The way it works: Jets launch warmth, water vapor, and particulate matter that may produce skinny clouds in the sky, often called “contrails”. When quite a few flights cross by way of such areas, these contrails can kind clouds that take in radiation escaping from the floor, appearing as blankets floating above the Earth.

Why it issues: A small fraction of total flights, between 2% and 10%, create about 80% of the contrails. So the rising hope is that merely rerouting these flights may considerably cut back the impact, presenting a probably excessive leverage, low price and quick approach of easing warming. Learn the full story.

—James Temple

LLMs change into extra covertly racist with human intervention

The information: Since their inception, it’s been clear that enormous language fashions like ChatGPT take in racist views from the thousands and thousands of pages of the web they’re educated on. Builders have responded by attempting to make them much less poisonous. However new analysis means that these efforts are solely curbing racist views which are overt, whereas letting extra covert stereotypes develop stronger and higher hidden. And it’s an issue that grows as these fashions get larger and larger.

How they did it: Researchers requested 5 AI fashions to make judgments about audio system who used African-American English (AAE). The race of the speaker was not talked about in the directions. Even when the two sentences had the identical which means, the fashions had been extra seemingly to apply adjectives like “soiled,” “lazy,” and “silly” to audio system of AAE than audio system of Normal American English. Learn the full story.

—James O’Donnell