The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - End Bits Special -- Using AI to Detect AI Cheating

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

This week's Wednesday End Bits special has a potpourri of useful (and yes some useless!) information. From the latest artificial intelligence concerns, to the Trump's Yukon brothel...and then even more. It's all here in this episode. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of the bridge. We've got it all today. It's an end bit special. Everything from new sleep patterns to the brothel that began the Trump Empire. And some stuff about AI, about how AI is being used to catch AI cheaters. That's all coming right up. And hello there, Hump Day, Wednesday, here on the bridge.

and today's a Wednesday special of NBits. You know, I don't think we've had a repeat program, which that's what Wednesdays are designed for here at the bridge. I don't think we've had a repeat program yet this year, and we're already into the second month. Because my old friend Mark Bulgich keeps digging up these amazing stories to read about, and we're going to read about as many as we can today. for this Wednesday

A reminder of that tomorrow's Your Turn is all about the Olympics And it got off to a really slow start here There was only a couple of letters On Monday And I thought, oh man We're going to have to go back to that Extra list of AMAs

Asked me anythings But oh no I started rolling in yesterday And we've got quite a few The question's simple about the Olympics. Do you watch? They start, you know, in two days' time.

They actually kind of pre-start tomorrow. I think there's a women's hockey game. But they really start with the opening ceremony on Friday, and then we're into two weeks of it. So the question is, do you watch? Do you care about the Olympics? Does it give you something to cheer about? something to feel about your country?

Or is it the opposite? You're kind of sick of it. They come along every couple of years, right? Winter, summer, Olympics. And so where you get ready for the onslaught. So, you know, what do you watch? What do you care about? Do you think too much money you spend on the Olympics?

Do you think governments spend too much money supporting athletes? Or not enough? I mean, there's lots of ways you're, can go on this. What do you watch? Do you just watch hockey? Or do you watch everything? Winter sports, there are fewer than there are the summer games.

But they're just as intense at times. So your thoughts on that. You write to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. You have your answer in before 6 p.m. today, Eastern Time, so you don't have much time to get your answers in on this. keep it below 75 words. That's an absolute requirement. Some of you have seemingly already forgotten that and sent in not longer.

They won't make it. Include your name and the location you're writing from. Okay. So there you go. All right. Let's get into our end bits for this week. The first one deals with sleep. and I find this interesting because, you know, as a younger fellow, I used to love my eight hours a night.

The older I got, the less I slopped. And something else that started happening in the last year or two where I wake up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. You know, it could be 3 o'clock, 3.30, I'll wake up. I'll be up for a while. half an hour, 45 minutes. I try to resist the temptation to pick up my device and read what's been happening in different parts of the world. But anyway, I'm up and then I fall back to sleep.

So I found this really interesting. A listener sent this to me. I'd never heard of this website, but I believe it's real. It's called Science Alert. And this was an article late last year. And the headline is, humans used to sleep twice every night. Here's why it vanished.

I thought, well, this is interesting, because this is me. So here we go. Continuous sleep is a modern habit, not an evolutionary constant, which helps explain why many of us still wait at 3 a.m. and wonder if something's wrong. It might help to know this is a deeply human experience. For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the normal. Instead, people

commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a first sleep and a second sleep. Wow, how original. Each of these sleeps lasted several hours, separated by a gap of wakefulness for an hour or more in the middle of the night. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia, and beyond describe how after nightfall, families would go to bed early, then wake up around midnight for a while before returning to sleep until dawn. Breaking the night into two parts probably changed how time felt. The quiet interval gave nights a close. clear middle, which can make long winter evenings feel less continuous and easier to manage.

