scientists, surveyed 319 knowledge workers who reported using AI tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot at least once a week. The researchers analyzed 936 real-world examples of AI-assisted tasks.

https://campustechnology.com/Articles/2025/02/21/Study-Generative-AI-Could-Inhibit-Critical-Thinking.aspx?admgarea=news