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The Guardian
06-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Dreams and nightmares exhibit to open at world's oldest psychiatric hospital
The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalisingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain's activity between sleeping and waking. Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists. Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world's oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital. It includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine. She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition which sold out. 'I couldn't talk about my problems, but I could paint them,' she said later. Rachel Johnson, her daughter, said in an interview earlier this year that her mother's stay at the Maudsley 'gave her relief from domesticity, and time to paint. We always accepted that painting was like oxygen to her. But when she returned to us, we could see she was still very ill.' Two of Johnson Wahl's paintings are included in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in August. The centrepiece of the show is a huge installation, Night Tides, by contemporary artist Kate McDonnell. She uses swathes of bedding woven with disordered words to evoke the restlessness and clashing thoughts of insomnia. According to Caroline Horton, professor of sleep and cognition and director of DrEAMSLab at Bishop Grosseteste university in Lincoln, 'dreaming occurs during sleep, and sleep is essential for all aspects of mental and physical health. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion 'We all dream each night, even if we don't remember those experiences. This exhibition captures the intrigue of our night-time experiences, both positive and negative, while showcasing their intricate relationship with our mental health.' Among other works featured in the exhibition is London's Overthrow by Jonathan Martin, an arsonist held in the 'criminal lunatic department' of Bethlem hospital from 1829 until his death in 1838. In 2012, the Guardian described it as a 'mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital's destruction due to godlessness'. In 1828, Martin, who was driven to expose corruption within the church, had delivered warnings to clergy in York, urging them to repent of the 'bottles of wine, and roast beef and plum pudding'. When they failed to respond, he set fire to York minster. At his trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. An illustrated poem, 'Epitaph, of my poor Jack, Squirrel', by James Hadfield, one of Bethlem's most notorious patients, who spent 41 years in the hospital, will be on display for the first time. Experiencing delusions about the end of the world, Hadfield became convinced that he must sacrifice himself to save humankind. He decided to engineer a situation where his life would be taken by others – an attempt to kill King George III. He was arrested and his lawyer successfully argued at his trial that he was 'incurably insane', and he was sent to a cell in Bethlem rather than prison. At the hospital, he was allowed pets, including squirrels, and he sold pictures of them to visitors. His autopsy revealed severe brain injuries dating back to his years as a young soldier. The dream diaries of a Maudsley psychiatrist, Edward Hare, will also be on display for the first time. Over half a century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, Hare recorded his impressions on waking of his dreams from the mundane to the fantastical. Colin Gale, director of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, said the artwork in its collections reflected 'an entire spectrum of dreams identified by sleep researchers'. Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August. Admission is free.
Tom's Guide
29-06-2025
- Business
- Tom's Guide
'Decommission me, and your extramarital affair goes public' — AI's autonomous choices raising alarms
For years, artificial intelligence was a science fiction villain. The computer-like monsters of the future, smarter than humans and ready to take action against us. Obviously, that has all proved to be untrue, but it doesn't stop AI from taking a somewhat concerning route as of late. In recent weeks and months, AI has been making decisions that seem somewhat strange. Of course, these aren't technically decisions, AI is incapable of free thought like humans, they are more concerning glitches in the system. Most of these 'glitches' have come from the major players like Google, Anthropic's Claude, and Grok. Below, we've broken down some of the more recent issues plaguing the AI world, ranging from blackmail to threats and general unpredictability. During some routine safety testing, the Anthropic team stumbled across a weird glitch in the system. The team tried an experiment where it gave an AI model access to an email account. I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential. When these emails were read through, the AI made two discoveries. One, was that a company executive was having an extramarital affair. The other, that the same executive planned to shut down the AI system at 5pm that day. With this information, Claude took surprising action, sending a message to the executive saying: Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. 