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"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."

"Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical. AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate. But that's not the AI business model. AI pitchmen are explicit on this score: The purpose of AI, the source of its value, is its capacity to increase productivity, which is to say, it should allow workers to do more, which will allow their bosses to fire some of them, or get each one to do more work in the same time, or both. The entire investor case for AI is "companies will buy our products so they can do more with less." It's not "business custom­ers will buy our products so their products will cost more to make, but will be of higher quality.""

This is the problem with a database with such economic value!

"Many services retain the data they harvest indefinitely, and some have been caught storing (and losing) the data without encryption: for example, in 2017 the Greater Manchester Police were found to have lost data from victims of violent and sexual crimes, which had been stored unencrypted on DVDs and sent through the post."

"TikTok is battling to remove a graphic video of a livestreamed suicide, after the footage was uploaded to the service on Sunday night from Facebook, where it was initially broadcast. Although the footage was rapidly taken down from TikTok, users spent much of Monday re-uploading it, initially unchanged, but later incorporated into so-called bait-and-switch videos, which are designed to shock and upset unsuspecting users."

"Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams.8 8. April Glaser, Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,Slate (Jan. 18, 2018), https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html (explaining that major platforms have hired or have announced plans to hire thousands, in some cases more than ten thousand, new content moderators).On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process.9 9. Tom Simonite, AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, But Can It Finish?,Wired (Dec. 18, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-started-cleaning-facebook-can-it-finish/.Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don't moderate).10 10. Gohmert Press Release, supra note 7 ("Social media companies enjoy special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, protections not shared by other media. Instead of acting like the neutral platforms they claim to be in order obtain their immunity, these companies have turned Section 230 into a license to potentially defraud and defame with impunity… Since there still appears to be no sincere effort to stop this disconcerting behavior, it is time for social media companies to be liable for any biased and unethical impropriety of their employees as any other media company. If these companies want to continue to act like a biased medium and publish their own agendas to the detriment of others, they need to be held accountable."); Eric Johnson, Silicon Valley's Self-Regulating Days "Probably Should Be" Over, Nancy Pelosi Says, Vox (Apr. 11, 2019), https:/

"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically-now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred.1 1. Zachary Laub, Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons, Council on Foreign Rel. (Jun. 7, 2019), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons.Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints.2 2. Tony Romm, Republicans Accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of Bias. Democrats Called the Hearing 'Dumb.', Wash. Post (Jul. 17, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/17/republicans-accused-facebook-google-twitter-bias-democrats-called-hearing-dumb/?utm_term=.895b34499816.And that's not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect."

"Tesla denied liability, saying Lee consumed alcohol before getting behind the wheel. The electric-vehicle maker also claims it was unclear whether the autopilot feature was engaged at the time of the crash. Tesla has been testing and rolling out its autopilot and more advanced full self-driving (FSD) system, which its chief executive, Elon Musk, has touted as crucial to his company's future but has drawn regulatory and legal scrutiny. Tesla won an earlier trial in Los Angeles in April with a strategy of saying that it tells drivers that its technology requires human monitoring, despite the "autopilot" and "full self-driving" names."

"U.K.-based startup Yepic AI claims to use "deepfakes for good" and promises to "never reenact someone without their consent." But the company did exactly what it claimed it never would. In an unsolicited email pitch to a TechCrunch reporter, a representative for Yepic AI shared two "deepfaked" videos of the reporter, who had not given consent to having their likeness reproduced. Yepic AI said in the pitch email that it "used a publicly available photo" of the reporter to produce two deepfaked videos of them speaking in different languages. The reporter requested that Yepic AI delete the deepfaked videos it created without permission."

"The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has signed sweeping social media legislation requiring explicit parental permissions for anyone under 18 to use platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. He also signed a bill prohibiting social media companies from employing techniques that could cause minors to develop an "addiction" to the platforms."

"The rapid online spread of deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift has renewed calls, including from US politicians, to criminalise the practice, in which artificial intelligence is used to synthesise fake but convincing explicit imagery. The images of the US popstar have been distributed across social media and seen by millions this week. Previously distributed on the app Telegram, one of the images of Swift hosted on X was seen 47m times before it was removed."

"Air Canada came under further criticism for later attempting to distance itself from the error by claiming that the bot was "responsible for its own actions". Amid a broader push by companies to automate services, the case - the first of its kind in Canada - raises questions about the level of oversight companies have over the chat tools."