Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’

A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.

The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.

Zvezdelina Stankova says she used AI to ‘help edit’ an article about some of her students being ‘five to eight years’ behind

A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a “severe” math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece.

The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were “five to eight years” behind and lacked a “middle school” education on fractions and basic algebra. Stankova said the UC system’s test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren’t sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley’s mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared.