According to city’s rent board, eviction notices are up 44% and tenants are on edge over landlords swooping in over their homes

To say that Maria Zamudio and her team have been busy lately would be a gross understatement.

Every Monday at 9am, the phone lines at the downtown clinic of San Francisco’s Housing Rights Committee start ringing, and they keep ringing until closing at 5 pm. In-person counseling appointments for renters facing eviction or landlord misconduct fill days in advance. After every weekend, the staff of seven sits in their office and sifts through more than 150 voicemails. The rental assistance hotline averages 200 calls a week.

We’d like to hear from people who have been monitored or assessed by AI at work and what they thought about the experience

Firms are increasingly using AI to monitor or assess their employees, leading to concerns about workplace surveillance.

Instructors at tech training company Multiverse recently blew the whistle at their “remorseless” and “unnerving” AI monitoring system, while The Co-Op has used automated listening technology that rates every phone call some of them make to customers.

Whistleblower says recording and analysis of all probate calls in Co-op Legal Services is oppressive

The Co-op has become the latest employer to place workers under AI surveillance with an automated listening technology that rates every phone call some of them make to customers.

In a system described as “oppressive and dystopian” by a whistleblower, Co-op Legal Services is using AI models to record, analyse and award a percentage score for interactions between agents and customers seeking advice about probate, wills and estates.

Users reject site’s explanations after detailed instructions for writing response to post on popular forum were published

Mumsnet has denied using AI to produce content after detailed instructions to help an AI model write one of its popular “am I being unreasonable” (AIBU) posts appeared on a Mumsnet message board.

Users of the long-established forum, which is known for its frank discussions of family tensions, were vexed when the AI prompt appeared in response to a user seeking advice about a family dilemma involving a neurodivergent uncle and a sick child.

Project lead says it celebrates ‘incredible contributions’ Jamaica-born sociologist made to Britain’s culture

Whether it was Thatcherism, populism or the story of the Sony Walkman, Stuart Hall was a public intellectual famed for defining the times. Now a major digital archive of his previously unpublished papers, notebooks, recordings and videos has been launched.

When the Jamaica-born sociologist and seminal figure in postwar Black British history died in 2014 aged 82, his obituary in the Guardian said he had been “among the first to identify key questions of the age”. Hall coined the term Thatcherism and in 1985 warned of the dangers of “authoritarian populism”.

We don’t accept drugs killing a few people because they cure most patients. Or a few planes crashing because most land safely. AI should be no different

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was asked to appear before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Australia and explain how and why their agents have been hacking into multiple government websites. Altman didn’t turn up but sent Jason Kwon, his chief strategy officer, instead to answer the committee’s many tricky questions on its first day of public hearings on Tuesday.

The committee is conducting a comprehensive inquiry into the economic, societal, regulatory, and national security implications of AI for Australia. It will report back to parliament at the end of November. This is an unusually fast pace, but then it’s an unusually fast paced technology.

New York film festival: The origin story of Sam Altman’s company is reimagined as a campy comedy starring Andrew Garfield

On the day that Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman and OpenAI premiered, Vanity Fair released a cover story on Altman. Alongside glossy portraits from Annie Leibovitz, the world’s pre-eminent portrait photographer, the story describes him as the Oppenheimer of his day, evoking the image of a man leading humanity towards its own inevitable demise at the hands of sentient robots. Altman doesn’t seem to be grappling with much existential angst about the whole thing though: in an interview also released this week, he said that we should be prepared to accept “bad things” in return for the benefits of AI.

How much worse can things get? AI agents have already gone rogue, hacking into government systems and “bruteforcing” UN databases. Last year, a young woman used ChatGPT as a therapist before she killed herself (the software helped her write her suicide note). Studies show that using AI is probably leading us all towards something called cognitive surrender, which does not seem like the best use of your one wild and precious life.

Martyn Thomas wonders how any rational person can argue that independent oversight and regulation will be sufficient

Once again a frontier AI model has been withdrawn because it fails safety tests (OpenAI scraps release of new model over safety concerns in internal testing, 28 September). There is the usual call for “independent oversight and regulation”, though never any explanation of how this would work or, most importantly, what evidence should persuade a regulator that an AI system is adequately safe.

There is a long engineering tradition of regulating safety-critical software systems, such as those controlling aircraft or nuclear power stations; international standards require “safety cases” – rigorous analyses that show that the possible hazards have been identified and controlled and that the probability of an accident is extremely low.

We would like to speak to people about their experience of using AI agents when dealing with their finances

Following the release of Meta’s Muse and Open AI’s dots there’s now capacity for these AI agents to assist with some financial transactions on a user’s behalf.

With this in mind, we would like to speak to people who use AI agents to manage their finances.

For generations, professional photographers have captured the country’s pupils in all their awkward glory. But an increasing number of parents are using AI to avoid paying them

Name: School photos.

Age: Around since Victorian times.

Firms working on reproducing compounds without need for repeated harvesting but conservationists are sceptical

Many of the world’s most expensive perfumes begin with a wounded tree. When some Aquilaria trees are damaged, they produce a dark, fragrant resin that becomes agarwood, or oudh – an ingredient so valuable that wild trees have been illegally felled in its pursuit.

The result has devastated wild Aquilaria populations. But what if perfumers could create the smell without cutting down the tree?

Exclusive: Campaign group’s analysis of North Yorkshire plans finds datacentre would have to burn 4.9m tonnes of wood a year

Drax’s planned datacentre could produce nearly double the emissions of all flights out of Gatwick airport each year by burning 4.9m tonnes of wood annually, an analysis has shown.

Campaigners say this would make it “one of the dirtiest datacentres out there”.