Topic: T H E N E W A M E R I C A
Anonymous A started this discussion 1 month ago #135,882
The new America consists of:- rampant xenophobia
- low birth rates
- an inflated stock market
In the 1980s Japan experienced:
- rampant xenophobia
- low birth rates
- an inflated stock market
Surely what happens next to us can’t be what happened next to them!
Anonymous A (OP) double-posted this 1 month ago, 33 seconds later[^] [v] #1,442,961
Also, how old is this website and the owner never figured out how to make images display: block, what’s up with that?
Anonymous B joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 25 minutes later, 25 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,442,962
Anonymous C joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 4 hours later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,126
@1,442,961 (A)
The real TTEH passed years back, we lost some of the posts because of how the server was set up and and since then any post with his name is one of the mods playing around.
The real TTEH passed years back, we lost some of the posts because of how the server was set up and and since then any post with his name is one of the mods playing around.
Anonymous D joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 14 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,138
@1,442,962 (B)
The host needs to verify his ID because of a new UK law soon, we'll have to move to a new board by then. Saw a link to the law in the discord.
The host needs to verify his ID because of a new UK law soon, we'll have to move to a new board by then. Saw a link to the law in the discord.
Anonymous E joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 5 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,140
@1,442,962 (B)
> The owner is dead and his bank account runs out in 2034 effectively shutting down mc
Where’d you get 2034 from?
Name: MINICHAN.NET
Registry Domain ID: The RDAP server redacted the value
Domain Status:
clientTransferProhibited
Nameservers:
ALFRED.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
EDNA.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Dates
Registry Expiration: 2027-04-09 19:22:36 UTC
Registrar Expiration: 2027-04-09 19:22:36 UTC
Updated: 2026-03-10 08:36:25 UTC
Created: 2021-04-09 19:22:36 UTC
> The owner is dead and his bank account runs out in 2034 effectively shutting down mc
Where’d you get 2034 from?
Name: MINICHAN.NET
Registry Domain ID: The RDAP server redacted the value
Domain Status:
clientTransferProhibited
Nameservers:
ALFRED.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
EDNA.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Dates
Registry Expiration: 2027-04-09 19:22:36 UTC
Registrar Expiration: 2027-04-09 19:22:36 UTC
Updated: 2026-03-10 08:36:25 UTC
Created: 2021-04-09 19:22:36 UTC
Anonymous E double-posted this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,141
The last payment was in march a month before the expatriation and the domain is paid for yearly.
Anonymous D replied with this 1 month ago, 11 seconds later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,142
Anonymous C replied with this 1 month ago, 32 seconds later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,143
Anonymous E replied with this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,144
Anonymous D replied with this 1 month ago, 26 seconds later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,146
Anonymous E replied with this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,148
I checked the time zones, it would still be March 10 instead of March 9. No clue if you’re pulling my leg on some kinda inside joke or if you’re serious. Don’t they close your bank accounts when you die?
(Edited 2 minutes later.)
Anonymous E double-posted this 1 month ago, 18 seconds later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,149
And how would you even know how much is in there? 🤔
Anonymous D replied with this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,150
@1,443,148 (E)
If you don't have a designed executor, it's not so simple.
@previous (E)
Becky had a recent screenshot. It's very far back in the discord chat.
If you don't have a designed executor, it's not so simple.
@previous (E)
Becky had a recent screenshot. It's very far back in the discord chat.
Anonymous E replied with this 1 month ago, 4 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,151
@previous (D)
Actually, now that I think about it, I have a website and it charges my account automatically. So if I died that’s plausible. Although, I have a lot of family members so I feel like the bank would find out about it.
Actually, now that I think about it, I have a website and it charges my account automatically. So if I died that’s plausible. Although, I have a lot of family members so I feel like the bank would find out about it.
Anonymous E double-posted this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,152
I guess the only part I don’t get is how can people see how much money is left in the account if they can’t log into the account? Or can other people log into the account but they need 2FA to change the card or something weird and his email is gone? I can’t imagine why the heck somebody would deign a website so anybody other than the admin can access that.
Anonymous F joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 4 seconds later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,153
Check the stickied messages in https://discord.gg/SpZ6YPEXV4
Anonymous E replied with this 1 month ago, 2 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,154
tteh !MemesToDNA joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 21 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,267
tteh !MemesToDNA double-posted this 1 month ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,268
@1,442,961 (A)
Why would you want images to use display: block? They're left-floated like every imageboard/chan/forum.
