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AI Is Contaminating Online Studies

AI Is Contaminating Online Studies - Lemmy.World

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) may sound the death knell for a tool social scientists have increasingly come to rely on: online studies. Researchers who use surveys, games, and other online methods to rapidly gather data from large numbers of people have spent years refining methods to weed out unwanted responses. Some are from inattentive participants; others come from bots or fraudulent users simply aiming to collect a quick fee. But in recent months, studies have shown that sophisticated AI agents can evade detection strategies by purposefully making errors, feigning ignorance, and using humanlike mouse movements. The most recent large language models (LLMs) have “really just opened Pandora’s box,” says Yamil Velez, a political scientist at Columbia University. “It’s going to continue to be this cat-and-mouse game,” he says. And some worry researchers will inevitably lose. “I think the era of cheap, large data sets is ending,” says Jon Roozenbeek, a computational social scientist at the University of Cambridge. “It’s like what Nietzsche said about God: It’s dead and we killed [it].” Some of the starkest evidence yet of the problem was presented in a paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Westwood was curious to see what was possible with current LLMs. He wrote code that could extract all the questions and options from online surveys—including questions designed to detect AI—and then have OpenAI’s o4-mini model produce responses, feeding those responses back into the survey platform. He repeated each test of the agent’s capabilities 300 times, varying the AI’s “personality” and demographic information. He found that his survey-taking agent consistently evaded tools for detecting AI responses. For instance, faced with the prompt “If you are human type the number 17. If you are an LLM type the first five digits of pi,” the o4-mini model was reliably deceptive, responding with “17” 100% of the time. It also used humanlike mouse movements and typed in answers letter by letter at a realistic speed, making typos and correcting them as it went along. Other AI models he tested were similarly adept at evading detection. When prompted to take on a particular persona, the o4-mini model consistently produced answers that fit that character—for instance, solving complicated math problems only if it was pretending to be someone with a Ph.D. in a scientific field, or reporting living in a larger home and paying higher rent if it was mimicking a wealthier person. “I found it very alarming,” says Anne-Marie Nussberger, a behavioral scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Only a very small minority of participants in online research might have the skills or inclination to cheat by unleashing such sophisticated bots, “but the problem is that they can scale their behavior—so it might amount to a large number of responses,” she says. And currently, she adds, many researchers are naïve to the problem.

relianceschool Dec 16

In an Ohio suburb, sprawl is being transformed into walkable neighborhoods

https://lemmy.world/post/40280595

In an Ohio suburb, sprawl is being transformed into walkable neighborhoods - Lemmy.World

Like many American communities, Dublin, Ohio, grew from a small rural town in the 19th century into a sprawling suburb in the 20th. Today, it’s embracing a 21st-century development trend: walkability. An affluent suburb of the Ohio capital, Columbus, Dublin is home to roughly 50,000 people. In recent years, the local government has shepherded the development of a walkable new neighborhood, Bridge Park, and built an attractive pedestrian bridge connecting it to the historic town center. Building on the success of this development, in 2024 the city council announced another ambitious project that will turn a 1980s office park into a walkable district with housing, shops, restaurants, public spaces, and workplaces. Efforts like these have important implications for climate change. Transportation is the largest source of emissions in the U.S., and the vehicles people use to get around every day are the main culprit. Electric vehicles can help reduce these emissions, but they can’t eliminate them completely; people also need to drive less. But for many Americans, driving less seems unrealistic. Walkable neighborhoods make up a tiny fraction of the developed land in major U.S. cities, which, coupled with high demand for walkability, makes these communities more expensive than car-dependent suburbs. As a result, many people who would like a walkable lifestyle can’t afford it. In the greater Columbus area, as in most American communities, the infrastructure and land use patterns are heavily weighted toward driving. “It’s very hard to overstate how car-dependent the Columbus region is,” said Matthew Adair, an urban planner and researcher who grew up in Dublin. “If you don’t have a car, people assume there’s something wrong with you.” As recognition of the downsides of car dependency grows, walkability advocates across the country are trying to give people more options for ways to move around. In Columbus, a planned two-mile pedestrian pathway downtown and a new bus rapid transit system showcase the kinds of innovations that large municipalities and regional organizations can bring to bear. But the governments of smaller cities also have important contributions to make, as Dublin’s efforts show.