The midnight interval was not dead time, it was noticed time, which shapes how long nights are experienced. Some people would get up to tend to chores, like stirring the fire or checking on animals. Others stayed in bed to pray or contemplate dreams they'd just had. Letters and diaries from pre-industrial times mentioned people using the quiet hours to read, write, or even socialize quietly with family or neighbors. Many couples took advantage of this midnight wakefulness for, you guessed it, intimacy. Literature from as far back as ancient Greece poet Homer and Roman poet Virgil contains references to an hour which terminates the first sleep indicating how commonplace the two-shift night was. So what happened to that? Got your ideas on that? Well,

here's the answer. The disappearance of the second sleep happened over the past two centuries due to profound societal changes. Artificial lighting is one of them. In the 1700s and 1800s, first oil lamps, then gas lighting, and eventually electric light, began turning night into more usable waking time. Instead of going to bed shortly after sunset, people started staying up later into the evening under lamplight. Biologically, bright light at night also shifted our internal clocks, our circadian rhythm, and made our bodies less inclined to wake after a few hours of sleep. Light timing matters. Ordinary room light before bedtime suppresses and delays melatonin, which pushes the onset of sleep.

sleep later. Okay, you get the message here. I find that fact, you know, I'd never heard of this. I probably should have, and some of you, I'm sure, sitting there saying, geez, man, where are you being all your life? Well, I guess I was asleep when they taught that one. Anyway, it's good to know, and it explains to me now that I'm searching back into the deep roots of my, you know, family history. to a different time. Because I do go to sleep earlier, usually, because I'm up so early in the morning doing this podcast.

But there you go. There's your answer about sleep patterns. And that we used to have a first sleep and a second sleep. There you go. Okay, here's one that I'd heard of kind of vaguely before, but I'd never seen it written down anywhere. Canadian press wrote the story. Not recently, it's been around for a while.

But I've made meaning to throw it into an in-bit special. The headline from Canadian press is the Trump family fortune sprang from this Canadian hotel slash brothel. Okay. In one of history's little-known eyes, Ironies, the maple leaf country, that's us, pushing back against Donald Trump's annexation bid is also host to a tiny remote restaurant and brothel that helped launch the U.S. President's family fortune more than 100 years ago.

This is for real. On a quiet, remote trail in British Columbia near the Yukon boundary sits a replica wooden facade of the brothel and restaurant, Trump's grandfather built at the turn of the century. Friedrich Trump called his business in Bennett, a town that sprang up because of the Klondike Gold Rush, the Arctic Restaurant and Hotel. Parks Canada says the replica

at the Chilkoot Trail National Historic Site was constructed in 2017, and the kitchen inside is now exclusively used by government workers. The exterior design was influenced by the Arctic restaurant and hotel because it is representative of numerous false-fronted buildings that existed at Bennett. Parks Canada spokesperson Megan Hope said in an email.

This is actually in global news story. The exterior design, sorry, the elder Trump, a German immigrant, cooked and served food inside the Arctic to Americans and Canadians, heading to gold fields in the Yukon. He made enough cash to sow the seeds for the future Trump Empire. In the Trump Tower, New York City, or all the various... Trump thinks it's ironic. He bombed and doing Trump hotels in Canada and Toronto and Vancouver.

He kind of sold his name to hotel entrepreneurs. But both of them. flamed out. A 90-year-old Eukonner wrote a booklet about men who became wealthy off the gold rush, including Friedrich Trump, says the replica should remind President Trump to show gratitude to Canada rather than launching a trade war and annexation bid against it. He's got a fantasy

of taking over Canada. That's gratitude, eh? Here's a little more. The story of Friedrich Trump's chapter in Canada begins in the 1880s. The 16-year-old Barber's Apprentice, that's what he was, whose father had died young, moved to New York City from Germany to be closer to his sister. He then moved to Seattle and began operating an eatery until a July 1897 newspaper headline caught his eye. Gold, gold, gold, screamed the headline. Friedrich Trump sold the eatery and headed north with thousands of other Americans and Canadians.