Why would you want images to use display: block? They're left-floated like every imageboard/chan/forum.
Anonymous H joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,270
tteh !MemesToDNA replied with this 1 month ago, 1 hour later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,281
Mr. Bloody Lemonade joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 51 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,282
Anonymous J joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 35 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,288
It's only piracy when the poors do it
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/microsoft-built-supercomputer-to-help-openai-infringe-copyrights-nyt-alleged/?comments-page=1#comments
In a heavily redacted court filing Thursday, The New York Times proposed to amend its copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft to clarify a claim and allege that Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal NYT works by building a bespoke supercomputing system ranked among the most powerful in the world.
NYT’s motion comes after the Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider, which set a new standard for contributory infringement. Moving forward, plaintiffs will have to prove that parties intentionally acted to induce illegal conduct. Recognizing that the legal precedent has changed, the NYT now wants to amend its complaint to align its contributory infringement claim against Microsoft with that new standard.
“Today, we asked the court for permission to file an amended complaint that further strengthens our case, clarifying our claim of contributory infringement against Microsoft based on new law and new evidence uncovered during discovery,” Graham James, an NYT spokesperson, said in a statement provided to Ars.
In addition to clarifying one claim, NYT also agreed to voluntarily dismiss two claims of contributory copyright infringement and trademark dilution against all defendants.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that the company views the amended complaint as “a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim from unfavorable precedent set in other recent rulings.”
But in its motion, the NYT argued that neither Microsoft nor OpenAI would be prejudiced by allowing the amended complaint. It’s proper to allow plaintiffs to revise arguments when legal standards change, the NYT argued, and the case schedule would not be set back because “The Times does not seek any additional discovery in support of its amended claims.”
“As we have long alleged, Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works,” James said. “Beyond amending that claim and streamlining the case to its most potent arguments, our core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit—that Microsoft and OpenAI stole millions of The Times’s copyrighted works to compete with our products and illegally enrich themselves.”
NYT targets Microsoft supercomputer
In 2023, the NYT became the first major publisher to sue OpenAI. The prominent newspaper alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on its articles, infringed on its copyrights by outputting articles verbatim, and caused market harms by positioning ChatGPT as a substitute for a NYT subscription, as well as reputational harms by falsely attributing claims to NYT reporting. Additionally, ChatGPT outputs summarizing Wirecutter reviews robbed writers of commissions from lost clicks on affiliate links, the NYT alleged.
In the initial complaint, the NYT discussed Microsoft’s supercomputing systems as if they were providing generic cloud computing services. The updated complaint seeks to specify that the supercomputer was tailor-made to help OpenAI infringe and allege that it was built for the explicit purpose of training AI on copyrighted works without permission. And as the NYT alleged, its articles were more heavily weighted by this system, as both firms hoped to train models on the highest-quality journalism possible, so that level of writing could be confidently mimicked in outputs.
By building this “unusually complex” machine, Microsoft not only helped select the works that were infringed but also provided a means to seize copyrighted works without permission, the NYT alleged.
“Microsoft specifically designed it for the purpose of using essentially the whole Internet—curated to disproportionately feature Times Works—to train the most capable LLM in history,” the NYT alleged.
And now it’s allegedly unfairly profiting.
“Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by a trillion dollars in the past year alone,” the NYT alleged.
Model outputs show market harms, NYT alleged
For the NYT, outputs shared during discovery—including a huge chunk of users’ ChatGPT sessions—remain some of the strongest evidence that OpenAI and Microsoft built tools that allegedly replaced the NYT by producing near-verbatim excerpts of its copyrighted works.
In some cases, users told ChatGPT they were trying to skirt paywalls and were able to see significant chunks of articles by requesting to see the “next paragraph.” In other cases, “models simply spit out several paragraphs” without such finagling. To prove market harms caused by substitution, they shared examples in their complaints of side-by-side comparisons, as well as screenshots of allegedly infringing outputs:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/microsoft-built-supercomputer-to-help-openai-infringe-copyrights-nyt-alleged/?comments-page=1#comments
In a heavily redacted court filing Thursday, The New York Times proposed to amend its copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft to clarify a claim and allege that Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal NYT works by building a bespoke supercomputing system ranked among the most powerful in the world.
