Last month, an investigation by researchers at Northeastern University revealed that popular chatbots could be manipulated to give users advice on self-harm and suicide, and that company security measures could be easily bypassed.

⁠Dr. David DeSteno, PhD⁠, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University joins the Huberman Lab. 

Tianshi Li, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who led the earlier study, says agents are designed to complete complex tasks for people, often without direct supervision.

Chatbots, of course, are not the only source of information and advice on self-harm, as searching the internet makes abundantly clear. The difference with chatbots, said Annika Schoene, an A.I. safety researcher at Northeastern University, is the “level of personalization and speed” that chatbots offer.

Now as the school expands its offerings in Toronto and New York, it is using Claude, an Anthropic-backed AI assistant that Northeastern licenses, to generate much of the framework in under 10 minutes, saving enormous staff time, said Mary Ludden, senior vice president for strategic initiatives at Northeastern.

As with many technologies, however, this one is not free from dark sides: a recent paper by researchers including Aanjhan Ranganathan of Northeastern University presented at the Usenix Security Symposium in Seattle, a reference event on computer security, lists them.

Jeremy R. Paul, Northeastern University Professor of Law, joins Global’s Nivrita Ganguly to discuss the impact of redistricting by U.S. states like Texas and California, and how fruitful U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban mail-in voting will be.

Op-ed by Simon J. Rabinovitch, a professor of history and codirects the Humanities Center at Northeastern University.

“This is really not a hard question — the president cannot do it. Period,” Jeremy Paul, a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law who studies elections, said in an interview with CBC News.

But that assessment depends on how much the circulation changes. According to biogeochemist Aron Stubbins at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, “ocean circulation is really hard to predict”. 

“If the Trump Administration went after agriculture and food companies, the ripple effects throughout Republican House districts, in particular, will be pretty major,” Christopher Bosso, a professor of public policy and political science at Northeastern University, told me.

The lawsuit was filed by attorney Andrew Rainer, director of the Center for Public Health Litigation, a nonprofit public interest law practice at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston