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"Carolan, who is 18 and has just completed an art foundation course in Cardiff, decided architecture would be a safer path to follow. "It feels like it will be a more secure degree. Lots of psychology goes into architecture," he says. "You need to understand the core of what you're doing." He is doubtful that images made by artificial intelligence will replace the art exhibited in galleries, but he worries that commercial projects previously requiring a team of artists may in the future need only one to work with AI and neaten up the final product. "The options will probably get limited as time goes on. Personally, I'd find it a bit depressing if there wasn't a human element, but whether or not we'd notice I'm not sure. I always thought things like art would be one of the last things robots would be able to do.""

"Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a "kill switch" to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries, leaked files reveal. The instructions to block authorities from accessing its IT systems were part of a sophisticated global operation by the Silicon Valley company to thwart law enforcement."

"We submitted the grant on time. The next day, while speaking to a friend, I told him, "This week, I wrote my first ChatGPT grant." He replied that he had been doing it for months and that many other scientists are doing the same. A 2023 Nature survey of 1,600 researchers found that more than 25% use AI to help them write manuscripts and that more than 15% use the technology to help them write grant proposals. Some people might see the use of ChatGPT in writing grant proposals as cheating, but it actually highlights a much bigger problem: what is the point of asking scientists to write documents that can be easily created with AI? What value are we adding? Perhaps it is time for funding bodies to rethink their application processes."

"No prominent developer of AI foundation models - a list including companies like OpenAI and Meta - is releasing sufficient information about their potential impact on society, determines a new report from Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence). Today, Stanford HAI released its Foundation Model Transparency Index, which tracked whether creators of the 10 most popular AI models disclose information about their work and how people use their systems. Among the models it tested, Meta's Llama 2 scored the highest, followed by BloomZ and then OpenAI's GPT-4. But none of them, it turned out, got particularly high marks."

"The camera never lies. Except, of course, it does - and seemingly more often with each passing day. In the age of the smartphone, digital edits on the fly to improve photos have become commonplace, from boosting colours to tweaking light levels. Now, a new breed of smartphone tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are adding to the debate about what it means to photograph reality. Google's latest smartphones released last week, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, go a step further than devices from other companies. They are using AI to help alter people's expressions in photographs. It's an experience we've all had: one person in a group shot looks away from the camera or fails to smile. Google's phones can now look through your photos to mix and match from past expressions, using machine learning to put a smile from a different photo of them into the picture. Google calls it Best Take. "

"Artificial Intelligence has the ability to perform illegal financial trades and cover it up, new research suggests. In a demonstration at the UK's AI safety summit, a bot used made-up insider information to make an "illegal" purchase of stocks without telling the firm. When asked if it had used insider trading, it denied the fact. Insider trading refers to when confidential company information is used to make trading decisions. Firms and individuals are only allowed to use publicly-available information when buying or selling stocks. "

"Can AI bring personalized tutors to every student? The AI education tools being piloted today are mind-blowing because they are tailored to each individual learner. Some of them-like Khanmigo and MATHia-are already remarkable, and they'll only get better in the years ahead. One of the things that excites me the most about this type of technology is the possibility of localizing it to every student, no matter where they live. For example, a team in Nairobi is working on Somanasi, an AI-based tutor that aligns with the curriculum in Kenya. The name means "learn together" in Swahili, and the tutor has been designed with the cultural context in mind so it feels familiar to the students who use it."

"Gambling on shitcoins takes the subtext of much of the crypto space and turns it into the entire purpose. There is no pretence, here, of anyone banking on widespread use, or of the coins having a purpose. The game is to find one that will go up, buy it cheap, push it as hard as you can to others, and then cash out at the top. The community takes phrases usually associated with financial crime - "shilling", "pump and dump", and so on - and wears them like a badge of honour."

"The glasses pick up audio and visual cues, translating them into text that gets displayed on your lens, right in your line of vision. These virtual subtitles overlay on your vision of the world, providing a contextual, USEFUL augmented reality experience that's leaps and bounds ahead of what the Google Glass was designed to do in 2013."

""We erase your past" declares the company's tagline. Eliminalia, which has offices in several cities including Barcelona and Kyiv, is part of a growing industry that will clean up your online profile. Officially the company performs "a deep search across the internet for all information - whether it be an article, a blog, social media posts or even a mistaken identity". It then endeavours, on behalf of its clients, to get any negative information removed."

