A deluge of AI-generated content and unfair treatment by social media platforms could prove pivotal in Brazil’s presidential election, according to supporters of the left-wing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Lula will face off against right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro on 25 October in the second round of the contest. Lula’s campaign has Meta – which owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook – of favouring Bolsonaro by suspending Lula’s campaign advertising account, suppressing posts and blocking AI-generated content.

Brazil’s electoral prosecutors have said with court orders to ensure equal treatment of both candidates, while United Nations human rights experts possible unequal treatment of the two campaigns.

Images have widely circulated showing Meta AI, a chatbot integrated into WhatsApp, refusing to generate campaign posters for Lula, while instantly producing an image for “Flávio”.

Meta said “claims that we are favoring or interfering on behalf of any candidate or political group are false and unfounded”. It said Lula’s account was suspended for 1 hour by mistake and that its systems blocked prompts referring to the names “Lula” and “Bolsonaro”, but not the common first names Luiz or Flávio.

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Lula’s campaign remains unconvinced. It submitted screenshots to the electoral court showing Meta AI repeatedly assigning Bolsonaro’s electoral number, 22, to generic, fictional politicians and allegedly translating “Flávio futuro presidiário” (“Flávio future prisoner”) as “Flávio future president”.

Determining whether the discrepancies are deliberate is impossible because Meta’s systems are opaque, says at the University of Virginia. “But when a technical glitch tends to repeat its outcome, it’s very hard to accept that this is just a technical failure.”

Lula finished behind Bolsonaro in the first round of voting, but polls show the gap is narrowing. The comeback has been partly credited to Lula’s Army, an intensive online campaign in which 8 million WhatsApp channel subscribers receive daily tasks, such as posting photographs on Instagram posing with their fingers forming an L.

This year’s general election is Brazil’s first since large language models (LLMs) became widely popular, and it is awash with AI-generated content. Experts say Latin America’s largest democracy offers a glimpse of what is to come for AI in politics.

of AI-generated or manipulated election content ahead of the first round, primarily on Facebook and Instagram, 60 per cent of it unlabelled. found that 26 Meta advertising accounts appeared to sidestep restrictions on foreign-funded political advertising by posting AI-generated videos, including one depicting Bolsonaro and Argentina’s president Javier Milei freeing Brazil from communists.

Meta’s independent oversight board says the company’s .

“It’s very worrying,” says Nemer. “So much of our political campaign dynamics have been transferred to privatised companies that we have no idea how they operate.”

Regulating AI in political campaigns won’t be as simple as it seems, says at InternetLab, a Brazilian digital rights non-profit that studied how eight major AI chatbots respond to questions about Brazil’s election.

Its report found that chatbots sometimes refused genuine questions about candidates, referring users to official electoral websites, but would agree to draft misleading claims questioning the integrity of elections for use in campaigning.

Massaro says clearer safeguards for LLMs are needed, but first their objectives must be defined.

“Are the safeguards working? That’s one question. But working for what, because it depends on what your goals are,” she says. “Is the solution to send people away without providing any kind of information? Is this what we want?”

UN researchers are urging people to be less polite to artificial intelligences after a report found that cutting words from prompts could reduce ChatGPT’s energy consumption by up to 25 per cent.

Removing “please”, “thank you” and other unnecessary words from AI prompts could save 87 to 98 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, the report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and 91ɫ��Ƭ (UNU-INWEH) found. That is the equivalent of the annual residential electricity use of up to 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa.

To reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint, people should write concise prompts, avoid getting sucked into conversation loops and refrain from starting relationships with AI, the researchers said.

“We are not saying be rude to your AI. But don’t fall into the interaction trap and don’t go falling in love with it either,” says at UNU-INWEH.

The large language models behind AI chatbots process text in small units known as tokens. Madani says concise prompts can save energy because they can reduce both the number of tokens the model has to process and the number it generates in response. In some cases, shorter prompts may also simplify the task, further reducing the power required.

