AI Learns From the Whole Internet. Researchers Just Showed Someone Could Poison It With Comments.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0800

In 2024, a team of researchers showed they could sneak harmful text into AI training data by quietly editing Wikipedia pages and buying up expired domain names. It worked. It was also, in hindsight, the easy version of the attack.

Here is the harder one, and as it turns out, the one that no one needs special access to pull off.

A group at the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for AI has now shown that anyone with a botnet and a target list of websites can poison the training data of the next generation of large language models. No Wikipedia logins. No domain purchases. Just comments. Ordinary, user-submitted website comments, the same kind you might leave on a WordPress blog or a news article.

When AI Stops Thinking in Sentences: Can We Still See Inside Its Mind?

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Every time you ask ChatGPT or Gemini a hard question, something remarkable happens behind the scenes. The model doesn’t just blurt out an answer — it thinks. It writes out a stream-of-consciousness chain of reasoning, step by step, in plain English, before delivering its final response. This isn’t just a quirk; it’s a safety feature. When an AI writes down its thoughts in human language, researchers can read them. They can spot signs of deception, catch flawed logic, and — if the model ever starts plotting something dangerous — hopefully intercept it before it’s too late.

Language Models on AI Science Report

AI Learns From the Whole Internet. Researchers Just Showed Someone Could Poison It With Comments.

When AI Stops Thinking in Sentences: Can We Still See Inside Its Mind?