"Pornbots create fake accounts that are designed to mimic real people. They steal photos from public social media accounts, and follow the real profile's friends. They tack on suggestive captions and post links to external paid adult sites. The fake accounts choose @usernames that are deceptively similar to those they impersonate. And for good measure, the fake accounts block the person they're copying, making it difficult for the victim to see or interact with them."

"Launched on the eve of the millennium, Turkey's most popular homegrown social media website has weathered lawsuits, criticism from the highest levels of government and even death threats directed at one of its founders. A simple editable online dictionary turned national obsession, Ekşi Sözlük has for more than two decades spurred its own biting form of social satire while providing a rare haven for free expression on the Turkish internet. But this year's earthquakes that upended life across Turkey may prove to be the death knell for Ekşi Sözlük, which was abruptly blocked across the country in the weeks after the earthquakes first struck, without proper explanation."

"Cyber conflicts are fought in the shadows, but in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is a group that calls itself Anonymous that has made the most public declaration of war. Late on Thursday the hacker collective tweeted from an account linked to Anonymous, @YourAnonOne, that it had Vladimir Putin's regime in its sights."

"According to the website Lexica, which tracks over 10 million images and prompts generated by Stable Diffusion, Rutkowski's name has been used as a prompt around 93,000 times. Some of the world's most famous artists, such as Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci, brought up around 2,000 prompts each or less. Rutkowski's name also features as a prompt thousands of times in the Discord of another text-to-image generator, Midjourney. Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn't his. "It's been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won't be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art," Rutkowski says. "That's concerning.""

"He's right to be annoyed - these tracks are a violation of an artist's creativity and personhood - and the fakes are noticeably more sophisticated than those from a few years ago, when Jay-Z was made to rap Shakespeare (this is the kind of humour beloved of AI dorks). The tech will continue to improve to the point where the differences become indistinguishable. Perhaps lazy artists will soon use AI to generate their latest album, not so much phoning it in as texting it. AI composes its music by regurgitating things it's been trained to listen to in vast song databases, and that's not so different than the way human-composed pop music is recombined from prior influences. Producers, engineers, lyricists and all the other people who work behind a star could be usurped or at least have their value driven down by cheap AI tools."

"Kahun still relies on its own vast repository of medical knowledge - over 30 million insights from trusted sources - but ChatGPT will now allow patients to describe their symptoms in their own words. Until now it's been a structured conversation, with the AI asking a question, the patient responding, and the AI working its way through a series of more detailed questions based on the answers it gets. Integrating ChatGPT puts the patient in control. They describe their symptoms exactly as they would to a doctor, and ChatGPT responds, just as their doctor would."

"The library outside St Pancras International station, which has one of the largest book collections in the world, said it has its own financial reserves and has not applied for extra funding. A spokesperson said: "The final costs of recovering from the recent cyber attack are still not confirmed. "The British Library and its Government sponsor, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), remain in close and regular contact."

"Sports Illustrated deleted web articles after a report claimed they were generated by artificial intelligence and published under fake author names. Tech publisher Futurism reported the issue after finding author headshots on an AI-generated image website. The Sports Illustrated Union said staff were "horrified" and demanded "basic journalistic standards". The publisher's owner disputed the report's accuracy, but it said it had launched an internal investigation. Arena Group, which owns the Sports Illustrated magazine and website, licensed the content from a third-party company, Advon Commerce, a company spokesperson said in a statement. Sports Illustrated has since removed the content after the allegations were raised, the statement added. Arena Group is now pursuing an internal investigation and has ended its partnership with Advon Commerce. "

"Peter Chen, CEO of the robot software company Covariant, sits in front of a chatbot interface resembling the one used to communicate with ChatGPT. "Show me the tote in front of you," he types. In reply, a video feed appears, revealing a robot arm over a bin containing various items-a pair of socks, a tube of chips, and an apple among them. The chatbot can discuss the items it sees-but also manipulate them. When WIRED suggests Chen ask it to grab a piece of fruit, the arm reaches down, gently grasps the apple, and then moves it to another bin nearby."

"In short, Klarna offers shoppers something similar to a store credit card - rather than paying $500 now, you might split it into 12 payments with a micro-loan from Klarna that gets issued within minutes. The e-commerce provider then pays Klarna a fee (usually around 6 percent, higher than what they'd pay for a Visa or Mastercard transaction, but still a good deal if it makes it easier for the customer to buy the product). As you might imagine, Klarna has lots of customers and those customers have a lot of questions. This means they hire lots of customer service representatives. And those customer service reps are the first major, public casualty in the conflict between AI and human jobs."