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"The NSA uses laughably sloppy tools for deciding whether a target is a "US person" (a person in the USA, or an American citizen abroad). For example, people whose address books contain foreign persons are presumed by some analysts to be foreign. Likewise, people who post in "foreign" languages (the US has no official state language) are presumed by some analysts to be non-US persons."

""The problem," Leveson wrote in a book, "is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.""

"There are some things that you can do to protect yourself from falling for a hoax. As the author of the upcoming book "Fake Photos," to be published in August, I'd like to offer a few tips to protect yourself from falling for a hoax."

"the facial recognition system was tested by disney research using infrared hi-def cameras that capture people's faces while watching movies like 'big hero 6', 'the jungle book' and 'star wars: the force awakens'. the results showcased 16 million facial landmarks from 3,179 viewers demonstrating a 'very strong predictive performance'. to do so, the AI software takes the faces of people and understands how many of them are laughing, how wide are their eyes, and the different expressions they make."

" If your consumption of content is tailored by near limitless observations harvested about people like you, how could your universe not collapse into the partial depiction of reality that people like you also enjoy? How could empathy and respect for difference thrive in this environment? Where's the incentive to stamp out fake accounts, fake news, paid troll armies, dyspeptic bots?"

"In October 2016, algorithms reacted to negative news headlines about Brexit negotiations by sending the pound down 6% against the dollar in under two minutes, before recovering almost immediately. Knowing which particular headline, or which particular algorithm, caused the crash is next to impossible. When one haywire algorithm started placing and cancelling orders that ate up 4% of all traffic in US stocks in October 2012, one commentator was moved to comment wryly that "the motive of the algorithm is still unclear"."

"Flooding involves deluging the citizen with a torrent of information - some accurate, some phoney, some biased - with the aim of making people overwhelmed. In a digital world, flooding is child's play: it's cheap, effective and won't generate backlash. (En passant, it's what Russia - and Trump - do.) In her book, Roberts provides abundant evidence of how the Chinese authorities deploy these three techniques."

"But a newsroom rebellion ended her tenure before it began. A group of employees wrote a letter protesting against her appointment because of several tweets she had written ten years earlier, when she was herself a teen. In them Ms McCammond reported Googling how to avoid waking up with "swollen, Asian eyes". She complained about the lack of an explanation for a poor mark in chemistry: "thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A. [teaching assistant]". She had apologised for these comments in the past, but a killing in Georgia on March 16th, in which six of the eight victims were Asian women, made them look even worse. Two days later Ms McCammond took to Twitter again-to say that she had agreed to renounce the Teen Vogue job."

""I think, without question, having access to quantitative data about our conversations, about facial expressions and intonations, would provide another dimension to the clinical interaction that's not detected right now," said Barron, a psychiatrist based in Seattle and author of the new book Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry."

""This online system has left the population's Covid vaccine statuses exposed to absolutely anyone to pry into. Date of birth and postcode are fields of data that can be easily found or bought, even on the electoral roll. "This is personal health information that could easily be exploited by companies, insurers, employers or scammers. Robust protections must be put in place immediately and an urgent investigation should be opened to establish how such basic privacy protections could be missing from one of the most sensitive health databases in the country.""

"So here's where we are: an online system has been running wild for years, generating billions in profits for its participants. We have evidence of its illegitimacy and a powerful law on the statute book that in principle could bring it under control, but which we appear unable to enforce. And the only body that has, to date, been able to exert real control over the aforementioned racket is… a giant private company that itself is subject to serious concerns about its monopolistic behaviour. And the question for today: where is democracy in all this? You only have to ask to know the answer."

"But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google's internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents. BERT is one of a number of A.I. systems that learn from lots and lots of digitized information, as varied as old books, Wikipedia entries and news articles."

"This might be a bit disappointing for you. But if you think about it, what would be a satisfying answer to the meaning of life, in the simulation or out of it? It seems difficult to think of a fully satisfying answer to a question that has been put on the most ornate pedestal of all questions. 'To love or to live' sound like something you'd read in a cheap self-help book. The Epicureans thought that the meaning of life was to seek modest pleasures. To me at least, that does not sound very satisfying."

"If anything, I think in the 50s and 60s - because so few people had direct experience of computers - there was even more concern than there is now. Computers were associated with vast power. It was only with the arrival in the 1980s and 1990s of the personal computer we were sold the idea that the technology was participatory and liberal. I think we have returned, in a way, to the original fears, now we sense that these personal devices very much represent the power of vast corporations. "

"Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn't to faithfully represent the author's spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of 'correct' English - it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in."

"100 Things We've Lost to the Internet. Its form seems to fit an era of short attention spans, breaking up its author's writing into short essays with headings such as "Solitude", "Ignoring people", "Leaving a message" and "A parent's undivided attention". At its best, the book reads like it mixes journalism with sociology and anthropology. To its credit, it also manages the rare feat of exploring what technology has done to us without succumbing to doom and panic."

"In papers filed on Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged "flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs' registered copyrights" and called the ChatGPT program a "massive commercial enterprise" that is reliant upon "systematic theft on a mass scale"."

"These are the early days of the data revolution in personal decision-making. I am not claiming that we can completely outsource our lifestyle choices to algorithms, though we might get to that point in the future. I am claiming instead that we can all dramatically improve our decision-making by consulting evidence mined from thousands or millions of people who faced dilemmas similar to ours. And we can do that now."

"They still have far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it - making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing. But the basic existence of that technology is years old, at this point. And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal - not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it."

"Musicians are therefore worried - about being made to perform material they otherwise wouldn't, or being usurped by a fantasy. "I can't help but think that I can be easily replaced," says Flora Rose, a singer-songwriter on TikTok. "I'm spending months crafting my debut EP, [and meanwhile] people can make tracks in one click." When it comes to the arts, AI tends to provoke horror or ridicule - as when an AI photograph won a major photography competition, or when ChatGPT declared young adult weepie The Fault in Our Stars "one of the best books of all time". In February, the lawyer behind a lawsuit on behalf of visual artists whose work was being used to generate AI art called any generative image "an infringing derivative work"."