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Animal hazard countermeasures in many places in Japan use AI to detect bear infestations | International | Central News Agency CNA
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Please agree to our privacy policy to enable news listening. (Central News Agency, Tokyo, 16th, comprehensive foreign news report) According to a Japanese media survey, among the 815 cities or wards (secondary administrative regions) surveyed across Japan, 685 regions have allocated funds for animal hazard countermeasures, accounting for 84% of the total. Some places use monitors equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) to detect bears in the hope of preventing damage. “Nihon Keizai Shimbun” recently investigated the 2026 budgets prepared by 815 secondary administrative regions across Japan to understand the status of responses to wildlife hazards. Among the budgets that have been prepared, measures to prevent intrusion such as installing electrified fences, purchasing box traps and other capturing equipment, and paying hunters are the most significant. In Hokkaido and Tohoku, more than 90% of local governments have prepared relevant budgets. All interviewed municipal offices in Hokkaido have prepared relevant budgets, and local specific countermeasures against species such as bears and deer are more prominent. In order to deal with wild animals such as brown bears and Ezo deer, Sapporo City in Hokkaido has allocated approximately 218 million yen to establish an early warning mechanism using drones and other means. Muroran City and Yubari City are evaluating and formulating capture reward systems. Local governments such as Tendo City in Yamagata Prefecture and Kamo City in Niigata Prefecture have chosen an “advance deployment” approach to subsidize the felling of fruit trees that attract bears to establish buffer zones between humans and wild animals. Toyama Prefecture’s Tonami City, Ishikawa Prefecture’s Haza City and other places have decided to adopt monitors equipped with AI functions in the hope of preventing victims. Some areas have begun to make good use of AI to detect the presence of bears. The Miyagi Prefecture government, which belongs to the Tohoku region of Japan, considered the increase in bear sightings and previously issued a “bear alert” for the entire prefecture. The Sendai City Government, where the Miyagi Prefectural Government is located, has allocated 297 million yen to deal with wild birds and animals, including Asiatic black bears, and promote relevant measures to deal with bears that appear in urban areas. In addition, in order to supplement the personnel responsible for capturing wild animals, many places have expanded the recruitment of talents with hunting licenses and subsidized people to obtain hunting licenses. In Western Japan, where there are fewer cases of bear damage, the focus is mainly on preventing damage to farmland caused by wild boars, deer, and monkeys. Preliminary statistics from Japan’s Central Ministry of the Environment show that in 2025 from April 1 last year to March 31 this year, 238 people were attacked by bears in Japan, and 13 of them died. Both the number of victims and the number of deaths hit a new high. More than 60% of these cases occurred in six northeastern counties. Moreover, in the year 2026, which starts on April 1 this year, it is expected that there will be more related cases in many places in Japan than in previous years. (Compiled by: Yang Weijing) 1150516 Support Central News Agency’s choice to stand with the facts. Every donation you make is a small amount of support to protect press freedom. Download the Central News Agency’s “First-hand News” APP to get the latest news in real time. The text, pictures and audio and video of this website may not be reproduced, publicly broadcast or publicly transmitted and used without authorization.