NYT’s motion comes after the Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider, which set a new standard for contributory infringement. Moving forward, plaintiffs will have to prove that parties intentionally acted to induce illegal conduct. Recognizing that the legal precedent has changed, the NYT now wants to amend its complaint to align its contributory infringement claim against Microsoft with that new standard.
“Today, we asked the court for permission to file an amended complaint that further strengthens our case, clarifying our claim of contributory infringement against Microsoft based on new law and new evidence uncovered during discovery,” Graham James, an NYT spokesperson, said in a statement provided to Ars.
In addition to clarifying one claim, NYT also agreed to voluntarily dismiss two claims of contributory copyright infringement and trademark dilution against all defendants.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that the company views the amended complaint as “a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim from unfavorable precedent set in other recent rulings.”
But in its motion, the NYT argued that neither Microsoft nor OpenAI would be prejudiced by allowing the amended complaint. It’s proper to allow plaintiffs to revise arguments when legal standards change, the NYT argued, and the case schedule would not be set back because “The Times does not seek any additional discovery in support of its amended claims.”
“As we have long alleged, Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works,” James said. “Beyond amending that claim and streamlining the case to its most potent arguments, our core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit—that Microsoft and OpenAI stole millions of The Times’s copyrighted works to compete with our products and illegally enrich themselves.”
NYT targets Microsoft supercomputer
In 2023, the NYT became the first major publisher to sue OpenAI. The prominent newspaper alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on its articles, infringed on its copyrights by outputting articles verbatim, and caused market harms by positioning ChatGPT as a substitute for a NYT subscription, as well as reputational harms by falsely attributing claims to NYT reporting. Additionally, ChatGPT outputs summarizing Wirecutter reviews robbed writers of commissions from lost clicks on affiliate links, the NYT alleged.
In the initial complaint, the NYT discussed Microsoft’s supercomputing systems as if they were providing generic cloud computing services. The updated complaint seeks to specify that the supercomputer was tailor-made to help OpenAI infringe and allege that it was built for the explicit purpose of training AI on copyrighted works without permission. And as the NYT alleged, its articles were more heavily weighted by this system, as both firms hoped to train models on the highest-quality journalism possible, so that level of writing could be confidently mimicked in outputs.
By building this “unusually complex” machine, Microsoft not only helped select the works that were infringed but also provided a means to seize copyrighted works without permission, the NYT alleged.
“Microsoft specifically designed it for the purpose of using essentially the whole Internet—curated to disproportionately feature Times Works—to train the most capable LLM in history,” the NYT alleged.
And now it’s allegedly unfairly profiting.
“Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by a trillion dollars in the past year alone,” the NYT alleged.
Model outputs show market harms, NYT alleged
For the NYT, outputs shared during discovery—including a huge chunk of users’ ChatGPT sessions—remain some of the strongest evidence that OpenAI and Microsoft built tools that allegedly replaced the NYT by producing near-verbatim excerpts of its copyrighted works.
In some cases, users told ChatGPT they were trying to skirt paywalls and were able to see significant chunks of articles by requesting to see the “next paragraph.” In other cases, “models simply spit out several paragraphs” without such finagling. To prove market harms caused by substitution, they shared examples in their complaints of side-by-side comparisons, as well as screenshots of allegedly infringing outputs:
Anonymous J double-posted this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,289
@previous (J)
Similarly as problematic for the NYT are hallucinations where Microsoft and OpenAI models falsely cite the NYT for content that they never published. The complaint listed examples like Bing Chat citing fake quotes from Steve Forbes’ daughter Moira Forbes and ChatGPT fabricating an NYT article that was never published but ChatGPT claimed linked non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to consuming orange juice.
“Users who ask a search engine what The Times has written on a subject should be provided with neither an unauthorized copy nor an inaccurate forgery of a Times article, but a link to the article itself,” the NYT alleged.
Microsoft and OpenAI are hoping that the court will agree that training AI on NYT articles is fair use. In a statement provided to Ars, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri reiterated the AI firm’s often-repeated claims that AI training on copyrighted works is indisputably fair use.
“Our models empower innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are grounded in fair use,” Pusateri said.