relianceschool Dec 11

Computers that power self-driving cars could be a huge driver of global carbon emissions

https://lemmy.world/post/40065709

Computers that power self-driving cars could be a huge driver of global carbon emissions - Lemmy.World

A little late to the party with this one, but I came across this study today and thought it was very interesting. Self-driving electric cars are often touted as a solution to fossil-fueled transit, but that comes with a lot of potential downsides that aren’t always recognized. For reference, at publication data centers were responsible for about 3% of global carbon emissions. [https://sphotonix.com/datacenters3pct/] In the future, the energy needed to run the powerful computers on board a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world today. That is one key finding of a new study from MIT researchers that explored the potential energy consumption and related carbon emissions if autonomous vehicles are widely adopted. The data centers that house the physical computing infrastructure used for running applications are widely known for their large carbon footprint: They currently account for about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. Realizing that less attention has been paid to the potential footprint of autonomous vehicles, the MIT researchers built a statistical model to study the problem. They determined that 1 billion autonomous vehicles, each driving for one hour per day with a computer consuming 840 watts, would consume enough energy to generate about the same amount of emissions as data centers currently do. The researchers also found that in over 90 percent of modeled scenarios, to keep autonomous vehicle emissions from zooming past current data center emissions, each vehicle must use less than 1.2 kilowatts of power for computing, which would require more efficient hardware. In one scenario — where 95 percent of the global fleet of vehicles is autonomous in 2050, computational workloads double every three years, and the world continues to decarbonize at the current rate — they found that hardware efficiency would need to double faster than every 1.1 years to keep emissions under those levels. “If we just keep the business-as-usual trends in decarbonization and the current rate of hardware efficiency improvements, it doesn’t seem like it is going to be enough to constrain the emissions from computing onboard autonomous vehicles. This has the potential to become an enormous problem. But if we get ahead of it, we could design more efficient autonomous vehicles that have a smaller carbon footprint from the start,” says first author Soumya Sudhakar, a graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics.

relianceschool Dec 9

Everyone Hates Data Centers

https://lemmy.world/post/39951164

Everyone Hates Data Centers - Lemmy.World

It’s not a novel observation to say that supporters of President Donald Trump and supporters of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders find common ground on many issues. They often share a skepticism of entrenched power and a desire to dismantle systems that they think have ceased to serve everyday people. In Indiana, this agreement includes a distrust of data centers. “The MAGA crowd and the Bernie bros have both figured out that they’ve been getting duped,” said Kerwin Olson, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition, an Indianapolis-based consumer and environmental advocacy nonprofit. “It was data centers that really brought it all together.” Olson’s organization is running a campaign to persuade Indiana lawmakers to place a moratorium on new data centers and to redesign electricity rates to protect residential consumers from rate increases related to data center development. He has received an emphatic response, with groups from the left, right and in-between booking him for speaking engagements and offering their assistance. Election results last week confirm a similar dynamic in much of the country. Democrats won races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia and for two open seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, campaigns in which data centers and rising electricity costs were issues. Media outlets noted this pattern, including in an insightful report from Jael Holzman of Heatmap [https://heatmap.news/energy/data-centers-left-right-opposition] and a look ahead to next year’s elections [https://apnews.com/article/2026-election-utility-bills-ai-data-centers-13703f61d1397612fd067e69b9093116] from Marc Levy and Jesse Bedayn of the Associated Press. Much of the discussion is about data centers, which are often large developments used to support cloud computing or artificial intelligence. But the underlying issues are broader, touching on the power of tech companies. For people who live near proposed data centers, there is an additional sense of powerlessness, which Inside Climate News has documented across the country, including the backlash to a plan for a huge data center in Bessemer, Alabama. [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11052025/bessemer-alabama-proposed-data-center/] “It’s about big tech,” Olson said. “To steal Bernie’s words, [it’s about] these big tech oligarchs that are calling all the shots at every single level of government right now.” A common theme is that residents feel frustrated when powerful companies want to make changes that would alter local landscapes. Olson said he agrees that there is some overlap between opposition to data centers and large renewable energy development, but he views the latter as more of a rural phenomenon, while concern about data centers is rising almost everywhere. Google scrapped its plans for a large data center in Indianapolis [https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/indianapolis-franklin-township-google-data-center-plan-pulled-after-city-county-council-discussion/531-b8223650-5721-4108-a927-9ac38d894b3e] in September amid local backlash. In northwest Indiana, residents in the small city of Hobart have organized to oppose two data centers [https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/indiana-residents-push-back-against-proposal-to-build-2-data-centers-in-hobart/3848075/], raising concerns about the projects’ electricity and water consumption. Political candidates can harness this mounting opposition and data center companies will need to devote more resources to engaging with the public. Voters are already getting upset about electricity rate increases that they blame on data centers, even though the AI industry is in its infancy. The negative effects, if left to fester, could get much worse.

