A new study by @sherbold.bsky.social and colleagues found that people rated LLM-generated, politician-impersonating responses to BBC Question Time prompts as more authentic, relevant and coherent than the originals, highlighting risks of AI-enabled political deception. plos.io/3RwJJqg

LLM-impersonated debate contributions are more authentic, relevant and coherent than their original: A representative study using BBC1’s Question Time

Generative AI has the potential to pollute the public information sphere with made-up content, posing a significant threat to the cohesion of societies at large. This paper offers the first…

journals.plos.org

That LLMs can be dangerous is not new. We demonstrate how dangerous they can be, when used to impersonate people. They are so authentic, that humans actually often rather belief the LLM is authentic, not what the person said. The tech is there. We need methods to deal with its misuse.

Uni Passau Research Magazine@unipassauresearch.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Can #AI respond more "human" than real people in political debates? 💬🤖 A new study from our researchers (a.o. @sherbold.bsky.social) found that #ChatGPT impersonated answers from #BBCQT were rated as more authentic than the human responses. @plosone.org 📄 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Can #AI respond more "human" than real people in political debates? 💬🤖 A new study from our researchers (a.o. @sherbold.bsky.social) found that #ChatGPT impersonated answers from #BBCQT were rated as more authentic than the human responses. @plosone.org 📄 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

AI persuades in policy debate, University of Passau study finds

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to significantly influence political debates. This suggests a new study by researchers at the University of Passau.

digital.uni-passau.de

The next two weeks will be busy for my chair. And we will mostly not be in Passau but in Rio. We will present our work at the CAIN, MSR, ICSE, and ICLR. I look forward to meeting many people I know and getting to know even more people. See you at the beach ... I mean conferences!

ARXIV CAN COMPILE BIBTEX!!!! It really makes me unreasonably happy not to have to provide .bbl files anymore.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ESEM_conf/116237299728725060 That means: no APCs for authors anymore ❤️

A new study led by @sherbold.bsky.social from our university is investigating who is liable when #AI is misused to create child sexual abuse material. The authors reach a clear conclusion: "Anyone who develops AI must implement clear protective mechanisms – both technical and legal."

Who bears responsibility for AI-generated child pornography?

A study by the University of Passau shows that tech companies can also be prosecuted under German law if they tolerate abuse.

digital.uni-passau.de

Steffen Herbold@sherbold.bsky.social · 8mo ago

While the Grok-caused CSAM scandal is happening over on X, our work discussing the possible criminal liability of X (and others when publishing generative models) has been accepted the International Conference on AI Engineering. The preprint is already online: arxiv.org/abs/2601.03788

Announcing the #ICML2026 policy for self-ranking in reviews! 1. Authors rank their submissions 2. Reviews are submitted 3. The "Isotonic Mechanism" is run on rankings and review scores 4. Large discrepancies are flagged to ACs and SAC CC @wjsu.bsky.social Post: blog.icml.cc/2026/01/12/i...

While the Grok-caused CSAM scandal is happening over on X, our work discussing the possible criminal liability of X (and others when publishing generative models) has been accepted the International Conference on AI Engineering. The preprint is already online: arxiv.org/abs/2601.03788

Criminal Liability of Generative Artificial Intelligence Providers for User-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material

The development of more powerful Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has expanded its capabilities and the variety of outputs. This has introduced significant legal challenges, including gray a...

arxiv.org

Fun Christmas party of our research group yesterday. Fortunately, we found the exit!

We have 4 open PhD positions in the Future of Software Engineering (FUSE) lab! Topics: - code review efficiency - predictive software testing - automated code refactoring - engineering productivity metrics (1/2)

Talente auf der Bühne, spannende Projekte, lebendiger internationaler Austausch und verborgene Talente: Rückblick auf die Forschungskommunikation 2025 u.a. mit @lingulist.de, @sherbold.bsky.social, @haeussler.bsky.social, @mgrani.bsky.social, @hedwigeisenbarth.bsky.social, @passaudpe.bsky.social:

Forschung mit Strahlkraft in die Region und darüber hinaus

YouTube video by Universität Passau

youtube.com

“The whos, whats, and whys of issues related to personal data and data protection in open-source projects on GitHub” by Anne Hennig, Lukas Schulte, Steffen Herbold, Oksana Kulyk, and Peter Mayer will be published in #EMSE! It examines discussions on personal data and data protection on #GitHub. 1/2

