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"The end result of that was, of course, the foundational contribution that the French revolution made to democracy. But now here we are, those of us living in liberal democratic states that depend on an educated, engaged population for their continued existence, facing a 21st-century arbre de Cracovie. Except this one is incalculably more ubiquitous, more instantaneous, more overwhelming, and more powerful. And as voters around the world proceed through the biggest election year in history, I find myself increasingly wondering: can democracy survive social media?"

"The organisation is a pioneer of the "ransomware as a service" model, whereby it outsources the target selection and attacks to a network of semi-independent "affiliates", providing them with the tools and infrastructure and taking a commission on the ransoms in return. As well as ransomware, which typically works by encrypting data on infected machines and demanding a payment for providing the decryption key, LockBit copied stolen data and threatened to publish it if the fee was not paid, promising to delete the copies on receipt of a ransom."

"Actually, ChatGPT was freaking out in many ways yesterday, but one recurring theme was that it would be prompted with a normal question - typically something involving the tech business or the user's job - and respond with something flowery to the point of unintelligibility. For instance, according to an X post by architect Sean McGuire, the chatbot advised him at one point to ensure that "sesquipedalian safes are cross-keyed and the consul's cry from the crow's nest is met by beatine and wary hares a'twist and at winch in the willow.""

"Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in "maybe possibly some remote chance," but as in "that is the obvious thing that would happen." It's not that you can't, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it's that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers."

"While GPT-4o's flirtatiousness was glossed over by a lot of male-authored articles about the release, Parmy Olson addressed it head-on in a piece for Bloomberg headlined Making ChatGPT 'Sexy' Might Not End Well for Humans. "What are the social and psychological consequences of regularly speaking to a flirty, fun and ultimately agreeable artificial voice on your phone, and then encountering a very different dynamic with men and women in real life?" Olson asks."

"How China is using AI news anchors to deliver its propaganda News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible"

"Parents Of Kids 13 And Under Are Sharing How Their Kids Are Being Affected By The Viral "Sephora Kids" Trend"

"How to summarise, then, the personality changes that the internet brings out in us? Tribalism, bullying, the wildfire spread of "crazes", "instant gratification culture", the triumph of the temper tantrum: future anthropologists might observe that the behaviour of adults online very much resembles that of children offline. I am often amazed at the rational common sense of those who don't bother with social media, when asked about some topic tearing the internet apart. Online, there is a level of adult sophistication that simply seems beyond us. Some call the internet a town square, some a wild west. In fact, it's a playground."

""This is mega!" said Daisy Greenwell from the Smartphone-Free Childhood campaign. "We are absolutely thrilled and we believe it's going to have a domino effect." She was reacting to news that St Albans in Hertfordshire is attempting to become the first UK city to go smartphone-free for all children under 14. Before St Albans, it was Greystones in Ireland last year, where parents banded together to collectively tell their children they could not have a smartphone until secondary school. Greenwell believes others will now take similar steps."

" Virtual reality games helping UK's deaf children to understand speech Scientists have found that immersing kids in computer games can train their brains to localise sounds better Robin McKie Science Editor Sat 25 May 2024 13.00 BST Share Scientists have recruited an unusual ally in their efforts to help children overcome profound deafness. They are using computer games to boost the children's ability to localise sounds and understand speech. The project is known as Bears - for Both Ears - and it is aimed at youngsters who have been given twin cochlea implants because they were born with little or no hearing. "These are children who are profoundly deaf," said audio engineer Lorenzo Picinali, a scientist on the project from Imperial College London. "They require major interventions to restore their hearing and we have found that computer games can make these much more effective.""

"Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store. "Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'." Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch."

"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died. Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died. Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."

"Security fears about Chinese influence over Bytedance, TikTok's owner, are undoubtedly part of the reason why UK politicians have been reluctant to get involved, and the political context is also different - Biden is reacting to Donald Trump's social media clout - but US strategists such as Teddy Goff have suggested that building up an army of TikTokers who can share and amplify political messages is vital."

"The greatest gains came when gaming met needs the kids couldn't meet in real life. Different games support different aspects of well-being depending on how they are designed."

"Recent experiments suggest AI peer reviews tend to be surprisingly good, with 82.4% of scientists finding AI peer reviews more useful than at least some of the human reviews they received from on a paper, and other work suggests AI is reasonably good at spotting errors, though not as good as humans, yet. Regardless of how good AI gets, the scientific publishing system was not made to support AI writers writing to AI reviews for AI opinions for papers later summarized by AI. The system is going to break."

"Teenagers in a remote Brazilian tribe have become hooked on pornography months after they were given high-speed internet access via Elon Musk's Starlink. The indigenous Marubo people, who for hundreds of years have existed in small huts along the Itui River in the Amazon, were connected to the billionaire's satellite network in September."

"Ultimately, he suggests, each user would have their own "large language model" (LLM), the underlying technology of services such as ChatGPT, which would be trained on their own speech and behaviour patterns, to let them generate extremely personalised responses to queries and requests. Such systems could be a natural progression from AI tools that already exist today. Services such as Gmail can summarise and suggest replies to emails based on previous messages, while Microsoft Teams will transcribe and summarise video conferences, automatically generating a to-do list from the contents."

"Google announced on Thursday that it would refine and retool its summaries of search results generated by artificial intelligence, posting a blog explaining why the feature was returning bizarre and inaccurate answers that included telling people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce. The company will reduce the scope of searches that will return an AI-written summary."

"Jadoun was trying to capture enough audio and video data to build an AI deepfake of Rathore that would convince 300,000 potential voters around Ajmer that they'd had a personalized conversation with him-but excess movement would break the algorithm."