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TECH & AI
Meet the Sad Wives of AI
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Though things keep changing, some analyses suggest that women are about 20 percent less likely than men to use generative AI. “It’s a function not of gender per se,” Rodgers suggests, “but of the occupations that women hold.” Women are disproportionately represented in jobs—education, health care, social services—that right now use AI less. The result could be a compounding disadvantage. Over time, it means less access to the boom’s financial rewards, more responsibility for the domestic labor it generates.And what happens when it doesn’t work out for the men? Many, if not most, won’t make it in AI, a lucrative but volatile business. “With job loss comes some depression,” Rodgers says. “Within the household, if one person is going through adverse mental health effects around job loss or uncertainty, the other naturally becomes the support person.” The cruel irony, for some sad wives, is that the moment their husband does leave AI, whether by choice or by force, there’s no relief. Now he’s home. Spiraling. Now she’s managing that too.It was nearing the end of my therapy session. I had been rambling for 50 minutes about the mental load, the changing hormones, whether my postpartum depression could really just be traced to the fact that it took longer than anticipated to fit back into my jeans. Then my therapist interrupted and asked what exactly my partner did for work again. “Oh,” I said. “Well, he’s head of AI at his company.”What she said next, I had to write down. Her client base, she allowed, is almost entirely women—women whose husbands, more often than not, are in some way professionally adjacent to AI. And it’s affecting their relationships. The pressure to keep up means zero boundaries at home. The very masculine energy of it all. And the constant fighting, which is about something bigger than them. He’s off in another world, a world of prompts and benchmarks and epiphanies, while she’s firmly in this one.The resentment builds quietly. Several of these sad wives, my therapist added, have turned down job opportunities in AI themselves. Not because they weren’t qualified, but because it’s hard to raise kids and disrupt civilization at the same time.Princess Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage. For the sad wives of AI, the third is a chatbot. I spoke to a few other family therapists, and they agreed with mine: The phenomenon is getting worse. “It’s a lot of tech wives,” one said, sighing. “A lot of tech wives.”A tiktok meme has been making the rounds recently: young women at their laptops or doing their makeup, captioned something like, “Working so hard so my man can work on his AI startup that loses $30K a month.” The comments section stands in solidarity: “I’m ded.” “Yas queen.” “Just so he can have ‘founder’ in his bio.” I tried to reach out to some of these women. None bit.I should also say I didn’t bother speaking to any of the actual husbands for this story. I’m sick of hearing from the men of AI. So many of us are. They have podcasts and Senate hearings and magazine profiles and probably a group chat with the president. They’ve been talked to—and I can’t stress this enough—enough.



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TECH & AI
Students Are Learning Less and Getting Higher Grades Because of AI, Study Finds
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The booming use of generative AI by students is leading to rising grade inflation at universities, according to a working paper published this week by the University of California, Berkeley. There are three ways generative AI can be used by students: augmentation, where the tools perform a supporting role assisting in things like research while the student completes the bulk of the work themselves; reinstatement of new AI-based tasks; or through displacement, where it completely automates the work that a student would otherwise perform themselves, such as writing an essay. All three use cases can improve grades, while only augmentation and reinstatement can further correlate with actual learning and skills building. Some academic tasks, like unsupervised take-home assignments, essays, and other homework, are perfect opportunities for AI displacement, as opposed to proctored exams, oral presentations, or in-class discussions. As part of the study, UC Berkeley senior researcher Igor Chirikov analyzed over 500,000 student-course enrollments across 84 departments at a large Texas university from 2018 to 2025. He found that grade increases were mostly concentrated in courses “with higher shares of writing and coding tasks,” where take-home assignments carried the most weight, concluding that students are using AI to cheat on some schoolwork and get better grades. Overall, the researchers found that “AI-exposed courses” saw a 30 percent increase in “A” grades since ChatGPT hit the market.

That’s not particularly shocking; it’s a generative AI use case as old as the dawn of ChatGPT. Plus, a student’s GPA could be make-or-break for their future, determining acceptance into postgraduate academic programs and lucrative early-career job opportunities. So, in a world where most industries are leaning into AI often at the expense of the young graduate job market, it makes sense that the average student would seek out an easy way to guarantee their future. What is interesting is that, four years into the widespread presence of generative AI in our daily lives, the study shows that American universities have yet to catch up with its consequences.

With more AI-enabled grade inflation, employers will have a tougher time weeding out strong young graduate candidates, the study says. But even more importantly, this increased reliance on AI in academia is bound to create an incompetent workforce that is dependent on AI.

“If AI displaces skill-building tasks during learning, students may graduate with weaker capabilities in precisely the domains where AI is strongest, reinforcing a feedback loop between AI in education and AI in production that could accelerate automation,” Chirikov writes. So an academic system that caters to AI-enabled grade inflation would create a workforce that does not know how to perform the core duties of their jobs, which in turn would create increased reliance on AI in the workforce and even more wholesale automation of jobs, on the road to a much-feared AI jobs armageddon that some experts claim is already underway in some industries.

Some universities are planning to take action against this grade inflation, though whether the planned measures will be truly successful is up for debate. At Princeton, where roughly 30% of seniors admitted to cheating mostly via generative AI in a recent survey, faculty voted this week to overturn a 133-year-old honor code that allowed students to take in-person exams without a faculty member proctoring. Meanwhile, at Harvard, faculty are voting on a proposal to cap A grades to no more than 20% of the class.



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