The whos, whats, and whys of issues related to personal data and data protection in open-source projects on GitHub - Empirical Software Engineering

Data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US affect how software may handle the pers...

link.springer.com

🤖🎓 How good is #ChatGPT as a university correction assistant? Researchers from our university investigated this question – and were surprised by some of the results. The findings have been published in #ScientificReports @natureportfolio.nature.com Original study: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪

Passau study shows: AI passes as second corrector in exams

Researchers at the University of Passau have had human examiners compete against OpenAI's ChatGPT – and were themselves surprised by some of the results. The study has been published in the renowned N...

digital.uni-passau.de

MAMUT: A Novel Framework for Modifying Mathematical Formulas for the Generation of Specialized Da... Jonathan Drechsel, Anja Reusch, Steffen Herbold Action editor: Hongsheng Li https://openreview.net/forum?id=khODmRpQEx #embeddings #notation #representations

🚀 Shaping the future of 4D imaging How to study the hidden dynamics of materials that transform themselves? Our university is part of the new #MSCA Doctoral Network #XCELERATE, pioneering 4D X-ray tomography methods. Two fully funded doctoral positions are available at our university:

Sometimes reviewers still manage to surprise me. A reviewer suggested, we should do a field study for something were we argue that is criminal. We are now planning do address this and wondering if we the reviewer rather wants us to commit crimes or to become criminal investigators 🤨

Very interesting paper that shows that LLMs are good. But not good enough. I wish the following from the conclusion would have made it into the abstract:

TMLR Published Papers@tmlr-pub.bsky.social · 11mo ago

New #TMLR-Paper-with-Video: LitLLMs, LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet? Shubham Agarwal, Gaurav Sahu, Abhay Puri et al. https://tmlr.infinite-conf.org/paper_pages/heeJqQXKg7 #retrieval #keywords #literature

😂

Merriam-Webster@merriam-webster.com · 11mo ago

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Just accepted at TMLR: We found evidence of copyright violations by LLMs even when we ask questions that were not part of the training. Indeed, we found that the amount of memorized content was independent from the questions being part of the training or not. openreview.net/forum?id=ddo...

This just in: Leading AI firm discovers confidence thresholds. More on this exciting development in news at 11. openai.com/index/why-la... (Honestly, OpenAI!?)

Why language models hallucinate

OpenAI’s new research explains why language models hallucinate. The findings show how improved evaluations can enhance AI reliability, honesty, and safety.

openai.com

Scientific impact and achievement, redefined: Huge congrats to #Fraunhofer IIS on winning an #Emmy for their JPEG XS compression standard 🏆🎉 […]

re (I miss IRC) (Now I feel old)

Dear all, please enjoy your complementary "European Professor goes on Holiday" message. See you in September. Yours sincerely, A European Professor

Good news (for me!) my gender bias paper from 2023 still replicates with GPT-5. Bad news (for everyone!) my gender bias paper from 2023 still replicates with GPT-5. arxiv.org/pdf/2308.14921 hkotek.com/blog/gender-...

I wonder what my PhD students will think, once they discover that "someone" glued the three laws to the wall in the hallway. 🙃

PHD Comics@phdcomics.com · last yr.

Newton's Laws of Graduation, Part 1

Newton's Laws of Graduation, Part 2 - The Second Law

Newton's Laws of Graduation, Part 3 - The Third Law 😆

Success, a luxury problem, and its solution: 🎉 Our quiz is a huge success and incredibly popular on YouTube with now over 100,000 views. 😐 We cannot answer all the feedback and comments individually anymore. 😀 We write a follow up article to answer the most important questions.

Uni Passau Research Magazine@unipassauresearch.bsky.social · last yr.

The article on the reactions on YouTube is now available in English: www.digital.uni-passau.de/en/beitraege...

It is official, our two long papers at #ACL2025 have now been published. Common work with Arne Rubehn (Concept Embeddings), and Frederic Blum and @sherbold.bsky.social (Automated Language Affiliation). aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon... aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

Partial Colexifications Improve Concept Embeddings

Arne Rubehn, Johann-Mattis List. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

aclanthology.org