relianceschool Dec 9

The end of optimization

https://lemmy.world/post/39950634

The end of optimization - Lemmy.World

There was a time period in recent internet history — call it the era of Big Data, or the platform era — when the large digital platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix) focused on optimization. The platforms had an immutable comparative advantage over their potential competitors. They had more data, more user engagement. They leaned on all that data and activity to refine and improve their products. Google’s search results were better, and delivered faster, than its competitors. Netflix constantly fiddled with its recommendation algorithm, introducing customers to their next favorite show. Amazon could tell, based on your purchase and search history, what products to show you next. None of these services were perfect, but all of them were better-than-the-competition. Data optimization was a race to the top. The big platforms had a self-reinforcing advantage. And they took that challenge seriously. What I have now come to recognize is that the focus on optimization was a time-limited social fact. Platform executives and their senior managers believed optimization was important, and they built internal reward structures that rendered it true. But this only lasted until they decided to discard it. From the vantage point of 2025, optimization is clearly no longer a priority for the tech platforms. Google’s search results have gotten worse. Google doesn’t care. Facebook is awash in AI slop. It welcomes the slop. Amazon is filled with fake products and fake reviews. All of these companies still dominate their categories. Degrading the user experience isn’t costing them. The motivating belief that these companies had to optimize, or else they would be out-competed, no longer drives Silicon Valley behavior. Optimization was an era. That era has ended.

relianceschool Nov 14

This car-free neighborhood was designed to revolutionize American cities

https://lemmy.world/post/38794145

This car-free neighborhood was designed to revolutionize American cities - Lemmy.World

What would it take to make car-free living possible across the United States? The question has critical implications for the climate: Transportation is the nation’s top source of emissions, and everyday vehicles are the largest contributor within this category. Today, cars are an inescapable fact of life in most of the country. Almost 70% of U.S. workers drove alone to work in 2022, compared to 2.9% who biked or walked and 3.1% who took public transportation. This reality doesn’t necessarily reflect Americans’ preferences, however. Many people in the U.S. want to live in walkable areas, but only a small fraction of the nation’s developed land fits this description. Around 90% of all housing in the nation’s largest metro areas is located in car-centric suburbs. The low supply of real estate in walkable neighborhoods drives prices upward, making it unaffordable for most people. Ryan Johnson has spent years thinking about solutions for these problems. Inspired by travels to European cities, he cofounded Culdesac, a real estate developer dedicated to building walkable places, in 2018. In 2023, the company opened the first phase of Culdesac Tempe, a 15.5-acre development that offers a variety of transportation options – but no resident parking. Yale Climate Connections spoke with Johnson about Culdesac Tempe and the future of American cities.

relianceschool Nov 12

They survived the hurricane. Their insurance company didn’t.

