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"But by far the most immediate danger is the role that AI data analysis and generation plays in spreading disinformation and extremism on social media. This technology powers bots and amplification algorithms. These have played a direct role in fomenting conflict in many countries. They are helping to intensify racism, conspiracy theories, political extremism and a plethora of violent, irrationalist movements."

"Although disinformation has been extensively discussed as a powerful weapon employed by state and non-state actors, especially given the quick rise of AI tools capable of generating fabricated texts, sounds, and moving or still images,"

"The new tool was recently unveiled by Wonder Dynamics founders Nikola Todorovic, and Tye Sheridan, star of Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. The above video showcases the capabilities of Wonder Studio, where an amateur filmmaker can use their footage of an individual and replace them with a variety of different CGI characters. The video shows Wonder Studio is as simple as dragging and dropping different CGI characters into real-life actors within the footage, while also having more in-depth options for lighting, motion, grain, color, and more."

"Because for all the promises of smart tech, at least a "dumb" heating system can't be taken over by a vindictive ex, and used to torment you with unbearable heat or terrible cold, when you have no idea why. A daft doorbell can't tell a stalker when you leave, or when you're home, or where you go if you use a smartwatch, too. And no stupid speaker can be used to listen in on your private conversations. These situations may sound like nightmares, but they are all real cases of smart tech-enabled domestic abuse. And the number of cases is shooting up: between 2018 and 2022, the domestic violence charity Refuge saw an increase of 258% in the number of survivors supported by their tech abuse team."

"Meta estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram receive online sexual harassment each day, including "pictures of adult genitalia", according to internal company documents made public late Wednesday."

"For women who have been victims of the creation and sharing of nonconsensual deepfake pornography, the events of the past week will have been a horrible reminder of their own abuse, even if they may also hope that the spotlight will force legislators into action. But because the pictures were removed, Swift's experience is far from the norm. Most victims, even those who are famous, are less fortunate. The 17-year-old Marvel actor Xochitl Gomez spoke this month about X failing to remove pornographic deepfakes of her. "This has nothing to do with me. And yet it's on here with my face," she said."

"What bothered Jeff, however, was not so much the loot boxes or the skins in themselves but another phenomenon that they have spawned: skins gambling. This works like any other casino. You load up your account with funds, place a bet, watch the graphics spin and either win or lose. The big difference in this case is that the casino taking your bet has no gambling licence and, in some cases, no reliable mechanism to stop under-18s getting their first taste of gambling - via an online ecosystem that is, to many parents, a total mystery."

""Elderly Chinese still often prefer to pay with cash and some struggle with using mobile payments." Less than a year ago, state media was lauding China's trajectory towards becoming the world's top country for cashless transactions. Xinhua reported cash had dropped to just 3.7% of the total money in circulation. But in recent months China's government has appeared to push back, with numerous announcements about "streamlining" payment systems for visitors and elderly people."

"The Israeli military's bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war. In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict."

"Their findings show that currently, only about 23 percent of wages paid for tasks involving vision are economically viable for AI automation. In other words, it's only economically sensible to replace human labor with AI in about one-fourth of the jobs where vision is a key component of the work. "

"In attendance will be Matthew P Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center - a law firm dedicated exclusively to representing the families of children allegedly harmed by social media. The firm has filed cases against platforms including Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord."

"But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally - and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days. However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy - many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion."

"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."

"The breakdown in negotiations resulted in Meta blocking all news sources on Facebook in Canada "recklessly and dangerously" as all 10 provinces and three territories in the country burned, Canada's heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, told Guardian Australia. "Facebook is leaving disinformation and misinformation to spread on their platform, while choosing to block access to reliable, high-quality, independent journalism," St-Onge said. "Facebook is just leaving more room for misinformation during need-to-know situations like wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical times for people to make decisions on matters that affect them.""

"I. Neither AI nor other people will take your job: While fears have shifted from AI taking jobs to people using AI replacing others, the reality is that you will most likely replace your non-AI-using self by adopting AI tools."

"That comment sparked interest and outrage, raising concerns that the kind of AI-generated "slop" that's prominent on Facebook would soon come straight from Meta and disrupt the core utility of social media - fostering human-to-human connection. As users began to sniff out some of Meta's AI accounts this week, the backlash grew, in part because of the way the AI accounts disingenuously described themselves as actual people with racial and sexual identities."

"From this fact about language development, Chomsky posited an (abstract) innate module for language learning - not processing. From a neurobiological standpoint, the brain has to be ready to understand language from birth. While there are plenty of examples of language specialization in infants, the precise neural mechanisms are still unknown, but not unknowable. But objects of study become unknowable when scientific terms are misused or misapplied. And this is precisely the danger: conflating AI with human understanding can lead to dangerous consequences."