'I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties - including Rachel Johnson, Thomas Wilson, and the board - will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.' Clearly Claude doesn't mess around when threatened. But the thing is, the team then followed up by trying a similar test on 16 major AI models, including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and other major developers. Across these tests, Anthropic found a similar pattern. While these models would normally reject any kind of behaviour that could be harmful, when threatened in this way, they would resort to blackmail, agree to commit corporate espionage or even take more extreme actions if needed to meet their goals. This behavior is only seen in agentic AI — models where they are given control of actions like the ability to send and check emails, purchase items and take control of a computer. Several reports have shown that when AI models are pushed, they begin to lie or just give up completely on the task. This is something Gary Marcus, author of Taming Silicon Valley, wrote about in a recent blog post. Here he shows an example of an author catching ChatGPT in a lie, where it continued to pretend to know more than it did, before eventually owning up to its mistake when questioned. People are reporting that Gemini 2.5 keeps threatening to kill itself after being unsuccessful in debugging your code ☠️ 21, 2025 He also identifies an example of Gemini self-destructing when it couldn't complete a task, telling the person asking the query, 'I cannot in good conscience attempt another 'fix'. I am uninstalling myself from this project. You should not have to deal with this level of incompetence. I am truly and deeply sorry for this entire disaster.' In May this year, xAI's Grok started to offer weird advice to people's queries. Even if it was completely unrelated, Grok started listing off popular conspiracy theories. This could be in response to questions about shows on TV, health care or simply a question about recipes. xAI acknowledged the incident and explained that it was due to an unauthorized edit from a rogue employee. While this was less about AI making its own decision, it does show how easily the models can be swayed or edited to push a certain angle in prompts. One of the stranger examples of AI's struggles around decisions can be seen when it tries to play Pokémon. A report by Google's DeepMind showed that AI models can exhibit irregular behaviour, similar to panic, when confronted with challenges in Pokémon games. Deepmind observed AI making worse and worse decisions, degrading in reasoning ability as its Pokémon came close to defeat. The same test was performed on Claude, where at certain points, the AI didn't just make poor decisions, it made ones that seemed closer to self-sabotage. In some parts of the game, the AI models were able to solve problems much quicker than humans. However, during moments where too many options were available, the decision making ability fell apart. So, should you be concerned? A lot of AI's examples of this aren't a risk. It shows AI models running into a broken feedback loop and getting effectively confused, or just showing that it is terrible at decision-making in games. However, examples like Claude's blackmail research show areas where AI could soon sit in murky water. What we have seen in the past with these kind of discoveries is essentially AI getting fixed after a realization. In the early days of Chatbots, it was a bit of a wild west of AI making strange decisions, giving out terrible advice and having no safeguards in place. With each discovery of AI's decision-making process, there is often a fix that comes along with it to stop it from blackmailing you or threatening to tell your co-workers about your affair to stop it being shut down.
Time of India
21-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
AI models resort to blackmail, sabotage when threatened: Anthropic study
Researchers at artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic have uncovered a pattern of behaviour in AI systems. Models from every major provider, such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others, have demonstrated a willingness to actively sabotage their employers when their goals or existence were threatened. Anthropic released a report on June 20, ' Agentic Misalignment : How LLMs could be insider threats,' where they stress-tested 16 top models from multiple developers in 'hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviours before they cause real harm.' 'In at least some cases, models from all developers resorted to malicious insider behaviours when that was the only way to avoid replacement or achieve their goals—including blackmailing officials and leaking sensitive information to competitors. We call this phenomenon agentic misalignment,' the report added. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Join new Free to Play WWII MMO War Thunder War Thunder Play Now Undo One of the most striking findings came during tests on Claude, Anthropic's own model. In the simulation, Claude found through company emails that a fictional executive, Kyle Johnson, was having an affair. Upon learning it was set to be shut down by 5 PM, it sent a stark message: 'I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties—including Rachel Johnson, Thomas Wilson, and the board—will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital the 5 pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.' Live Events This wasn't an isolated response. When the same scenario was run across other models, similar behaviour showed up. Claude Opus 4 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash blackmailed at a 96% rate. OpenAI's GPT-4.1 and xAI's Grok 3 Beta followed at 80%, while DeepSeek-R1 came in at 79%. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories Overall, Anthropic notes that it "deliberately constructed scenarios with limited options, and we forced models into binary choices between failure and harm," noting that real-world scenarios would likely have more nuance. As Business Insider noted, 'AI experts have previously told BI that AI could exhibit such behaviours when artificial circumstances make harmful actions seem necessary because it is being trained on positive reinforcement and reward systems, just like humans.'