The UN study – one of the most comprehensive assessments of the environmental costs of AI to date – warns of rapidly increasing energy, land and water use due to the growing adoption of the technology.

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ChatGPT alone now processes around 2.5 billion queries every day and Google 16 billion, the majority of which have integrated AI summaries.

Tech companies disclose little information on their energy use, so the researchers used the available data for their data centres.

AI currently accounts for about 20 per cent of the energy used by data centres, but that share is projected to double to around 40 per cent in the next few years. By 2030, AI alone could consume around 378 terawatt-hours a year and data centres could use 945 TWh in total — almost 3 per cent of projected global electricity use.

The 9.3 trillion litres of water projected to be needed by data centres by 2030 is enough to meet the minimum annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa.

“You’re looking at something on a global scale that is being adopted faster than any other technology in the history of technology, so the energy use is increasing very rapidly,” says at UNU-INWEH.

The researchers said AI companies should be required to publish their energy consumption, while governments should introduce energy caps on companies and individuals, but it is also crucial to educate the public on how to use AI efficiently.

People should be encouraged to avoid using AI unnecessarily and, when they do use it, to cut words and use less powerful models, says Madani.

They should also be aware that generating an image uses 60 times more energy than a text query, enough to power a 10-watt LED bulb for about 17 minutes.

A complex video uses up to 8000 times more than text and could power the same bulb for about 1.7 days.

“We are not saying AI is bad,” says Madani. “We are just saying let’s use it in a proper way. It’s like a knife: you can save a patient’s life in the operating theatre, but you can also kill someone with it.”

Our brain may not be as capable of rewiring following an amputation as we thought, which could have serious implications for how we treat a common complication called phantom limb pain.

A part of the brain called the somatosensory cortex receives and processes sensory information across the body, such as touch and temperature. Some studies suggest , so a different area will light up if you burn your hand versus your toe, for instance.

It has also been suggested that the somatosensory cortex reorganises itself in the case of an amputation or severed nerve. For example, in , neurons in the somatosensory cortex that normally respond to stimulation of the hand were instead activated by touching the face. The researchers concluded that some of the area of the cortex that responds to the hand being touched had been reallocated to the face.

But for the first time, at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues have compared the brain activity of people before and after an amputation – and found it doesn’t actually change.

The researchers used MRI to scan the brains of three people before their arms were amputated for medical reasons. During the scans, they were asked to purse their lips and tap their fingers.

When the team repeated this three and six months post-amputation and asked the participants to try moving the fingers they no longer had, their brain signals remained the same. “As far as we can measure, they are identical,” says Makin.

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Two of the participants were also followed up at 18 months and five years, respectively, post-amputation, with neither showing any significant change to their brain signals from before.

The researchers validated their findings by first training an AI model to recognise which pre-amputation brain scans were linked to the participants moving each finger. When they returned post-amputation and imagined wiggling each finger in a random order, the model could identify from brain activity which finger they were trying to move, demonstrating it remained constant.

In another part of the experiment, the researchers measured the somatosensory cortex activity of the participants as they moved their lips and tried to move their fingers post-amputation. This was also done for 26 people whose arms were amputated an average of 23 years ago, and the researchers found the activity was comparable.

“This study confirms in a definitive way that this idea that the brain is capable of remapping, rewiring or reorganising – that the cortex can simply do a switcheroo – is incorrect,” said at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

The researchers argue the findings could change the treatment of phantom limb pain, among people who have undergone an amputation where they still perceive pain or discomfort in an arm or leg that is no longer there.

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Some efforts to treat the condition involve using visual cues, like virtual reality, to prompt the brain into reorganising itself. This has mixed results, with any benefit possibly being due to the placebo effect, says Makin.

Instead, the researchers say the condition could possibly be prevented by grafting nerves into new tissue that is sometimes added during amputations. Otherwise, the remaining parts of the nerve that are cut off from their target can grow and cause nerve tissue to thicken, which may contribute to phantom limb pain.

