Group items tagged

"This is partially why online anonymity is so important - it gives people the grace of exploration and inquiry. It allows people to make choices, change their minds, learn, and grow. TikTok doesn't make room for this kind of internet exploration; it makes it impossible to have curiosity without consequence. TikTok isn't alone in using engagement and recommender algorithms to curate personalised content feeds, but it does take it to the extreme. This is profitable both because it keeps people scrolling and because there's very little difference between being able to personalise content and personalise ads."

"The first paper turns the tables on the trend for job applicants to be screened by algorithms. The researchers assigned some applicants "algorithmic writing assistance" with their CVs or covering letters to see if it influenced employers' decisions. But obviously those of us who do lots of recruiting would never be affected by such small changes… would we? I'm afraid so. Jobseekers who had the tech help were 8% more likely to get hired. Sigh."

"Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok's success - more than 1 billion users worldwide - is combining with well-established fears about social media's data collection practices and concerns over China's geo-political ambitions to generate a background hum of distrust about the app. "As the geopolitical situation changes I suspect we will see companies such as TikTok will continue to be treated with some caution in the west," says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University."

"In this future, teachers assisted in marking and lesson planning by LLMs would be left with more much-needed time to focus on other elements of their work. However, in a bid to cut costs, the "teaching" of lessons could also be delegated to machines, robbing teachers and students of human interaction. "Of course, that will be for the less well-off students," Luckin says. "The more well-off students will still have lots of lovely one-to-one human interactions, alongside some very smartly integrated AI." Luckin instead advocates a future in which technology eases teachers' workloads but does not disrupt their pastoral care - or disproportionately affect students in poorer areas. "That human interaction is something to be cherished, not thrown out," she says."

"The government is introducing some amendments in time for the report stage on 12 July, with another batch to be announced shortly after. Under one confirmed change, tech firms will be required to shield internet users from state-sponsored disinformation that poses a threat to UK society and democracy. This is a tightening of existing proposals on disinformation in the bill, which already require tech firms to take action on state-sponsored disinformation that harms individuals - such as threats to kill. Another confirmed amendment is equally incremental. A clause in the bill aimed at end-to-end encrypted services already gives Ofcom the power to require those platforms to adopt "accredited technology" to detect child sexual abuse and exploitation [CSEA] content. If that doesn't work, then they must use their "best endeavours" to develop or deploy new technology to spot and remove CSEA. This move appears to be aimed at Mark Zuckerberg's plans to introduce end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger and Instagram."

"So what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we aren't as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? Are we so reliant on smartphones that they will ultimately change how our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just occasionally miss stuff when we don't remember the reminders?"

"However, the new government under the newly inaugurated Chief Executive John Lee is changing these policies and requiring real-name registration in the app, which some are concerned may pose a privacy threat. The city will also adopt a health code system similar to the one used in mainland China in a bid to curb the latest COVID spike."

"Analyst Brian Nowak estimates that the AI technology will have a $4.1 trillion economic effect on the labor force - or affect about 44% of labor - over the next few years by changing input costs, automating tasks and shifting the ways companies obtain, process and analyze information. Today, Morgan Stanley pegs the AI effect at $2.1 trillion, affecting 25% of labor. "We see generative AI expanding the scope of business processes that can be automated," he wrote in a Sunday note. "At the same time, the input costs supporting GenAI functionality are rapidly falling, enabling a strongly expansionary impact to software production. As a result, Generative AI is set to impact the labor markets, expand the enterprise software TAM, and drive incremental spend for Public Cloud services.""

"This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt."

"ow, legal redress is all very well, but it's usually beyond the resources of working artists. And lawsuits are almost always retrospective, after the damage has been done. It's sometimes better, as in rugby, to "get your retaliation in first". Which is why the most interesting news of the week was that a team of researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a tool to enable artists to fight back against permissionless appropriation of their work by corporations. Appropriately, it's called Nightshade and it "lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways" - dogs become cats, cars become cows, and who knows what else? (Boris Johnson becoming piglet, with added grease perhaps?) It's a new kind of magic. And the good news is that corporations might find it black. Or even deadly."

"Researchers involved in a recent study trained an artificial intelligence (AI) model to diagnose type 2 diabetes in patients after six to 10 seconds of listening to their voice. Canadian medical researchers trained the machine-learning AI to recognise 14 vocal differences in the voice of someone with type 2 diabetes compared to someone without diabetes. The auditory features that the AI focussed on included slight changes in pitch and intensity, which human ears cannot distinguish. This was then paired with basic health data gathered by the researchers, such as age, sex, height and weight. Researchers believe that the AI model will drastically lower the cost for people with diabetes to be diagnosed."

"A Taiwanese American model says a well-known fashion designer uploaded a digitally altered runway photo that made her appear white. In a TikTok about the incident that has been viewed 1.8m times in the last week, Shereen Wu says Michael Costello, a designer who has worked with Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Celine Dion, posted a photo to his Instagram from a recent Los Angeles fashion show. The photo depicts Wu in the slinky black ballgown that she walked the runway in - but her face has been changed, made to appear as if she is a white woman."

"TikTok moderators have struggled to assess content related to the Israel-Gaza conflict because the platform removed an internal tool for flagging videos in a foreign language, the Guardian has been told. The change has meant moderators in Europe cannot flag that they do not understand foreign-language videos, for example, in Arabic and Hebrew, which are understood to be appearing more frequently in video queues. The Guardian was told that moderators hired to work in English previously had access to a button to state that a video or post was not in their language. Internal documents seen by the Guardian show the button was called "not my language", or "foreign language"."

"Research suggests more than half of adolescents are on screens right before bedtime, and that can keep them from getting the sleep they need. Not only is poor sleep linked to all sorts of downsides, including poor mental health symptoms, poor performance in school and trouble regulating stress, Prinstein said, but "inconsistent sleep schedules are associated with changes in structural brain development in adolescent years. In other words, youths' preoccupation with technology and social media may deleteriously affect the size of their brains.""

"To start we need a new human right to "cognitive liberty", which would come with an update to other existing human rights to privacy, freedom of thought and self-determination. All told it would protect our freedom of thought and rumination, mental privacy, and self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. It would change the default rules so we have rights around the commodification of our brain data. "

"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,"

"But ChatGPT and similar programs are, by design, unlimited in what they can "learn" (which is to say, memorize); they are incapable of distinguishing the possible from the impossible. Unlike humans, for example, who are endowed with a universal grammar that limits the languages we can learn to those with a certain kind of almost mathematical elegance, these programs learn humanly possible and humanly impossible languages with equal facility. Whereas humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally conjecture, machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round. They trade merely in probabilities that change over time."

The Canadian office of primary commissioner stated the changes in the privacy policies, especially after 9-11 when the privacy laws were looked past to concentrate on the gathering of information to reduce terrorism in the US and Canada with no real results. However, this problem has been tackled in Canada and stated that they "believe that Canadians deserve federal privacy laws based on rights. The incorporation of a rights-based framework in our privacy laws would help support responsible innovation and foster trust in government, giving people confidence to fully participate in the digital age."

"The economist Oren Cass has a compelling answer for these concerns. He says they suffer from bias: the idea that this technological revolution is somehow unique, when we have lived through many epochs of innovation and upheaval. They also overestimate the pace of change (robots are a long way off from competing with humans in many areas) and assume that new kinds of jobs will not be created in the process."

"Data centers are mushrooming worldwide to meet AI demand, but particularly in Latin America, seen as strategically located by Big Tech. One of the largest data center hubs is in Querétaro, a Mexican state with high risk of intensifying climate change-induced drought. Farmers are already protesting their risk of losing water access."