But the NYT likely expects that its evidence of substitution is strong, and that might not bode well for the tech firms it’s suing. Notably, one of the earliest verdicts finding that AI training was fair use was explicitly granted due to the plaintiffs’ failure to prove market harms. Last June, a federal judge laid out what he thinks could be a winning argument against AI training on copyrighted works, suggesting that the fair use question is far from answered.
In this case, OpenAI has argued that “ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription,” the NYT reported, partly because “they transformed the material for a different use.”
But if NYT manages to convince the court that the ChatGPT use is not so different from the newspaper’s, the most extreme outcome could require OpenAI and Microsoft to wipe models and start over.
The NYT has also asked for permanent injunctive relief to prevent future infringement, as well as extensive damages, insisting that “as a direct result of their conduct, Defendants have wrongfully profited from copyrighted works that they do not own.”
Similarly as problematic for the NYT are hallucinations where Microsoft and OpenAI models falsely cite the NYT for content that they never published. The complaint listed examples like Bing Chat citing fake quotes from Steve Forbes’ daughter Moira Forbes and ChatGPT fabricating an NYT article that was never published but ChatGPT claimed linked non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to consuming orange juice.
“Users who ask a search engine what The Times has written on a subject should be provided with neither an unauthorized copy nor an inaccurate forgery of a Times article, but a link to the article itself,” the NYT alleged.
Microsoft and OpenAI are hoping that the court will agree that training AI on NYT articles is fair use. In a statement provided to Ars, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri reiterated the AI firm’s often-repeated claims that AI training on copyrighted works is indisputably fair use.
“Our models empower innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are grounded in fair use,” Pusateri said.
But the NYT likely expects that its evidence of substitution is strong, and that might not bode well for the tech firms it’s suing. Notably, one of the earliest verdicts finding that AI training was fair use was explicitly granted due to the plaintiffs’ failure to prove market harms. Last June, a federal judge laid out what he thinks could be a winning argument against AI training on copyrighted works, suggesting that the fair use question is far from answered.
In this case, OpenAI has argued that “ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription,” the NYT reported, partly because “they transformed the material for a different use.”
But if NYT manages to convince the court that the ChatGPT use is not so different from the newspaper’s, the most extreme outcome could require OpenAI and Microsoft to wipe models and start over.
The NYT has also asked for permanent injunctive relief to prevent future infringement, as well as extensive damages, insisting that “as a direct result of their conduct, Defendants have wrongfully profited from copyrighted works that they do not own.”
Mr. Bloody Lemonade joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 34 seconds later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,290
Anonymous C replied with this 1 month ago, 7 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,294
@1,443,288 (J)
@1,443,289 (J)
The Jew York Times wants every Palestinian child turned to mist, so I hope OpenAI wins this one.
@1,443,289 (J)
The Jew York Times wants every Palestinian child turned to mist, so I hope OpenAI wins this one.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade replied with this 1 month ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,295
Anonymous C replied with this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,296
@previous (Mr. Bloody Lemonade)
https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
https://github.com/openai/gpt-oss
https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
https://github.com/openai/gpt-oss
Mr. Bloody Lemonade replied with this 1 month ago, 7 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,298
@previous (C)Yes, I trust this for-profit non-for-profit founded to stop tech giants from developing AI first with Microsoft owning a 27% stake.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade double-posted this 1 month ago, 5 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,299
…that somehow isn’t making any profit at the same time.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade triple-posted this 1 month ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,302
And obviously I trust Sam Altman, he’s an AI genius, totally not just a guy who likes investing in tech companies. His focus is definitely the technology itself and not investing, and you will come to that conclusion if you skim through the career section of his Wikipedia page where it talks about all the things he invented instead of all the things he invested in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman
(Edited 16 seconds later.)
Mr. Bloody Lemonade quadruple-posted this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,303
Which you know, is why OpenAI is a profitable business and not a business that only exists because he got investors to invest money into it thinking they’re going to make a return on investment when one of the most computationally inefficient technologies anybody’s ever come up with magically has different economics somehow one day.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade quintuple-posted this 1 month ago, 13 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,304
I also totally trust them because they confidentially filed for an IPO to avoid sharing their financials decided to delay it until 2027 after SpaceX went public… definitely inspires confidence in me.