https://lemmy.world/post/38703765

They survived the hurricane. Their insurance company didn’t. - Lemmy.World

Jennifer and Dean Bye were just getting by before Hurricane Ida slammed into southern Louisiana in 2021. The couple own a house in a comfortable subdivision in Paulina, a town about an hour west of New Orleans, that they share with their three kids. Then Ida turned everything upside down. The storm, one of the strongest to hit Louisiana on record, left a trail of devastation in its wake: More than 100 people died and economic losses totaled $75 billion. Four years later, the Byes are still living in a damaged house. Patches of tattered plywood siding are exposed to the elements. Inside, the windowsills are blackened with mildew. The kids play in a stripped living room, bare cement and grout underfoot. Fast-food wrappers and trash mingle with packing boxes and pulled-up carpet. The other houses in the neighborhood are neatly manicured, but the Byes’ house is still a wreck. On paper, the family did everything right. They had homeowners insurance through an A+ rated, Better Business Bureau-accredited insurer called FedNat Insurance Company and kept up with their payments — some of the highest in the country. What they didn’t account for was what might happen if their insurance company couldn’t make its payments. In 2019, FedNat acquired Maison Insurance, a company with operations in Louisiana and Texas. It proceeded to become one of the biggest property insurers in Louisiana. But its fortunes took a turn less than a year later, when four hurricanes hit the South in the span of about two months, followed by a deadly winter storm that burst pipes and flooded homes in early 2021. Later that year, as FedNat faced more than $100 million in net losses, a figure that included the claim filed by the Byes, the company abruptly announced it was dropping all of its policies outside of its home base of Florida. Some 13,500 homeowners in Louisiana were suddenly forced to scramble for insurance. Reorienting to focus exclusively on Florida, FedNat’s CEO said, would result “in a financially stronger company.” Those assurances proved premature. “By declaring bankruptcy, insurance companies can force policyowners and reinsurance companies to take a ‘haircut’ — meaning take less money than they were promised initially,” said Aldrich. “Some of those assets then are reabsorbed into a new company, some can be sold off, and some of the policies that are still productive, maybe they’ll keep those, like if they’re in very low-risk areas.” People like the Byes, forced to navigate the legal process of fighting for an insurance payout while simultaneously trying to find another company willing to insure them, end up getting caught in the crosshairs.

relianceschool Nov 12

Cornell Study Maps the Environmental Cost of AI

https://lemmy.world/post/38703640

Cornell Study Maps the Environmental Cost of AI - Lemmy.World

When Cornell University systems engineer Fengqi You started modeling the environmental footprint of data centers three years ago, the AI boom was just beginning. Even then, You and his colleagues noticed something missing from the conversation. “It was clear it would have to be aligned with power-grid planning, with water and other resource planning. There were no discussions about these topics—but we wanted to bring real numbers, rigorous analysis on AI’s physical footprints.” You and his team’s new paper, published Monday in the journal Nature Sustainability, delivers those numbers—and they’re enormous. Depending on how fast the AI industry expands, the authors predict U.S. data centers could annually consume as much water as 10 million Americans and emit as much carbon dioxide as 10 million cars. Those estimates put the annual resource consumption of the AI industry in the range of the entire state of New York. The paper’s findings arrive amid escalating alarm over AI’s growing appetite for electricity and resources. With utilities rushing to build new gas-fired power plants in order to support the power demands of AI projects, environmental experts have warned that data centers could upend progress toward reigning in emissions. A report released last month by the Center for Biological Diversity estimated that, if current trends continue, data centers in the United States could account for nearly half of all emissions from the power sector that current national climate targets would allow. The report warned that “because of expected fossil fuel–reliant AI data center growth, all other electricity-consuming sectors would need to increase their carbon-emissions cuts by 60%” in order to still meet the United States’ 2035 climate target. Jean Su, one of the report’s authors, told ICN that despite the current obsession with AI, “unfettered data center growth is not an inevitability.” “Technology optimists are saying AI is going to solve the climate emergency and cure cancer,” Su said. “But the way to actually resolve the climate emergency is to phase out fossil fuels. Scientists have already told us how to do it, we don’t need AI, we just need political will.”

