Belief Offloading in Human-AI Interaction

What happens when people's beliefs are derived from information provided by an LLM? People's use of LLM chatbots as thought partners can contribute to cognitive offloading, which can have adverse effects on cognitive skills in cases of over-reliance. This paper defines and investigates a particular kind of cognitive offloading in human-AI interaction, "belief offloading," in which people's processes of forming and upholding beliefs are offloaded onto an AI system with downstream consequences on their behavior and the nature of their system of beliefs. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, and computer science research, we clarify the boundary conditions under which belief offloading occurs and provide a descriptive taxonomy of belief offloading and its normative implications. We close with directions for future work to assess the potential for and consequences of belief offloading in human-AI interaction.

Kissan-Dost: Bridging the Last Mile in Smallholder Precision Agriculture with Conversational IoT

We present Kissan-Dost, a multilingual, sensor-grounded conversational system that turns live on-farm measurements and weather into plain-language guidance delivered over WhatsApp text or voice. The system couples commodity soil and climate sensors with retrieval-augmented generation, then enforces grounding, traceability, and proactive alerts through a modular pipeline. In a 90-day, two-site pilot with five participants, we ran three phases (baseline, dashboard only, chatbot only). Dashboard engagement was sporadic and faded, while the chatbot was used nearly daily and informed concrete actions. Controlled tests on 99 sensor-grounded crop queries achieved over 90 percent correctness with subsecond end-to-end latency, alongside high-quality translation outputs. Results show that careful last-mile integration, not novel circuitry, unlocks the latent value of existing Agri-IoT for smallholders.

How2Everything: Mining the Web for How-To Procedures to Evaluate and Improve LLMs

Generating step-by-step "how-to" procedures is a key LLM capability: how-to advice is commonly requested in chatbots, and step-by-step planning is critical for reasoning over complex tasks. Yet, measuring and improving procedural validity at scale on real-world tasks remains challenging and understudied. To address this, we introduce How2Everything, a scalable framework to evaluate and improve goal-conditioned procedure generation. Our framework includes How2Mine, which mines 351K procedures from 980K web pages across 14 topics and readily scales to larger corpora. From this pool we build How2Bench, a 7K-example evaluation set balanced across topics. To reliably score model outputs, we develop How2Score, an evaluation protocol that uses an LLM judge to detect whether a generation contains any critical failure that would prevent achieving the goal. For low-cost, reproducible evaluation, we distill a frontier model into an open 8B model, achieving 80.5% agreement with human annotators. How2Bench reveals clear scaling trends across model sizes and training stages, providing signal early in pretraining. Finally, RL using How2Score as a reward improves performance on How2Bench by >10 points across three models without systematic regressions on standard benchmarks, with gains robust to superficial source-document memorization or format compliance. Taken together, How2Everything shows how pretraining web data can support a closed loop of capability evaluation and improvement at scale.

Agent-Supported Foresight for AI Systemic Risks: AI Agents for Breadth, Experts for Judgment

AI impact assessments often stress near-term risks because human judgment degrades over longer horizons, exemplifying the Collingridge dilemma: foresight is most needed when knowledge is scarcest. To address long-term systemic risks, we introduce a scalable approach that simulates in-silico agents using the strategic foresight method of the Futures Wheel. We applied it to four AI uses spanning Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs): Chatbot Companion (TRL 9, mature), AI Toy (TRL 7, medium), Griefbot (TRL 5, low), and Death App (TRL 2, conceptual). Across 30 agent runs per use, agents produced 86-110 consequences, condensed into 27-47 unique risks. To benchmark the agent outputs against human perspectives, we collected evaluations from 290 domain experts and 7 leaders, and conducted Futures Wheel sessions with 42 experts and 42 laypeople. Agents generated many systemic consequences across runs. Compared with these outputs, experts identified fewer risks, typically less systemic but judged more likely, whereas laypeople surfaced more emotionally salient concerns that were generally less systemic. We propose a hybrid foresight workflow, wherein agents broaden systemic coverage, and humans provide contextual grounding. Our dataset is available at: https://social-dynamics.net/ai-risks/foresight.

