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"I started to feel that propaganda had fundamentally changed. The types of actors who could create it and spread it had shifted, and the impact it was having on our society was quite significant, but we weren't using the word. We were using words like "misinformation" or "disinformation", which seemed to be misdiagnoses of the problem. And so I wanted to write a book that asked, in this media ecosystem, what does propaganda look like?"

"Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse? Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than official tally"

"Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store. "Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'." Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch."

Tenant-screening systems like SafeRent are often used in place of humans as a way to 'avoid engaging' directly with the applicants and pass the blame for a denial to a computer system, said Todd Kaplan, one of the attorneys representing Louis and the class of plaintiffs who sued the company. The property management company told Louis the software alone decided to reject her, but the SafeRent report indicated it was the management company that set the threshold for how high someone needed to score to have their application accepted. Louis and the other named plaintiff alleged SafeRent's algorithm disproportionately scored Black and Hispanic renters who use housing vouchers lower than white applicants. SafeRent has settled. In addition to making a $2.3m payment, the company has agreed to stop using a scoring system or make any kind of recommendation when it comes to prospective tenants who used housing vouchers for five years.

"The European Commission has asked X to hand over internal documents about its algorithms, as it steps up its investigation into whether Elon Musk's social media platform has breached EU rules on content moderation. The EU's executive branch told the company it wanted to see internal documentation about its "recommender system", which makes content suggestions to users, and any recent changes made to it, by 15 February. X has been under investigation since December 2023 under the EU's content law - known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) - over how it tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation. The company has been accused of manipulating the platform's systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility over other political groups."

"Murky and misty streets, coughing townsfolk, and the distant toll of a plague doctor's bell all feature in Hogne's most-watched video, which has racked up 53 million views. It has sparked fascination among many, but historian Dr Amy Boyington describes the medieval-themed video as "amateurish" and "evocative and sensational" rather than historically accurate. "It looks like something from a video game as it shows a world that is meant to look real but is actually fake." She points out inaccuracies like the depiction of houses with large glazed windows and a train track running through the town which wouldn't have existed in the 1300s. Historian and archaeologist Dr Hannah Platts has also noticed significant inaccuracies in a video depicting the eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii. "Due to Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of the eruption, we know that it didn't start with lava spewing everywhere so to not use that wealth of historical information available to us feels cheap and lazy.""

"The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren't Happy About It Students call it hypocritical. A senior at Northeastern University demanded her tuition back. But instructors say generative A.I. tools make them better at their jobs."

"The researchers established a complex picture in terms of the impact. Voice-based chatbots initially appeared to help mitigate loneliness compared with text-based chatbots, but this advantage started to slip the more someone used them. After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialise with people than their male counterparts. Participants who interacted with ChatGPT's voice mode in a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment."

"What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by 2028? In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years."

"I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated"

"The reported ownership of LLM group's essays in the interviews was low. The Search Engine group had strong ownership, but lesser than the Brain-only group. The LLM group also fell behind in their ability to quote from the essays they wrote just minutes prior. As the educational impact of LLM use only begins to settle with the general population, in this preliminary study we demonstrate the pressing matter to explore further any potential changes in learning skills based on the results of our study. "