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"To Lawmakers and School Administrators: As parents and caregivers, there is nothing more important to us than our children's safety. That's why we're calling for an outright ban on the use of facial recognition in schools. We're concerned about this technology spreading to our schools, infringing on our kids' rights and putting them in danger. We don't even know the psychological impacts this constant surveillance can have on our children, but we do know that violating their basic rights will create an environment of mistrust and will make it hard for students to succeed and grow. The images collected by this technology will become a target for those wishing to harm our children, and could put them in physical danger or at risk of having their biometric information stolen or sold. The well-known bias built into this technology will put Black and brown children, girls, and gender noncomforming kids in specific danger. Facial recognition creates more harm than good and should not be used on the children we have been entrusted to protect. It should instead be immediately banned."

"y memory and recall are alarmingly good - borderline photographic. But when I used Instagram, I found it would short-circuit my recall in an alarming way. I'd be describing something mid-sentence and I'd just stop speaking, unable to finish. So I rarely use it. But my attention span - and my posture, eyes and sleep - are still being degraded by other technology and my dependence on it. In my pandemic life, technology is a lifeline - 90% of my social and work life happens on one of four screens."

"The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as - or better than - the real thing. Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. "

"Playing video games can be good for your mental health, a study from Oxford University has suggested, following a breakthrough collaboration in which academics at the university worked with actual gameplay data for the first time."

""Facebook, listen to me," Duterte said in a late-night televised address. "We allow you to operate here hoping that you could help us. Now, if government cannot espouse or advocate something which is for the good of the people, then what is your purpose here in my country?""

"But, being pro-technology doesn't mean that I have to pretend there is no danger. Most people are unaware of the ways their technology is holding them back. The good news is that once you become aware, it's not too difficult to start getting things back on track. It's possible use technology while keeping yourself protected from its detrimental effects."

"Early Saturday morning after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover for non-compliance. "

"The data wars to come? Worryingly, there was one question where the AI simply couldn't come up with a counter argument. When arguing for the motion that "Data will become the most fought-over resource of the 21st century", the Megatron said: The ability to provide information, rather than the ability to provide goods and services, will be the defining feature of the economy of the 21st century. But when we asked it to oppose the motion - in other words, to argue that data wasn't going to be the most vital of resources, worth fighting a war over - it simply couldn't, or wouldn't, make the case. In fact, it undermined its own position: We will able to see everything about a person, everywhere they go, and it will be stored and used in ways that we cannot even imagine."

"Second Life's endurance demonstrates that, whatever the configuration, a metaverse's success can only be founded on human qualities of social interaction and self-expression. "I obviously don't feel as excited now as when I started roaming around Second Life," Aufwie says. "But I still feel gratitude towards this apparently everlasting pioneering metaverse that allowed me to express myself, make friends, learn and share thoughts and all the good things humanity has within it.""

"Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. "If you're unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam," the AI advised in part. "I would have given this a good grade," Gillmor said. "Academia has some very serious issues to confront.""

"Open AI researchers said that while it was "impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text", good classifiers could pick up signs that text was written by AI. The tool could be useful in cases where AI was used for "academic dishonesty" and when AI chatbots were positioned as humans, they said."

"Oh, I just listen to bird sounds a lot and then try to emulate the kinds of things they do. Synthesizers are quite good at that because some of the new software has what's called physical modeling. This enables you to construct a physical model of something and then stretch the parameters. You can create a piano with 32-foot strings, for instance, or a piano made of glass. It's a very interesting way to try to study the world, to try to model it. In the natural world there are discrete entities like clarinets, saxophones, drums. With physical modeling, you can make hybrids like a drummy piano or a saxophone-y violin. There's a continuum, most of which has never been explored."

"Our reliance on their information is now a matter of life and death. Misinformation online has real-world consequences. In the developing world, a hoax claimed India had banned coronavirus social posts, and in the US, 13 percent of people thought coronavirus was a hoax during the critical weeks where earlier notification to shelter-in-place would have saved thousands of lives. Tech platforms have an ability through their persuasive techniques and microtargeting to influence the behavior of society in ways traditional media can't. "

"What if facial recognition technology isn't as good at recognising faces as it has sometimes been claimed to be? If the technology is being used in the criminal justice system, and gets the identification wrong, this can cause serious problems for people (see Robert Williams' story in "Facing up to the problems of recognising faces")."

"No surprise, then, that Twitter is aglow with engineers and academics mocking Lemoine for falling into the seductive emptiness of his own creation. But while I agree that Lemoine has made a mistake, I don't think he deserves our scorn. His error is a good mistake, the kind of mistake we should want AI scientists to make."

"Parent "Portals," as utilized in K12 education, are doing significant harm to student development.[1] For those not familiar, Parent Portals are learning management systems that provide "real time" information to parents of school-aged children: "grades, attendance, assignments, and more." On a daily basis parents can monitor their child's performance in school and intervene at home. In theory, this seems like a good thing. But what is the difference between "real time" data and constant surveillance? In my view, not much. What if surveillance is not conducive to education? I'm working this one out. Let's see where it goes."

"OpenAI has "discussed and debated quite extensively" when to release a tool that can determine whether an image was made with DALL-E 3, OpenAI's generative AI art model, or not. But the startup isn't close to making a decision anytime soon. That's according to Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy, who spoke with TechCrunch in a phone interview this week. She said that, while the classifier tool's accuracy is "really good" - at least by her estimation - it hasn't met OpenAI's threshold for quality."

"What's fascinating about all this is how much of it comes down, not to finance or technology, but to people and what they know. In that sense the FT's deep dive into TSMC's travails reminded me of a striking piece of research conducted decades ago by the philosopher of science Harry Collins when he was a PhD student. Collins was interested in how knowledge gets transferred and intrigued by a particular piece of technology, the TEA laser. This was a device that was comprehensively documented in the physics literature but which research laboratories were unable to replicate. What Collins discovered was that "nobody could make the laser work if they hadn't spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn't lase.""

"ow, legal redress is all very well, but it's usually beyond the resources of working artists. And lawsuits are almost always retrospective, after the damage has been done. It's sometimes better, as in rugby, to "get your retaliation in first". Which is why the most interesting news of the week was that a team of researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a tool to enable artists to fight back against permissionless appropriation of their work by corporations. Appropriately, it's called Nightshade and it "lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways" - dogs become cats, cars become cows, and who knows what else? (Boris Johnson becoming piglet, with added grease perhaps?) It's a new kind of magic. And the good news is that corporations might find it black. Or even deadly."

"Have you been looking forward to somniferous alkaloid compounds customized to your personal metabolic dependency profile? Good news! 23andMe is selling everyone's DNA to the pharmaceutical industry. GSK Plc will pay 23andMe Holding Co. $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications."