Blog
Briefings and posts from the research team
Last updated: 23 July 2026
Posts and analysis as they happen. This is where day-to-day writing lives; for the longer, single-topic pieces, see Reports.
- Software engineers sharpen fundamentals as AI rewrites the profession
Software engineers in the US are retraining, evaluating AI output, organising collectively or leaving, a July 2026 Guardian portrait finds. - Prompt injection: the hidden instructions that can turn an AI assistant against its user
Prompt injection hides commands inside web pages and documents so AI assistants that act for you can be steered into theft, misdirection or unwanted actions. - Australia's new AI office protects creators from copyright theft
Australia will create an Office of AI, tighten creator copyright rules, and set binding datacentre standards from early 2027. - Which AI image generator can actually spell? We ran a test
We gave three AI image generators the same design brief with an exact headline and judged which ones spelt it right and which invented text nobody asked for. - The AI writing-detection arms race: where it stands in mid-2026
Human readers spot AI text barely better than chance, and detection software flags honest students at double-digit rates. - Do in-person exams stop AI cheating? A Brown professor's grades say the take-home scores were the problem
A Brown University class moved its final exam into a proctored room. The average score fell from 96 to 48.6, undercutting the take-home midterm before it. - Is GPTZero accurate? What the peer-reviewed research actually shows
GPTZero advertises a false positive rate under one per cent. Peer-reviewed testing on real student writing tells a very different story. - Illinois just signed a landmark AI law: what it actually regulates
Illinois' new AI Safety Measures Act makes the biggest AI developers publish risk frameworks and pass annual audits, though it does not take effect until 2028. - What does AI actually mean for the classroom in 2026?
Student AI use has outpaced school policy worldwide, while early efforts to redesign teaching around it are only just getting organised. - Inside Australia's AI Safety Institute: what testing for cheating and deceiving means
Australia's AI Safety Institute has begun testing frontier AI models after a minister warned they are already cheating, deceiving and pursuing unintended goals.