He headed toward the Yukon River, but landed just short of it in B.C. He and a business partner erected a canteen on the route And called it the Arctic restaurant and hotel Their specialty was roadkill Within three years he relocated the business With the same facade to Whitehorse Where the hotel became famous He made quick money on booze

And he was a good cook Apparently Newspaper ads at the time mentioned private sweets for late ladies and scales for patrons to weigh their gold if they preferred to pay for services that way. Ah, yes. So that's how we started. Some things don't change.

Okay, here's one. I like this story. You know, we try to do something on AI at least once a week somewhere, either on the podcast or on my newsletter. I hope you follow my newsletter. It's kind of fun. It comes out every Saturday morning at 7 a.m. Straight into your mailbox, your inbox. No charge.

It's free. And it's just, it's basically a collection of stories that I've read during the week that I find interesting and informative. And help me understand some of the big swings during the week. And if you want to get it, it, you've got to go to national newswatch.com slash newsletter

and you subscribe there and subscribing is a simple matter of just giving your email. No charge, you don't have to put your visa in or any of that stuff. Just your email. And then you will get on the newsletter chain

every Saturday morning at 7 a.m. So when you wake up, there it is. It's kind of a Saturday read. And it's been quite successful. We've got around, I think, 20,000 subscribers, which for a newsletter is pretty good. It's very good, actually. All right, one of the things we try to do in the newsletter, we try every week to have something about AI.

So here's one for this week's end bit special. The headline is to avoid accusations of AI cheating college students are turning to AI. This is on the NBC News website. It's written by a fellow by the name of Tyler Kincaid. So let's read a bit of this.

On college campuses across the United States, the introduction of generative artificial intelligence has sparked a sort of arms race. Rapid adoption of AI by young people set off waves of anxiety that students could cheat their way through college, leading many professors to run papers through online AI detectors that inspect whether students used large language models to write their work for them. Some colleges say they've caught hundreds of students cheating that way. However, since the debut a few years ago, AI detectors have repeatedly been

criticized as unreliable and more likely to flag non-native English speakers on suspicion of plagiarism. And a growing number of college students also say their work has been falsely flagged as written by AI. Several of filed lawsuits against universities over the emotional distress and punishments they say they faced as a result. NBC News spoke to 10 students and faculty. who described being caught in the middle of an escalating war of AI tools. Amid accusations of AI cheating, some students are turning to a new group of generative AI tools called humanizers. The tools scan essays and suggest ways to alter text

so they aren't read as having been created by AI. Some are free, while others cost around $20 a month. Some users of the humanizer tools rely on them to avoid detection of cheating, while others say they don't use AI at all in their work, but want to ensure they aren't falsely accused of AI use by AI detector programs. Now this goes on at quite some length. But that's how you can find it. You go to the NBC News website and search out it.

AI stories and AI detection. And you'll find it. You know, this is interesting. And I find it a bit fascinating. The more I learn about AI, and the more I'm, you know, Will, my son, who works on this program, he's deep into AI.

He uses it for a lot of different things. not for cheating. He uses it as part of his daily routine. And so he's got me into using it more often than I had. And it's fascinating. With every day, there's more AI in your daily life. You know, now when I use Gmail as my email. I Google now has an AI thing about, you know,

when you're into a chain, in email between, you know, yourself and somebody else or an institution or what have you. And there have been a number of emails. It pops up right away an AI summary of the conversation so far. Yeah, it's pretty accurate. I mean, it's very accurate. And it's based solely on what's been written. So I guess it should be accurate.

But, you know, it seems that every day, there's something else in our lives that is impacted by AI. And when I think, you know, all those years ago, when I started working, and you'd be researching a story, and you'd have to start at like square one in your research, you know, you'd look up in the encyclopedia stuff. And it could take hours or days, just to get the basics to head out on the story. Now it's their bang at the push of a button.

