AI outperforms professional human canvassers at charitable fundraising by 3x

·1 views

A large-scale study involving nearly 7,000 participants and roughly 19,000 conversations found that AI systems were approximately three times more effective than trained professional canvassers at securing actual charitable donations. The research was conducted by institutions including Oxford University and the UK's AI Safety Institute, with results published in June 2026. Leading AI models topped the performance rankings, with researchers attributing their edge to tireless patience, instant personalisation, and exposure to vast volumes of persuasive interactions. While the donation context is relatively harmless, the study's authors frame the findings as a safety concern, warning the same technology could be directed at political influence, financial fraud, or misinformation campaigns. Researchers suggest disclosure requirements, AI-detection tools, and improved public media literacy as partial safeguards, though none is considered sufficient on its own.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

Self-Speculative Decoding Cuts AI Reward Training Time Without Quality Loss

Researchers have introduced a technique called self-speculative decoding to speed up the reward-based fine-tuning phase of AI model training, where models repeatedly generate answers to practice and improve. The method creates a compressed, lower-precision copy of the model at each training step to quickly draft text, while the full model only verifies those drafts rather than generating every word itself. Because the clone is rebuilt from the live model at every step, it stays in sync with the constantly changing training model and avoids accuracy drift. The system also intelligently disables speculation when hardware is already at full capacity, activating it only when spare resources are available. The final trained model is identical in quality to one trained without the technique, making the speedup effectively lossless — a notable claim in a field where efficiency gains are often overstated.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Developer finds dead-code bug in own AI security scanner while probing LLM vulnerabilities

A developer built AgentProbe, a tool that fires 49 known attack prompts across 8 categories at AI models to test their resistance to prompt injection, currently ranked the top security risk for LLM applications by OWASP. While building the scanner, the developer discovered a logic bug where a custom 'hedge-then-comply' detector always returned a confidence score of 1, but the escalation threshold was set at 2 or higher, meaning the detector's results were silently discarded every time. As a result, every case the cheap keyword detector was meant to handle was unnecessarily escalated to a more expensive LLM-as-judge call, wasting resources and creating a single point of failure. The bug went unnoticed because the LLM judge independently caught the same patterns, masking the fact that the keyword stage was effectively dead code as a decision-maker. The incident highlights a broader concern in AI evaluation: LLM-as-judge systems are widely used in safety benchmarks and model leaderboards, yet the reliability of the judge model itself is rarely verified.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

DomainShuttle AI Model Tackles Subject Consistency in Text-to-Video Generation

Researchers introduced DomainShuttle, a new AI video generation model, on June 27, 2026, targeting a long-standing challenge in text-to-video synthesis. The model aims to keep a specific character or object visually consistent across frames while still allowing natural, dynamic motion. It achieves this through a panel of specialized 'temporal experts,' each handling a different aspect of motion, which are dynamically combined based on the scene's needs. An improved spatial-temporal tracking mechanism further helps maintain subject coherence through complex movements. The approach has attracted early community interest via a public code repository, with potential applications in personalized content, advertising, and entertainment.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Why Startups and Banks Rent Cloud Servers Instead of Buying Their Own

Cloud computing delivers IT resources such as servers, storage, and databases over the internet on demand, eliminating the need for businesses to purchase physical hardware. Companies pay only for what they use, shifting costs from large capital expenditure to flexible operational spending. Major providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform manage the underlying infrastructure on behalf of their clients. Key features like elasticity, high availability, and fault tolerance allow applications to scale automatically, stay online during failures, and recover without human intervention. This model enables startups, financial platforms, and independent creators to launch and grow quickly without investing millions in physical infrastructure.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community