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"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."

"Campaigners fear the face-scanning technology could be used against protesters, and that police have done so before. The Met insisted the technology would not be used to quell lawful protest or target activists. But campaign groups do not believe them. Britain's biggest force said: "It is not used to identify people who are linked to, or have been convicted of, being involved in protest activity." A leading academic expert said the number of people whose faces would be scanned would make it the largest deployment yet of live facial recognition (LFR) in the UK."

"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."

"Fluent in Digital Culture - Not Academic Tools"

"The question of why AI generates fake academic papers relates to how large language models work: they are probabilistic, in that they map the probability over sequences of words. As Dr David Smerdon of the University of Queensland puts it: "Given the start of a sentence, it will try to guess the most likely words to come next.""

"But for many scientists, Twitter has become an essential tool for collaboration and discovery - a source of real-time conversations around research papers, conference talks and wider topics in academia. Papers now zip around scientific communities faster thanks to Twitter, says Johann Unger, a linguist at Lancaster University, UK, who notes that extra information is also shared in direct private messages through the site. And its limit on tweet length - currently 280 characters - has pushed academics into keeping their commentary pithy, he adds."

"A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care. That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study. "If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model," Green said. "That personal data could be generated and revealed to somebody else." She said carers might act on faulty or biased information and inadvertently cause harm, and an AI-generated care plan might be substandard."

"Frank McCourt, Founder of Project Liberty and Executive Chairman of McCourt Global, announces that Project Liberty is building a consortium to purchase TikTok and rearchitect the platform to put people in control of their digital identities and data Leading technologists and academics, including Jonathan Haidt, David Clark, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee express support for Project Liberty's vision for a more open, inclusive and responsible internet"

"Among kids under age 13 (i.e., 11- and 12-year-olds), they found: 63.8% reported using social media They had an average of 3.38 social media accounts Among the 63.8% with a social media account, TikTok was most popular, with 68.2% saying they have an account. 57.3% said they have Instagram and 55.2% Snapchat Only 5.4% said their social media account(s) were secret from their parents My take: The takeaway here is simple: a lot of kids are using social media! This data may slightly overestimate the numbers, given data collection during the pandemic (2019-2021), when rates of social media use may have been higher. But still: 64% using social media! Despite a national desire to put our fingers in our ears and scream "la-la-la," kids under 13 are using these platforms. We need to either do a better job of preventing that, or make the platforms safer for kids that age. Academic Pediatrics."

Firewalls and China....censorship or protection?

"Researchers at the University of Reading fooled their own professors by secretly submitting AI-generated exam answers that went undetected and got better grades than real students. The project created fake student identities to submit unedited answers generated by ChatGPT-4 in take-home online assessments for undergraduate courses. The university's markers - who were not told about the project - flagged only one of the 33 entries, with the remaining AI answers receiving higher than average grades than the students."