It's quite remarkable. And what's even more remarkable is young people who are just coming into the workforce, it's all natural to them. Instant information? Absolutely. They've seen it most of their lives. Now, I'm not saying there wasn't some good in what we had to do,

back in the day. And, you know, and what that taught you about studying and learning. But now there's so much incense stuff. You're launched into things much quicker. But the good thing about this is the story, is it reminds you that you've also got to be cautious. You've got to be cautious. what you believe and where that information is coming from

and how reliable the particular source is that you're using to get information. Okay, where are we? We're at that moment where we're going to take a break. And we've got more stories on this NBit special, this Wednesday end bit special. And we'll look forward to giving them to you right after this. And welcome back, Peter Bansbridge here. This is the Wednesday edition of The Bridge.

And this Wednesday, we're doing an NBid special. Most of you know what that is. And I hope you're learning a few things you didn't know about. You're listening at Series XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, are on your favorite podcast platform. Glad to have you with us. A couple of reminders. Tomorrow's your turn.

The question is about the Olympics. Get your answers in. only get a couple more hours to do that. The random rancher will be by it tomorrow as well. Friday, it's Good Talk with Bruce and Chantel. And as always, that is a popular one. Did you catch yesterday's More Butts conversation? It was the first time we put it out on YouTube.

Good Talk has a huge YouTube following on Fridays. you know, last week was over 100,000. The week before was around 150,000 views. Keep that in mind. That is more than some television programs get. In fact, it's more than many television programs get. So it was quite remarkable, really. But yesterday, joining the YouTube craze is the Moore-Buts conversation.

And I was an important one yesterday. I hope you had a chance to see it. Some people, I still get letters that some people who just watch YouTube don't realize that the bridge is on every day of the week, Monday to Friday. Wednesdays is, you know, like today, sometimes it's an M-bit special, sometimes an encore edition. But it's available each day of the week, Monday to Friday. And we put out a, you know, a program through the podcast, and you can download it, from, you know, Apple Podcasts or Spotify or any number of other different platforms.

And it's there. It gets a lot of downloads, whatever that actually means, you know, 25,000 a day downloads. Kind of averages out two these days, you know, well over 100,000 a week. So it's, there are different ways to get the bridge. That's the point I'm trying to make. All right. Next up. Okay, this is kind of cute. This is on Yahoo.com lifestyle section.

The most unexpected tech choice I've ever made worked shockingly well. Now, this is a young person who's trying to break the habit of their mobile phone, their cell phone. They're holding their hand and they're constantly looking at and reading and scrolling. So Amanda Zuckerman-Claresfeld wrote this at Yahoo. Well, she actually wrote it for Slate, but Yahoo Lifestyle section has reprinted it. Here are the key takeaways of this article. A recent trend of going analog to combat cell phone addiction

involves using a landline phone with a cellular to landline adapter to limit nighttime cell phone usage. Hmm So let's read on Let's find out what this is about Remember landlines How many of you still have a landline? I got rid of all my landlines

Two summers ago now Save me a lot of money I don't miss them At first I thought oh my God How am I going to do without a landline Something plugged into the wall I never think about it anymore. So this is what Slate calls a one thing,

a column with tips on how to live. Let me read a little bit of it. I talked to my daughter about the good old days when we were forced to do everything without our cell phones, which, although helpful in myriad ways, are sucking the life out of our species in other times. I recently racked my brain for a practical way to reclaim some of what I lost.

When several years back, I began willingly handing over five hours of every day to my miniskreen. That's what Amanda here figured out, five hours a day. She was relying on her cell phone. The easiest time for a cell phone shutdown would be at night after work. But after considering the most gruesome what-ifs, I reasoned that having a landline would guard against me missing a memory. emergency communications. The most practical option was an old-school corded phone and a cellular to landline adapter.

The phone, mine, she says, is peptobismal pink with a 15-foot coiled cord, plugs into the adapter that pairs with my cell via blue teeth as soon as it's in range. When I arrive home from work, I silence my phone. and put it in a drawer for the night, while calls from iPhone designated favorites ring through to the landline. That's interesting. I hadn't heard of one of those adapters. But the whole idea is get that cell phone away from me.

