In high-stakes settings like medical diagnostics, users often want to know what led a computer vision model to make a certain prediction, so they can determine whether to trust its output. Concept bottleneck modeling is one method that enables artificial intelligence systems to explain their decision-making process. These methods force a deep-learning model to use a set of concepts, which can be understood by humans, to make a prediction. In new research, MIT computer scientists developed a method that coaxes the model to achieve better accuracy and clearer, more concise explanations. The concepts the model uses are usually defined in advance […]

The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and AI company Anthropic over its technology has raised a deep open question: does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans? Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk metadata from the phones of Americans, the US is still navigating a gap between what ordinary people think is surveillance and what the law allows.  The flashpoint in the standoff between Anthropic and the government was the Pentagon’s desire to use Anthropic’s AI Claude to […]

Scott Shambaugh didn’t think twice when he denied an AI agent’s request to contribute to matplotlib, a software library that he helps manage. Like many open-source projects, matplotlib has been overwhelmed by a glut of AI code contributions, and so Shambaugh and his fellow maintainers have instituted a policy that all AI-written code must be reviewed and submitted by a human. He rejected the request and went to bed.  That’s when things got weird. Shambaugh woke up in the middle of the night, checked his email, and saw that the agent had responded to him, writing a blog post titled […]