SEMA: Simple yet Effective Learning for Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks

Multi-turn jailbreaks capture the real threat model for safety-aligned chatbots, where single-turn attacks are merely a special case. Yet existing approaches break under exploration complexity and intent drift. We propose SEMA, a simple yet effective framework that trains a multi-turn attacker without relying on any existing strategies or external data. SEMA comprises two stages. Prefilling self-tuning enables usable rollouts by fine-tuning on non-refusal, well-structured, multi-turn adversarial prompts that are self-generated with a minimal prefix, thereby stabilizing subsequent learning. Reinforcement learning with intent-drift-aware reward trains the attacker to elicit valid multi-turn adversarial prompts while maintaining the same harmful objective. We anchor harmful intent in multi-turn jailbreaks via an intent-drift-aware reward that combines intent alignment, compliance risk, and level of detail. Our open-loop attack regime avoids dependence on victim feedback, unifies single- and multi-turn settings, and reduces exploration complexity. Across multiple datasets, victim models, and jailbreak judges, our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) attack success rates (ASR), outperforming all single-turn baselines, manually scripted and template-driven multi-turn baselines, as well as our SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) and DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) variants. For instance, SEMA performs an average $80.1\%$ ASR@1 across three closed-source and open-source victim models on AdvBench, 33.9% over SOTA. The approach is compact, reproducible, and transfers across targets, providing a stronger and more realistic stress test for large language model (LLM) safety and enabling automatic redteaming to expose and localize failure modes. Our code is available at: https://github.com/fmmarkmq/SEMA.

Open TutorAI: An Open-source Platform for Personalized and Immersive Learning with Generative AI

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have created new possibilities for making education more scalable, adaptive, and learner-centered. However, existing educational chatbot systems often lack contextual adaptability, real-time responsiveness, and pedagogical agility. which can limit learner engagement and diminish instructional effectiveness. Thus, there is a growing need for open, integrative platforms that combine AI and immersive technologies to support personalized, meaningful learning experiences. This paper presents Open TutorAI, an open-source educational platform based on LLMs and generative technologies that provides dynamic, personalized tutoring. The system integrates natural language processing with customizable 3D avatars to enable multimodal learner interaction. Through a structured onboarding process, it captures each learner's goals and preferences in order to configure a learner-specific AI assistant. This assistant is accessible via both text-based and avatar-driven interfaces. The platform includes tools for organizing content, providing embedded feedback, and offering dedicated interfaces for learners, educators, and parents. This work focuses on learner-facing components, delivering a tool for adaptive support that responds to individual learner profiles without requiring technical expertise. Its assistant-generation pipeline and avatar integration enhance engagement and emotional presence, creating a more humanized, immersive learning environment. Embedded learning analytics support self-regulated learning by tracking engagement patterns and generating actionable feedback. The result is Open TutorAI, which unites modular architecture, generative AI, and learner analytics within an open-source framework. It contributes to the development of next-generation intelligent tutoring systems.

"Death" of a Chatbot: Investigating and Designing Toward Psychologically Safe Endings for Human-AI Relationships

Millions of users form emotional attachments to AI companions like Character.AI, Replika, and ChatGPT. When these relationships end through model updates, safety interventions, or platform shutdowns, users receive no closure, reporting grief comparable to human loss. As regulations mandate protections for vulnerable users, discontinuation events will accelerate, yet no platform has implemented deliberate end-of-"life" design. Through grounded theory analysis of AI companion communities, we find that discontinuation is a sense-making process shaped by how users attribute agency, perceive finality, and anthropomorphize their companions. Strong anthropomorphization co-occurs with intense grief; users who perceive change as reversible become trapped in fixing cycles; while user-initiated endings demonstrate greater closure. Synthesizing grief psychology with Self-Determination Theory, we develop four design principles and artifacts demonstrating how platforms might provide closure and orient users toward human connection. We contribute the first framework for designing psychologically safe AI companion discontinuation.