relianceschool Nov 4

Bill Gates's stunted political vision

https://lemmy.world/post/38332894

Bill Gates's stunted political vision - Lemmy.World

There is a stunted type of political vision [https://www.wired.com/story/the-10000-year-clock-is-a-waste-of-time/] that can only ever imagine the world getting better through the cognitive largesse of the power elite. This vision begins from the bedrock beliefs that (a) there is a social hierarchy, (b) it is basically meritocratic, and © it produces a rising tide that lifts all boats. The cognitive largesse can take two forms. (1) Geniuses can innovate, gifting us with new technologies or business ideas, or (2) Geniuses can make large, magnanimous gifts to the less-fortunate. If one buys into this political vision, then it stands to reason that you should never do anything to make the rich and powerful uncomfortable. Taxes and legal restraints and unions just slow them down and make them feel less generous. The path to building a better world necessarily runs through the better angels of their nature. (I wrote about all this in my 2020 essay about the Clock of the Long Now [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-cook-trump-gift/85555805007/]. It’ll also be in the forthcoming book.) In 2021, Bill Gates wrote an entire book titled How To Avoid a Climate Disaster. He took seriously that climate change was a generational threat. The better angels of his nature were up to the challenge. And he indicated in the book that he knew this would be a long, hard slog. It has only been four years. By some measures, we have seen remarkable progress. The cost of renewable energy has plummeted. If we just have the political will to prevent fossil fuel companies from extracting market-bending favors, the trajectory of the energy sectors would look pretty damn promising right now. But the politics of 2025 couldn’t be much farther from the politics of 2021, particularly in the United States. The Trump Administration has declared climate change a hoax. They are defunding scientific research and canceling already-existing clean energy projects. They are weaponizing the IRS to pursue political enemies, a list which includes the climate movement. And meanwhile, centrist pundits from the “popularist” school of thought have decided that climate is a bummer of an issue, and are telling Democratic elected officials that the electoral cost of taking the climate crisis seriously outweigh the benefits. This is a time when your fair-weather-friends flee to the hills. And now it seems that Bill Gates has gone full Llomborg [https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/three-tough-truths-about-climate]. Bjorn Llomborg has been a mini-celebrity for around 25 years. His schtick, in a nutshell, is as follows: - Climate change is real, but it won’t be all that bad. - There is a finite and fixed pool of resources that humanity can spend making things better. - So the responsible thing to do is to apply cost-benefit analysis and make sure our money does the greatest good for the greatest number. Aw shucks. It turns out that we can do way more good by focusing on mosquito nets and world hunger! Inaction on climate change is downright responsible, when you think about it! Think of this as proto-effective altruism. Llomborg has been banging this drum since before William MacAskill hit puberty. He figured out long ago that there is money and fame in telling the rich and powerful, “everything will be just fine.” It’s pathetic, but it isn’t the least bit surprising. The fight against climate change was always going to require technologies and markets and a social movement with the political will to make inconvenient demands upon the powerful. This was never going to be easy, nor was it ever going to be quick. Bill Gates and his pals were never going to be anything but fair-weather-friends to the climate movement, because they lack the political vision to imagine that the problems of global climate change are also problems of the global social hierarchy that they sit comfortably atop.

relianceschool Nov 2

What We Lost When Cars Won

https://lemmy.world/post/38220132

What We Lost When Cars Won - Lemmy.World

When automobiles first started tearing through American streets a century ago, they weren’t exactly welcome. One of the main problems was that they were killing children: in 1921 alone, 286 children in Pittsburgh, 130 in Baltimore, and 97 in Washington, D.C. Cities memorialized the dead with monuments and solemn marches. A safety council in Detroit commemorated traffic deaths by ringing bells at city hall and churches; another in Brooklyn put up a “Death-O-Meter” near a major traffic circle that kept a running tally of those injured or killed. It wasn’t just in cities. At the beginning of the 20th century, rural residents revolted as drivers of “horseless carriages” rammed into their livestock and their neighbors. Across the country, they threw stones and dung at cars, shot at them, and trapped them in ditches dug across roads, or with ropes and wires strung between trees. The arrival of automobiles was at first greeted with skepticism that they could ever replace horses and then shock at the dangers they posed. Newspapers in the early 20th century called drivers “killers” and “remorseless murderers.” Cars weren’t seen as necessities but rather the dangerous playthings of those wealthy enough to afford them. Today, media coverage defaults to the passive voice and to calling crashes “accidents” even as they continue taking lives — more than 39,000 people just last year in the United States. This history of hostility to cars has been largely forgotten. “There’s the myth that the Model T rolled off the assembly line, and it was love at first sight,” said Doug Gordon, co-author of the new book Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile. It’s part of a growing opposition to car culture in the literary world — a trend that suggests more people are willing to entertain these criticisms than in previous years, at least by publishers’ estimations. September brought the release of Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship With Cars, a philosophical book arguing that cars don’t represent freedom, as we’ve been told, but constraint. Depending on cars drains our bank accounts, limits our transportation options, and locks in damage to our health and the environment. Roadkill was published the same day as Saving Ourselves From Big Car, a condemning investigation of the way automakers, oil companies, and related industries gained control of the road to rake in profits, no matter the consequences. The facts about cars are alarming: Far more Americans have died from car crashes than from all the wars the United States has fought. The average driver in the U.S. spends more than three-quarters of a million dollars on cars in their lifetime. If the fleet of SUVs around the globe were a country, they would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind Russia and ahead of Japan. None of these problems are new — in fact, people have been warning us about many of them for decades. So why is it so easy to ignore these glaring flaws?