Open University of Catalonia (UOC)

Avoiding social media for a week can reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, and insomnia, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open. The study measured the mental health of a group of 373 people aged 18 to 24 in the US before and after a week without using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, or X. The authors caution that the durability of these results and their associations with behaviour require further research.

According to a study published in the journal JAMA Health Forum, the use of the benzodiazepine lorazepam by the character Victoria Ratliff in the series The White Lotus was associated in the United States with an increase in Google searches for this medication, including queries about how to obtain it online. The series generated 1.6 million more searches than usual over a 12-week period. Although the study reflects searches for information and not actual consumption, the abuse of anti-anxiety drugs is a fact: illegal sales of benzodiazepines have increased in the United States, and Spain leads the rankings in terms of consumption.

Large language models (LLMs) do not reliably identify people's false beliefs, according to research published in Nature Machine Intelligence. The study asked 24 such models – including DeepSeek and GPT-4o, which uses ChatGPT – to respond to a series of facts and personal beliefs through 13,000 questions. The most recent LLMs were more than 90% reliable when comparing whether data was true or false, but they found it difficult to distinguish between true and false beliefs when responding to a sentence beginning with ‘I believe that’.

In online debates, Large Language Models (LLMs, i.e. Artificial Intelligence systems such as ChatGPT) are more persuasive than humans when they can personalise their arguments based on their opponents’ characteristics, says a study published in Nature Human Behaviour which analysed GPT-4. The authors urge researchers and online platforms to ‘seriously consider the threat posed by LLMs fuelling division, spreading malicious propaganda and developing adequate countermeasures'.

According to a meta-analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour, the widespread use of digital technology may be associated with lower rates of cognitive decline in people over the age of 50. The results of the study — which analysed 57 studies involving more than 400,000 people with an average age of 69 — seem to contradict the hypothesis that the daily use of technology weakens cognitive ability.

An artificial intelligence (AI) model led by the company Meta is capable of translating speech and text, including direct speech-to-speech translations, from up to 101 languages in some cases. According to the research team, this model - called SEAMLESSM4T - can pave the way for fast universal translations ‘with resources to be made publicly available for non-commercial use’. The work is published in the journal Nature.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 to researchers John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for discovering the foundations that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. Hinton for discovering the foundational basis that enables machine learning with artificial neural networks. This technology, inspired by the structure of the brain, is behind what we now call ‘artificial intelligence’. 

Large language models - Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems based on deep learning, such as the generative AI that is ChatGPT - are not as reliable as users expect. This is one of the conclusions of international research published in Nature involving researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. According to the authors, in comparison with the first models and taking into account certain aspects, reliability has worsened in the most recent models, such as GPT-4 with respect to GPT-3.

The sperm of men infected with high-risk genotypes of the human papillomavirus (HPV) suffers more damage from oxidative stress and has a weaker immune response, which can lead to reduced fertility. This is one of the conclusions of a study published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology. The research compared the semen of 20 adults infected with high-risk genotypes, seven infected with low-risk genotypes, and 43 adults without infections.

Using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated datasets to train future generations of machine learning models can contaminate their results, a concept known as ‘model collapse’, according to a paper published in Nature. The research shows that, within a few generations, original content is replaced by unrelated nonsense, demonstrating the importance of using reliable data to train AI models.