Anonymous C replied with this 1 month ago, 2 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,318
@1,443,298 (Mr. Bloody Lemonade)
Strawman: I said you need to trust them
Steelman: I linked to the weights for their open model.
Strawman: I said you need to trust them
Steelman: I linked to the weights for their open model.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 20 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,319
Mr. Bloody Lemonade double-posted this 1 month ago, 7 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,320
@1,443,318 (C)
> for their open model
Yeah, I wonder if that has something to do with the fact they have also have closed models and they’re a non-profit that changed into a for-profit.
> for their open model
Yeah, I wonder if that has something to do with the fact they have also have closed models and they’re a non-profit that changed into a for-profit.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade triple-posted this 1 month ago, 2 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,321
It’s like you think if I say anything I’m accusing you of saying the opposite. I can’t strawman you when I literally didn’t accuse you of saying anything in the first place. I’m sick of all these retarded conversations.
Anonymous M joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 8 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,322
It’s not even an unusual opinion, people were saying it before ChatGPT was released.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aqwcyx/discussion_openai_should_now_change_their_name_to/
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aqwcyx/discussion_openai_should_now_change_their_name_to/
Anonymous C replied with this 1 month ago, 12 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,324
@1,443,320 (Mr. Bloody Lemonade)
What does "open" have to do with making a profit?
Red Hat is a billion dollar corporation and also an open source company.
What does "open" have to do with making a profit?
Red Hat is a billion dollar corporation and also an open source company.
Anonymous N joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 17 hours later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #1,443,450
Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown University: ‘Academic integrity is at risk’
The renowned economist Roberto Serrano has ‘overwhelming evidence’ that his students cheated. He thinks the time has come for an in-depth debate so the technology does not signal the end of higher education
Roberto Serrano in Naples, Florida on June 25.
MARCO BELLO
Manuel G. Pascual
MANUEL G. PASCUAL
JUN 28, 2026 - 06:30 CEST
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The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League, which brings together the East Coast’s eight most elite private universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania.
When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor in a telephone conversation from Providence, Rhode Island. To prevent AI from ending the prestige and utility of teaching, he feels, it is necessary to adopt a different approach: “We need to publicly admit the seriousness of the situation and open up a broad debate about the real extent of the problem.”
Serrano is considered one of the leading proponents of applying game theory—the field that earned John Nash the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics—to the analysis of markets. After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from Spain’s Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he has been Doctor Honoris Causa since 2019, Serrano went on to obtain a PhD at Harvard and, after completing his studies, received several job offers. Convinced that he wanted to devote his life to research and teaching, he accepted a position at Brown, where he remains to this day. He has been the recipient of several awards, including the King of Spain Prize for Economics in 2024.
At age 17, Serrano went blind. In a matter of months, the retinal dystrophy that had dogged him since he was little, but which still allowed him to read and play soccer, took away his sight entirely. After a short-lived crisis, he decided it would not stop him. He learned Braille, and his excellent academic record opened up the doors of Harvard. “Of course it affects my life, but one shouldn’t over-dramatize. We economists understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions. I view my disease simply as one more restriction that I have to deal with, and I optimize based on that,” he says.
Serrano always has an assistant in class to do the work on the whiteboard and handle the slides. Everything else, from preparing the class exercises to tutoring, as well as writing papers and books, he does by himself; recently these tasks have become easier thanks to technological progress.
This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” In this case, Serrano changed some of the model assumptions they had seen in class, and asked students to demonstrate whether certain statements were true or false under the new assumptions.
The course, which he has been teaching for years, is not an easy one: it typically attracts few students, but very good ones. He has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100. The people who corrected the exams warned him about several irregularities. “Some answers contained unusual passages that coincided with results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” he says.
Serrano did not void the midterm exam, but warned students that the final one, which counted for 50% of the final grade, would be held in-person. He also said that if the grade distribution was not similar to the midterm, only the final exam would be taken into account. The average score dropped to 48 out of 100. Of the 89 students who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up, 22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.
“The empirical evidence of fraud is overwhelming,” says the professor, who has decided to make changes for the coming academic year. First, the weekly exercises will not count towards the final grade, as these could be done with AI. Second, no more take-home exams, no matter how appropriate they would be.