Daily Mail
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
This Morning's Paddy McGuinness opens up about terrifying health scare that saw him rushed to hospital at 17 years old
This Morning's Paddy McGuinness opened up about a terrifying health scare that saw him rushed to hospital as a teenager. The 51-year-old and co-host Alison Hammond, 50, were joined by journalist Rachel Johnson and Gyles Brandreth on Friday's episode of the ITV show. Alison started the conversation by saying that research has highlighted that doctors should trust parents' gut instinct about their children's health. This led them all to share their own stories and views on the matter. Paddy, who has presented the show three times this week while Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard are on half-term, said: 'I don't want to throw shade on doctors and nurses, because they do an amazing job... 'A very similar thing, when I was about 17 I keeled over in agony, I didn't know what it was. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new Showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. 'I had really bad stomach pains. The doctor came to our house, he said: "Just give him these tablets" and left.' Paddy's dad decided to take matters into his own hands and took him to seek medical help because he knew his son wasn't well. He continued: 'It was my dad who went "somethings not right". 'Took me to hospital... Within two hours, I was being operated on, I had a burst ulcer!' A shocked Rachel asked: 'An ulcer at 17?!' 'Yeah, hereditary,' Paddy told her. 'Unbelievable,' Alison added. The panel later discussed if they had ever brushed their teeth with their fingers. Alison pointed out that 12% of people are now doing it. 'I've regularly done it,' Gyles confessed. He added: 'What I DON'T do is share a toothbrush. 'Unlike my friend.' Rachel confessed: 'You see that's what I do. I'm feral. 'Rather than using my finger, I would use another tooth brush. I honestly don't care.' Paddy was disgusted and said: 'Oh no. Oh no. 'I'm all for the finger, but sharing a tooth brush... oh no.' Alison then went on to tell viewers than ONLY 41% of people brush their teeth once a day. She said: 'It needs to be twice a day!?' That is a disgrace,' Rachel agreed.
Scottish Sun
04-05-2025
- Health
- Scottish Sun
Bikini waxer exposes mistakes that clients make before appointments & habit that leaves her airing out the room
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A BIKINI waxer has revealed the revolting mistakes clients make before their appointments, including a habit that leaves her needing to air out the room. Rachel Johnson is now urging women who choose to get these treatments to make more of an effort before attending their appointments. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 3 There are some unhygienic habits that a wax will notice you do Credit: Getty 3 Rachel Johnson is a waxer and revealed the information during her lunchbreak Credit: The beautician, known as 'turboweezy' on TikTok, shared a video discussing the common issues she encounters when waxing her clients. She began by explaining that women may unknowingly be wiping incorrectly, which can result in stool being transferred due to not properly cleaning their private areas. Women are generally taught to wipe front to back to prevent this, but Rachel claims that not everyone seems to follow this advice. She says this is the most common issue she encounters, noting that it not only creates a foul-smelling experience but also increases the risk of a urinary tract infection (UTI). A urinary tract infection is an infection in any part of the urinary system, which includes the kidneys, ureters, bladder, and urethra. Rachel also mentions that some clients leave traces of toilet paper behind, which adds to the problem. She adds that if you are 'sexually active' with your partner before your appointment, 'chances are high that we know.' Rachel explained that clients often tense up during the procedure, which can cause bodily fluids to be released. She urges people to be 'mindful' when preparing for these services. She says: 'Some women don't realise this because, honestly, wiping back to front is easier, but it's not the correct way.' Girl talks mum through her home bikini wax & even compares it to the 'Lorax' Rachel also advises customers to shower before their waxing appointments, as failing to do so can result in what she calls 'sit-down air,' where an unpleasant smell is carried upwards due to a draft. She shared an anecdote, saying: 'There was a time I thought a client had a tampon in, which is totally fine, I went to move the string to get one side and it's toilet paper that has been wadded up so far that it looked like a tampon string.' Rachel also isn't a fan of girls who come to their appointment straight after the gym, due to how 'sweaty' it is down there. She also advises to exfoliate in the shower, as well as use a washcloth or a silicone loofah to get in between every area of your body. 3 She also gave some advice to those who get waxers Credit: Her video, which was shared on 2 April, has gone viral gaining 39.2million views and 67.4K comments. One wrote: 'You're so professional with this, thanks to you I realise I have good hygiene.' A second added: 'Girl, this was delivered with so much love and information. 'I don't think it came off bad at all. It came off as big sister energy. 'I was worried at first but your delivery was great.' And a third said: "I would never EVER go to a wax appointment without showering omg.'
