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"I don't trust it, David! It's the whole Lord of the Rings vibe - "one app to rule them all", which famously didn't work out great for Middle-earth. A lot of people have concerns, myself included. It's why there was a backlash to Meta - which provides Facebook and WhatsApp - trying to launch a digital currency. I think there's a broader issue of digital literacy here: when we give up our permissions to a super app, do we really know what we're agreeing to?"

"Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. "If you're unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam," the AI advised in part. "I would have given this a good grade," Gillmor said. "Academia has some very serious issues to confront.""

"Prisma Labs has already gotten into trouble for accidentally generating nude and cartoonishly sexualised images - including those of children - despite a "no nudes" and "adults only" policy. Prisma Lab's CEO and co-founder Andrey Usoltsev told TechCrunch this behaviour only happened if the AI was intentionally provoked to create this type of content - which represents a breach of terms against its use. "If an individual is determined to engage in harmful behavior, any tool would have the potential to become a weapon," he said."

"Here's how the program, which has been developed in partnership with SWGfL, a UK-based non-profit behind the Revenge Porn Helpline, works. If you've shared an intimate image with someone and are worried that that person might do something nefarious with it, you can send the images to content moderators at Facebook to be "hashed"- essentially the image is assigned a digital fingerprint. If someone then tries to upload that image to Facebook it can be quickly identified and blocked. It's obviously not a silver bullet for stopping revenge porn, and it requires putting a lot of trust in Facebook and accepting that a random content moderator is going to be looking at your naked photos, but it gives people a little bit of control over their images."

"And some provinces are using some creepy Big Brother technology to do it. In Surat Thani, the province that contains the tourism hotspot islands of Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao, the immigration office is employing new technology. Officers have equipped Smart Patrol Cars that is using advanced facial recognition to check foreigners quickly. Immigration officers are patrolling in WiFi-enabled cars, usually a BMW, to crack down on foreigners who have overstayed."

"According to tweets from DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, however, this time AlphaGo really did make mistakes. The AI "thought it was doing well, but got confused on move 87," Hassabis said, later clarifying that it made a mistake on move 79 but only realized its error by 87. AlphaGo adjusts its playing style based on its evaluation of how the game is progressing."

"Scientists are fascinated by ant colonies because they can form collectives called "superorganisms" that function as single organisms do. Investigation into how ants behave has revealed more about how such group behavior arises, and some researchers are using that knowledge to help build smarter robot swarms, said Simon Garnier, a scientist who studies animal behavior at the New Jersey Institute of Technology."

""Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology," he wrote. "I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI - that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster."

"Cave wrote in his response: "Since its launch in November last year many people, most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic awe, have sent me songs 'in the style of Nick Cave' created by ChatGPT. There have been dozens of them. Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology. I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI - that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster.""

"The US battle with TikTok over data privacy concerns and Chinese influence has been heating up for years, and recent measures have brought college campuses to the forefront - with a number of schools banning the app entirely on campus wifi. Students have responded, of course, on TikTok. Taking advantage of viral sounds, they have expressed outrage at their favourite app being blocked at universities like Auburn, Oklahoma and Texas A&M in the past few months. "Do they not realize people in college are actually adults?" one user wrote. "We should make our own independent decision to use TikTok or not," another said."

""ChatGPT may have better syntax than humans, but it's shallow on research and critical thinking," said Lauren Goodlad, a professor of English and comparative literature at Rutgers University and the chair of its Critical Artificial Intelligence initiative. She said she understands where concern about the tool is coming from but that - at least at the college level - the type and caliber of written tasks that ChatGPT can offer does not replace critical thinking and human creativity. "These are statistical models," she said. "And so they favor probability, as in they are trained on data, and the only reason they work as well as they do is that they are looking for probable responses to a prompt.""

"The intriguing echo of Eliza in thinking about ChatGPT is that people regard it as magical even though they know how it works - as a "stochastic parrot" (in the words of Timnit Gebru, a well-known researcher) or as a machine for "hi-tech plagiarism" (Noam Chomsky). But actually we do not know the half of it yet - not the CO2 emissions incurred in training its underlying language model or the carbon footprint of all those delighted interactions people are having with it. Or, pace Chomsky, that the technology only exists because of its unauthorised appropriation of the creative work of millions of people that just happened to be lying around on the web? What's the business model behind these tools? And so on. Answer: we don't know."

"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."

"Consumer faith in cybersecurity, data privacy, and responsible AI hinges on what companies do today-and establishing this digital trust just might lead to business growth. "

"Oh, I just listen to bird sounds a lot and then try to emulate the kinds of things they do. Synthesizers are quite good at that because some of the new software has what's called physical modeling. This enables you to construct a physical model of something and then stretch the parameters. You can create a piano with 32-foot strings, for instance, or a piano made of glass. It's a very interesting way to try to study the world, to try to model it. In the natural world there are discrete entities like clarinets, saxophones, drums. With physical modeling, you can make hybrids like a drummy piano or a saxophone-y violin. There's a continuum, most of which has never been explored."

"The post sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of fine-tuning an AI on the work of a specific living artist, even as new fine-tuned models are posted daily. The most-upvoted comment asked, "Whether it's legal or not, how do you think this artist feels now that thousands of people can now copy her style of works almost exactly?""

"Shoppers are being deceived because social media platforms and messaging apps are not doing enough to prevent a "cottage industry of fraudsters" soliciting fake reviews, according to Amazon. Fake reviews have become one of the most persistent scourges of online retailers, and some analysts think that about one in seven reviews in the UK are not the real deal, with blame often directed at groups that proliferate on Facebook. Last year Amazon alone blocked 200m fake reviews. Dharmesh Mehta, head of the company's customer trust team, said this avalanche of misinformation was harming consumers, who were being "deceived about what products they should or shouldn't be buying"."

"As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: "They don't want this product resold and competing against their new products, so they want it all destroyed." I'd expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain iFixit, tells me, these "must-shred" contracts are the "dirty secret" of the recycling industry. ("The recyclers are desperate for manufacturer contracts, so they'll do anything and keep their mouths shut," Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in the UK found Amazon was sending millions of new and returned items a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the practice.)"

"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."

"Do androids dream of electric betrayal? That's just one question looming over this cover of "Jolene," made by the musician Holly Herndon using her "deepfake" digital twin Holly+, built to replicate the artist's own singing voice using machine learning technology."