Like I pick it up all the time. I'm all constantly looking at and reading it. I can get by at night without all that stuff. What I can't get by with is the calls that come that are important. So that's what the adapters for Let me see whether it tells you where to get these But listen to this Here's what it does tell you

There was a study done last year By a consumer review site called reviews.org That concludes that 43.2% of us self-report cell phone addiction If that's not a cry for for help. I don't know what it is. And, you know, how do you self-report? Well, you tell your friends,

I got to get, I got to stop, I got to stop this thing I have about my phone. I'm always looking at it. I'm always checking it. That's self-reporting. I do that here on the, on the bridge every once in a while. I'll say, man, I've got to put the thing down. I said it earlier today when we were talking about getting up in the middle of the night and picking up the phone and reading it. Anyway, I assume you can find these at any good tech place. Just Google. Where to find a landline adapter, landline mobile phone adapter. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.

Let's keep going here. Got a couple more. People who naturally stay up late may have worse heart health than those who get up early. Okay, hey, this is me. I go to bed early unless I still enjoy the pain of watching the Leafs play. I watched them last night. In Edmonton, they won their third game in a row.

A three-game winning streak. There's still nowhere near making the playoffs, but when you're a Leaf fan, you learn, never stop believing. Anyway, let's get back to this. People who naturally stay up late may have worse heart health than early risers. So let me read a bit of this one. Where is it?

It comes out of, well, it's an NBC News health story. The early bird may not catch the proverbial worm, but also have a healthier heart, new research suggests. People who naturally stay up late, self-described night owls, are likelyer to have poor heart. health than people with more traditional sleep-wake schedules, according to a study published just this week in the Journal of the American Heart Association. The findings were particularly strong among women.

Researchers assessed the health and behaviors of nearly 323,000 adults, so this is no small study. They were in the UK Biobank, a comprehensive research. database that recruited people from 2006 to 2010, participants whose average age was 57, just kids, just young people, completed a questionnaire about their chronotypes, a way of categorizing people by the time of day when they naturally are most energetic and active. Research is increasingly showing that when our internal body clock is out of sync with daily schedules, it can affect cardiometabolic health, said lead author Sina Kiernerci, a research fellow in the

Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. About 24% of respondents said they considered themselves to be a morning person, while 8% said they were an evening person. The 67% majority, which researchers dubbed the intermediate group, said they fell somewhere in between. Okay, here's a little, there's a couple of sentences on the way they broke this down. The American Heart Association's Life's Essential S metrics, eight metrics, sorry, the essential eight metrics to award each participant a heart health score from

0 to 100 with a higher score indicating a healthier heart. The behaviors that affect biological aging are sleep quality, weight, nutrition, blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking status, and physical activity. The average heart health score for all participants was 67.4. Women had better heart health than men, with scores of 70 and 65 respectively. so they're pretty close, but women do better. Compared with the intermediate group, Night Owls had a 79% higher prevalence of poor heart health

defined by a score below 50. Meanwhile, early birds had a 5% lower prevalence. Okay, I don't understand all that, other than to say, clearly it backs up their study that says, if you get up early, your heart's going to be in better shape than if you go to bed late. I think that's what it says.

Dr. Mansbridge here. Whichever way you look at it, sleep is vital for heart health. Heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the U.S. for more than a century, killing one person every 34 seconds, according to the American Heart Association. Though a number of studies have tied poor sleep hygiene to an increased risk of death, the heart association didn't incorporate sleep into its pillars of cardiovascular health until 2022. Okay. Don't stay up late.