The shooting that changed everything
Brown University made headlines on December 13 of last year for reasons that were not strictly academic. Neves Valentes, a 48-year-old former PhD student, showed up on campus with a gun in his hand and started firing. Two people died and nine more sustained injuries, in some cases serious ones. “We were living in an apartment in downtown Providence, and that Saturday we started to see a lot of police cars and ambulances headed for the university,” he recalls. His phone soon started getting messages. The shooting took place inside a classroom where a review session was underway for Introduction to Economics, led by one of his colleagues, Rachel Friedberg. These are sessions held to answer any questions that might arise ahead of the final exams. Two of the nine injured students were enrolled in Serrano’s class. They fought for their lives for weeks, and happily both survived.
Two days later, on the 15th, when the names of the deceased were released, he found out that one of the two fatalities was Ella Cook. The young woman had been to Serrano’s office that very same week to introduce herself. She had told him she was going to enroll in his Intermediate Microeconomics class that semester, and asked if he could be her career advisor for her joint concentration in economics and mathematics. “We chatted for quite a while. She was full of projects, ideas and hope. She was very interested in her studies. When I found out, I couldn’t believe it. I’ve been living in the U.S. for a long time, and I still cannot understand how this country still upholds the right to bear arms. There are cases like this one all the time, but you carry on with your life because they don’t affect you personally. Until one does. And it hurts, it hurts a great deal.”
Serrano was affected. “I was in a really bad place mentally for a while. After what happened, it occurred to me that that semester, which was beginning a month and a bit after the shooting, exams could be take-home in order to make life a little easier for students. Many of them still feel anxiety when they are on campus because of what happened in December.”
But now Serrano worries about the fact that some of his students decided to cheat. And that the university would side with them, in part because it gets generous donations from very wealthy families whose children often study there. “This means that the kids always get the benefit of the doubt; I’ve seen it on other occasions,” he notes. But it also hurts him that the one time in 34 years that he decided to offer a take-home exam, for highly justified reasons, the response was wide-scale fraud.
The temptation of AI
Artificial intelligence is altering century-old traditions at America’s most elite universities. Princeton, for instance, has decided to end a practice that had been upheld for 133 years: from now on, professors will proctor in-person exams. This hadn’t been the case since 1893, when an Honor Code went into effect by which all students pledged not to cheat: the teacher would hand over the exam, leave the room, and walk back in to pick up the tests at the end. If anybody cheated, it would be up to other students to report it.
But “A.I. has made deception easier and more remunerative than ever before,” wrote the U.S. journalist Theo Baker in a recent article in The New York Times. “I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college.” The 22-year-old writer has just graduated from Stanford, where he started classes two months before the first version of ChatGPT was released. In his four years as a student, he has witnessed how his fellow students have been unable to resist the temptation.
Serrano agrees that AI makes students have more incentives to cheat. That is why, he says, these cases cannot be swept under the rug. On the contrary, they should serve to open up an in-depth debate. “If we no longer defend truth and decency and honesty, then what kind of credibility are we going to have as academics?”
The renowned economist Roberto Serrano has ‘overwhelming evidence’ that his students cheated. He thinks the time has come for an in-depth debate so the technology does not signal the end of higher education
Roberto Serrano in Naples, Florida on June 25.
MARCO BELLO
Manuel G. Pascual
MANUEL G. PASCUAL
JUN 28, 2026 - 06:30 CEST
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The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League, which brings together the East Coast’s eight most elite private universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania.
When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor in a telephone conversation from Providence, Rhode Island. To prevent AI from ending the prestige and utility of teaching, he feels, it is necessary to adopt a different approach: “We need to publicly admit the seriousness of the situation and open up a broad debate about the real extent of the problem.”
Serrano is considered one of the leading proponents of applying game theory—the field that earned John Nash the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics—to the analysis of markets. After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from Spain’s Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he has been Doctor Honoris Causa since 2019, Serrano went on to obtain a PhD at Harvard and, after completing his studies, received several job offers. Convinced that he wanted to devote his life to research and teaching, he accepted a position at Brown, where he remains to this day. He has been the recipient of several awards, including the King of Spain Prize for Economics in 2024.
At age 17, Serrano went blind. In a matter of months, the retinal dystrophy that had dogged him since he was little, but which still allowed him to read and play soccer, took away his sight entirely. After a short-lived crisis, he decided it would not stop him. He learned Braille, and his excellent academic record opened up the doors of Harvard. “Of course it affects my life, but one shouldn’t over-dramatize. We economists understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions. I view my disease simply as one more restriction that I have to deal with, and I optimize based on that,” he says.
