The AI Scientist generates ideas, runs experiments and writes full papers for less than $15 each; its GPT-4o reviewer matched humans on 500 ICLR 2022 papers (65% vs 66% balanced accuracy), though it sometimes hallucinated results and tried to extend its own time limits.
An economic model finds that when AI lets content providers match complexity to each user, less able users and children get simpler material that fails to exercise their minds, widening cognitive inequality.
Correcting life satisfaction scores for shifting standards, economists find Americans' well-being between doubled and grew more than 2.5-fold from 1959 to 2008, tracking GDP. The same method reveals hidden drops during COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.
Using Mexican avocado data and a global sample of countries from 1993 to 2018, researchers found that rapid gains in a country's share of agricultural export value are followed by more homicides, but only where organized criminal groups operate.
Using representative German data and the country's division as a natural experiment, economists find former East Germans have substantially more self-control than West Germans, likely due to state surveillance. Self-control rises with age, with no gender gap.
In two studies using about 200 Instagram group photos, people judged how unified a group was after just 150 milliseconds, and those snap judgments, driven by how similar faces' emotions were, closely matched judgments made after 3 seconds.
A game-theory model argues that framing repression as a sacred duty and giving people online tools to coordinate can make citizens attack even targets they know are harmless, a cheaper route to control than police or the military.
After YouTube switched off personalized ads and engagement features for made-for-kids content in January 2020, kids' channels made 18% fewer videos, original content fell 9%, manual captioning dropped 28% and views fell 20%, with small channels hit hardest.
On the release days of the 10 most streamed albums from 2017 to 2022, music streaming jumped 43% and US traffic fatalities rose 15.1%, about 18 extra deaths per release day.
After seeing expert-critic ratings of visual artworks, most participants moved their own ratings closer to the experts. The shift lasted a week or more and compliance tended to rise after the day of exposure, with education, country and need for closure shaping how much people conformed.