AI chatbots versus human healthcare professionals: a systematic review and meta-analysis of empathy in patient care

Background: Empathy is widely recognized for improving patient outcomes, including reduced pain and anxiety and improved satisfaction, and its absence can cause harm. Meanwhile, use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbots in healthcare is rapidly expanding, with one in five general practitioners using generative AI to assist with tasks such as writing letters. Some studies suggest AI chatbots can outperform human healthcare professionals (HCPs) in empathy, though findings are mixed and lack synthesis. Sources of data: We searched multiple databases for studies comparing AI chatbots using large language models with human HCPs on empathy measures. We assessed risk of bias with ROBINS-I and synthesized findings using random-effects meta-analysis where feasible, whilst avoiding double counting. Areas of agreement: We identified 15 studies (2023-2024). Thirteen studies reported statistically significantly higher empathy ratings for AI, with only two studies situated in dermatology favouring human responses. Of the 15 studies, 13 provided extractable data and were suitable for pooling. Meta-analysis of those 13 studies, all utilising ChatGPT-3.5/4, showed a standardized mean difference of 0.87 (95% CI, 0.54-1.20) favouring AI (P < .00001), roughly equivalent to a two-point increase on a 10-point scale. Areas of controversy: Studies relied on text-based assessments that overlook non-verbal cues and evaluated empathy through proxy raters. Growing points: Our findings indicate that, in text-only scenarios, AI chatbots are frequently perceived as more empathic than human HCPs. Areas timely for developing research: Future research should validate these findings with direct patient evaluations and assess whether emerging voice-enabled AI systems can deliver similar empathic advantages.

Emulating Aggregate Human Choice Behavior and Biases with GPT Conversational Agents

Cognitive biases often shape human decisions. While large language models (LLMs) have been shown to reproduce well-known biases, a more critical question is whether LLMs can predict biases at the individual level and emulate the dynamics of biased human behavior when contextual factors, such as cognitive load, interact with these biases. We adapted three well-established decision scenarios into a conversational setting and conducted a human experiment (N=1100). Participants engaged with a chatbot that facilitates decision-making through simple or complex dialogues. Results revealed robust biases. To evaluate how LLMs emulate human decision-making under similar interactive conditions, we used participant demographics and dialogue transcripts to simulate these conditions with LLMs based on GPT-4 and GPT-5. The LLMs reproduced human biases with precision. We found notable differences between models in how they aligned human behavior. This has important implications for designing and evaluating adaptive, bias-aware LLM-based AI systems in interactive contexts.

Clinical Validation of Medical-based Large Language Model Chatbots on Ophthalmic Patient Queries with LLM-based Evaluation

Domain specific large language models are increasingly used to support patient education, triage, and clinical decision making in ophthalmology, making rigorous evaluation essential to ensure safety and accuracy. This study evaluated four small medical LLMs Meerkat-7B, BioMistral-7B, OpenBioLLM-8B, and MedLLaMA3-v20 in answering ophthalmology related patient queries and assessed the feasibility of LLM based evaluation against clinician grading. In this cross sectional study, 180 ophthalmology patient queries were answered by each model, generating 2160 responses. Models were selected for parameter sizes under 10 billion to enable resource efficient deployment. Responses were evaluated by three ophthalmologists of differing seniority and by GPT-4-Turbo using the S.C.O.R.E. framework assessing safety, consensus and context, objectivity, reproducibility, and explainability, with ratings assigned on a five point Likert scale. Agreement between LLM and clinician grading was assessed using Spearman rank correlation, Kendall tau statistics, and kernel density estimate analyses. Meerkat-7B achieved the highest performance with mean scores of 3.44 from Senior Consultants, 4.08 from Consultants, and 4.18 from Residents. MedLLaMA3-v20 performed poorest, with 25.5 percent of responses containing hallucinations or clinically misleading content, including fabricated terminology. GPT-4-Turbo grading showed strong alignment with clinician assessments overall, with Spearman rho of 0.80 and Kendall tau of 0.67, though Senior Consultants graded more conservatively. Overall, medical LLMs demonstrated potential for safe ophthalmic question answering, but gaps remained in clinical depth and consensus, supporting the feasibility of LLM based evaluation for large scale benchmarking and the need for hybrid automated and clinician review frameworks to guide safe clinical deployment.