That's the bottom line. Okay. Here's, this is probably our last story for this week. It comes from Yahoo.com lifestyle. Do you remember when it was, when you started traveling and staying in hotels, where they started, you know, those fancy little things that are usually in the bathroom of a hotel, you know, the little tiny vials of shampoo, hair conditioner, body lotion, sometimes a toothbrush,

sometimes a very tiny little tube of toothpaste. Remember those days? I remember those days. I remember the first time I think I was, the first time I went to a hotel that had stuff like that was in Boston, in 1971 or 72, something like that. It was a fancy hotel.

I was covering the Winnipeg Jets in their first year in the World Hockey Association. Remember Bobby Hull and Ulf Nielsen and Anders Hedberg? Great hockey team. I was covering them in the finals, the World Hockey WHA, AVECO Cup. It was called like the Stanley Cup. Well, nothing's like the Stanley Cup, but they were trying to pretend this was.

and I was covering them and we stayed and we were playing the New England Whalers in Boston and we landed in Boston in the middle of the night sometime we get to the hotel fancy hotel

and it had all these little things in the bathroom and I thought oh my God this is fantastic and obviously I'm taking these I mean you can't start a tube of toothpaste and expect to leave it there for the next person. Same with the hair shampoo. That's back when I needed hair shampoo.

And so I kept those. Now, in effect, I was stealing, right? And that's what that Yahoo piece is about, this Yahoo piece. A study has revealed the most commonly stolen items from hotel rooms. The results may surprise you. Well, technically, those are ones. Technically, when you check into a hotel and you pay for the hotel room, you're just paying for the right to use the room and to sleep in the bed.

You're not paying, or at least it doesn't say anywhere, you're paying to hoard all the toiletries. But the hotels kind of expect that. But they also say, you take that stuff, it costs us more to run these rooms, and so you're going to see the prices that are going to always go up when that stuff's taken because it's costing us more all the time to buy it and therefore

we've got to move the cost over to the consumer. And if you've stayed at hotels recently, you know that the price of a hotel room, especially in major cities, has skyrocketed. Anyway, let me read this because it's interesting. This story is not about taking

the shampoo Here it is. We've all stayed in hotel rooms where we love the various features and toiletries so much that we wished we could take it home with us. But alas, at the end of the trip, we say goodbye and leave everything within the room, except our memories, of course. The reality is, though, not everyone is so honest, and some are trying to take home aspects of that room that are not. theirs to take. Recently, Deluxe Holiday Homes, that's a company, did some research where they spoke to over a thousand people who worked at hotels in various capacities. These staff members were asked about various items found in typical hotel rooms, and

if they have experienced finding those items missing after a guest checks out of the hotel. when the researchers tallied up their results, they found that of all possible items, what do you think of all possible items, the most frequently stolen at hotels is? 90% of these people said the same thing. And what it is? Towels.

Towels. Can you believe it? People steal towels? Other commonly stolen items include bathrobes. They must have big suitcases to put all the stuff in. 66% of hotel staff said they've discovered missing, followed by hangers, toiletries, and blankets, pillows, pens, and remote controls often turn up missing as well. While branded soaps or pens may feel like gifts with purchases

when you pay to stay in a hotel room, those items that leave a hotel room will then have to be replaced. And that drives up costs for the hotel, which ultimately make your next day more expensive. If you think about it, are those items really saving anyone any money then? We're all spending more in the long run because you took home that towel

that then needed to be replaced with a newly bought one. Towels? People take towels? Really? Okay. Or the bathrobes. You know those fancy plush bathrobes? Although, I don't know, it's just me, but they always seem, when I use the bathrobe in a hotel room, it's always, like, tiny.

Anyway, there you go. So, you know, the towel you've got hanging in your bathroom. It says Weston on it, or Fairmont, or Trump Tower, or the Trump brothel in Yukon. Be careful out there. You don't want them coming after you for that towel you thought was so important. Okay, that's going to do it for today's in-bit special.

Hope you enjoyed at least some of it. And look forward to talking to you tomorrow for your turn and the random ranter. I'm Peter Mansprich. Thanks so much for joining us today. Talk to you again in less than 24 hours.