A Danish study warned that chatbots based on artificial intelligence provide users with a narrower and more similar range of information, compared to traditional search engines, which may lead to a decline in the diversity of knowledge available to people in the future.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen explained that the increasing reliance on chatbots, as a main gateway to accessing information, may expose users to fewer viewpoints and information, in a phenomenon they called “knowledge collapse.” The results are scheduled to be presented at an international research conference to be held in Budapest, Hungary, from October 24 to 29.
Chatbots rely on large language models that analyze users' questions and generate a unified answer, based on patterns they have learned from huge amounts of text.
In contrast, a search engine such as Google displays a wider range of results and sources that the user can compare and explore, providing a more diverse range of information.
The researchers tested 27 large linguistic models, including models from OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Alibaba, across 155 topics related to 12 countries. For each topic, they used 200 different question wordings, based on queries posed by real users, resulting in about 1.7 million AI-generated answers, which included about 70 million individual pieces of information or claims.
The results showed that the most diverse model among the tested models, GPT-5 from OpenAI, produced at least 18.7 percent less diverse information, compared to Google search tests. The study included various issues, from nuclear weapons, marriage, racism, and genocide, to topics related to specific countries and regions.
The researchers also found that smaller forms produce more diverse content than larger forms, that newer forms are more diverse than older ones, and that all forms included in the analysis showed significantly less diversity than traditional search engines.
The researchers attribute this in part to the way large language models are trained, which compress huge amounts of text and learn the most frequent patterns in them, which may lead to a decline in the presence of information that differs from the prevailing patterns.
The team fears the problem will get worse if AI models increasingly train on texts generated by other models. New models may learn from previous outputs that are themselves less diverse than the original human texts. As this process is repeated over successive generations, the pool of information passed from one model to another may narrow, what researchers call “knowledge collapse.”
They likened the potential impact of this process to what happened with globalization, as the world now includes the same products and café chains in many places. This has its advantages, but it has also led to a decline in diversity.
They stressed that summaries of chatbots can be useful, but it is important to use different sources to get a broader picture and understand the finer details, “especially for the younger generation who is growing up with artificial intelligence.”
A talented British chess girl has become the youngest player in history to win the title of “Grandmaster” for women. The International Chess Federation, FIDE, confirmed that Budhana Sivanandan, 11 years old, from northwest London, achieved her third and final criterion for the title while representing England in the 46th Chess Olympiad, held in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
Speaking to the International Federation, Sivanandan expressed her happiness with this achievement, but stressed her desire to “continue making history.” According to the BBC, this title represents the latest stage in the exceptional rise of this student, who previously became the youngest women's chess champion in Britain, and the youngest person to represent England internationally in any sport.
Sivanandan, who is from the Harrow area, participated in all 11 rounds on the first board for the English team, which is the position reserved for the best player in the team, and she finished the tournament with 8 points. She had already exceeded the classification threshold of 2,300 points, required to obtain the title of “Grandmaster” for women, before achieving her third and final standard.
Katerina Lagno, who represented both Russia and Ukraine, previously held the record for the youngest player to win the women's Grandmaster title, having achieved it at the age of 12 years. Chinese Hou Yifan also won the title at the same age, and to this day she remains the youngest woman to obtain the open title of “Grandmaster,” the highest rank, after she obtained it at the age of 14.
The title of “Grandmaster” for women is the highest title reserved exclusively for female players, and is granted for life. Sivanandan's success in Samarkand also contributed to her second criterion for obtaining the title of "International Professor", bringing her one step closer to this most prestigious title.
Judicial and legal attention in the United States is turning to the high-security Riverbend Prison in Nashville, where the US state of Tennessee stands on the cusp of a historical and legal event unprecedented since the modern era. The state is preparing to implement the death sentence against prisoner Christa Gayle Pike (50 years old), in a move that constitutes the first time that a woman has been executed in this state in more than two hundred years, specifically since 1819.
This notable development came after the state's governor, Bill Lee, officially announced his refusal to intervene to grant executive clemency or commute the sentence, stressing that the terrible crime committed by Pike nearly three decades ago left no room for retraction from legal retribution.
This case, whose chapters date back to 1995, has occupied American public opinion for a long time due to its harsh details and the young age of the perpetrators and the victim, as Christa Pike was an eighteen-year-old teenager studying at a vocational training center in the city of Knoxville. Motivated by intense jealousy and personal differences, Pike, with the help of her friend, lured her colleague Colleen Slimer (19 years old) to an isolated area on the University of Tennessee campus. There, the perpetrators carried out a brutal attack that included torturing the victim for half an hour and engraving strange symbols on her body, before Pike killed her with fatal blows to the head. She even kept a piece of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.”
Despite Pike's early admission of guilt, her defense team waged a fierce legal battle that extended for decades, based on the fact that the ruling issued in 1996 neglected to review the tragic history of Pike, who suffered a harsh childhood that included repeated physical and sexual assaults, in addition to suffering from severe psychological and mental disorders that were not treated at the time of the crime. The lawyers argued that the brain at the age of 18 is not fully developed, and that the remorseful 50-year-old Pike today is completely different from the broken-down teenager who committed the crime three decades ago.
In addition to the human and psychological dimension, the defense's legal strategy focused on challenging the legality of the execution protocol used in Tennessee. Lawyers submitted urgent requests to the US Supreme Court to halt the implementation, claiming that the lethal injection mechanism entails the risk of causing excruciating pain and suffering that exceed the constitutional limit. In a move that sparked much legal controversy, Pike submitted an exceptional and unusual request to the authorities, demanding that the team responsible for restraining her and administering the lethal injection consist entirely of women, without any male presence, justifying this by saying that the male guards’ treatment of her body would revive old traumas of rape and abuse that she had been exposed to when she was young.
This case has reignited the deep moral and ethical division in American society over the death penalty, as human rights activists and experts from the United Nations believe that the execution of a fifty-year-old woman who regrets a crime she committed when she was a teenager whose brain was not fully developed represents excessive cruelty. On the other hand, the victim's family adhered to the necessity of enforcing the law until the end, as Colleen's mother, May Martinez, traveled hundreds of kilometers to attend the implementation, expressing that punishment was the only way to achieve justice for her daughter, whose life was taken in her young age.