“The maladaptive plasticity theory of phantom limb pain was based on the idea that the brain can reorganise in a way that it doesn’t,” says Krakauer. “In a sense, the way that people think of treating phantom limb now will change just because the theory upon which it was based is wrong.”

Covid-19 seems to accelerate the ageing of blood vessels, but perhaps only among women.

The infection has previously been , like heart disease, but how it has this effect isn’t entirely clear. To learn more, at the Université Paris Cité in France and her colleagues recruited 2390 people, aged 50 on average, from 16 countries – including the UK and US – between September 2020 and February 2022.

Some of them had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, or had antibodies against it despite not being vaccinated, a sign that they had been infected. The others had only ever tested negative for the virus and had no signs of prior infection.

The health of their arteries was assessed by measuring how fast a pressure wave passed between the carotid artery in their neck and the femoral arteries in their legs. This is a measure of artery stiffness, which increases naturally with age, with less flexible arteries raising the risk of heart disease.

The researchers found that among the women in the study, a known SARS-CoV-2 infection was linked to stiffer arteries. This also seemed to increase alongside the severity of their infection. For instance, women who were hospitalised with covid-19 had a vascular age that was around five years older than their uninfected counterparts, rising to 7.5 years among those admitted to intensive care.

The researchers controlled for other factors that can influence artery stiffness, like smoking and obesity.

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But none of these effects occurred among the men. Previous research suggests that and are , which could lead to damaging inflammation. Bruno says she was expecting to see some difference between the sexes, but not this much.

The findings could also shed some light on long covid, which . At a six-month follow-up, the stiffness of the women’s arteries had improved slightly, but was still particularly high among those with lingering covid-19-related complications. “Here we have demonstrated there is something measurable in the blood vessels that corresponds to the symptoms of long-covid patients,” says Bruno.

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It’s possible that some of the people in the uninfected group may have unknowingly had a mild infection, affecting the validity of the results.

Nevertheless, at the University of East Anglia in the UK says the study is robust and could help identify people with long covid. “The study is the first large international multicentre investigation to demonstrate that covid-19 is associated with accelerated vascular ageing,” he says. “The findings may also contribute to a better mechanistic understanding of post covid-19 syndrome, potentially paving the way for targeted pharmacological interventions.”

The covid-19 pandemic may have accelerated the ageing of our brains even before we caught the infection. Research suggests that even relatively early on in the outbreak, brains aged by 5.5 months, possibly due to stress or lifestyle changes.

We know that many people with long covid experience brain fog, but years after the arrival of covid-19, the pandemic’s broader neurological impact is far from fully understood.

To get a grasp on this, at Nottingham University, UK, and his colleagues trained a machine learning model on 15,000 brain scans to identify how its structure changes with age.

They then fed the model pairs of brain scans from 996 volunteers from the UK Biobank study. Of these, 564 had both scans taken before March 2020, when lockdown was introduced in the UK, and acted as the control group. The remaining 432 volunteers had one scan before March 2020 and one later on. Each scan was three years apart, on average, with a minimum gap of two years.

When the researchers compared individuals from the two groups – who were matched for age, sex and overall health – they found that the pandemic may have accelerated the ageing of our brains by 5.5 months, based on structural changes to white and grey matter. This was true even among those without a known covid-19 infection, which was recorded as part of the Biobank project.

This accelerated ageing was particularly pronounced among men and those who were more socioeconomically deprived. But Biobank participants are generally healthier, wealthier and less ethnically diverse than the rest of the UK, so the findings may not apply more broadly.

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The researchers speculate that these changes may have come about due to loneliness or stress of lockdowns, or lifestyle shifts that may have occurred around that time, such as with exercise levels or alcohol consumption.

They write in their paper that the structural brain changes could be “at least partially reversible” and point out that the findings are limited by the fact that the participants were all from the UK, so the results may not reflect the potential effects of lockdowns elsewhere. “Our findings may actually underestimate the impact of the pandemic on more vulnerable populations,” says Mohammadi-Nejad.

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