Serrano always has an assistant in class to do the work on the whiteboard and handle the slides. Everything else, from preparing the class exercises to tutoring, as well as writing papers and books, he does by himself; recently these tasks have become easier thanks to technological progress.
This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” In this case, Serrano changed some of the model assumptions they had seen in class, and asked students to demonstrate whether certain statements were true or false under the new assumptions.
The course, which he has been teaching for years, is not an easy one: it typically attracts few students, but very good ones. He has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100. The people who corrected the exams warned him about several irregularities. “Some answers contained unusual passages that coincided with results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” he says.
Serrano did not void the midterm exam, but warned students that the final one, which counted for 50% of the final grade, would be held in-person. He also said that if the grade distribution was not similar to the midterm, only the final exam would be taken into account. The average score dropped to 48 out of 100. Of the 89 students who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up, 22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.
“The empirical evidence of fraud is overwhelming,” says the professor, who has decided to make changes for the coming academic year. First, the weekly exercises will not count towards the final grade, as these could be done with AI. Second, no more take-home exams, no matter how appropriate they would be.
The shooting that changed everything
Brown University made headlines on December 13 of last year for reasons that were not strictly academic. Neves Valentes, a 48-year-old former PhD student, showed up on campus with a gun in his hand and started firing. Two people died and nine more sustained injuries, in some cases serious ones. “We were living in an apartment in downtown Providence, and that Saturday we started to see a lot of police cars and ambulances headed for the university,” he recalls. His phone soon started getting messages. The shooting took place inside a classroom where a review session was underway for Introduction to Economics, led by one of his colleagues, Rachel Friedberg. These are sessions held to answer any questions that might arise ahead of the final exams. Two of the nine injured students were enrolled in Serrano’s class. They fought for their lives for weeks, and happily both survived.
Two days later, on the 15th, when the names of the deceased were released, he found out that one of the two fatalities was Ella Cook. The young woman had been to Serrano’s office that very same week to introduce herself. She had told him she was going to enroll in his Intermediate Microeconomics class that semester, and asked if he could be her career advisor for her joint concentration in economics and mathematics. “We chatted for quite a while. She was full of projects, ideas and hope. She was very interested in her studies. When I found out, I couldn’t believe it. I’ve been living in the U.S. for a long time, and I still cannot understand how this country still upholds the right to bear arms. There are cases like this one all the time, but you carry on with your life because they don’t affect you personally. Until one does. And it hurts, it hurts a great deal.”
Serrano was affected. “I was in a really bad place mentally for a while. After what happened, it occurred to me that that semester, which was beginning a month and a bit after the shooting, exams could be take-home in order to make life a little easier for students. Many of them still feel anxiety when they are on campus because of what happened in December.”
But now Serrano worries about the fact that some of his students decided to cheat. And that the university would side with them, in part because it gets generous donations from very wealthy families whose children often study there. “This means that the kids always get the benefit of the doubt; I’ve seen it on other occasions,” he notes. But it also hurts him that the one time in 34 years that he decided to offer a take-home exam, for highly justified reasons, the response was wide-scale fraud.
The temptation of AI
Artificial intelligence is altering century-old traditions at America’s most elite universities. Princeton, for instance, has decided to end a practice that had been upheld for 133 years: from now on, professors will proctor in-person exams. This hadn’t been the case since 1893, when an Honor Code went into effect by which all students pledged not to cheat: the teacher would hand over the exam, leave the room, and walk back in to pick up the tests at the end. If anybody cheated, it would be up to other students to report it.
But “A.I. has made deception easier and more remunerative than ever before,” wrote the U.S. journalist Theo Baker in a recent article in The New York Times. “I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college.” The 22-year-old writer has just graduated from Stanford, where he started classes two months before the first version of ChatGPT was released. In his four years as a student, he has witnessed how his fellow students have been unable to resist the temptation.
Serrano agrees that AI makes students have more incentives to cheat. That is why, he says, these cases cannot be swept under the rug. On the contrary, they should serve to open up an in-depth debate. “If we no longer defend truth and decency and honesty, then what kind of credibility are we going to have as academics?”
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