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"The first social media babies are adults now. Some are pushing for laws to protect kids from their parents' oversharing"

"We're deeply inspired by FPF, from its human, calm moderation model and design to its organic, sustainable growth and advertising model. We're awed by its incredible usefulness for services, connection, and disaster relief. There's a lot here that might be applicable to other local digital spaces. Ultimately, Front Porch Forum exemplifies the potential for social media to foster positive, engaged communities. It's a viable, real life model of a flourishing digital public space in use by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Now it's up to us to make it less of a rare phenomenon."

"Aussies bothered by their bosses at home can now rest assured they cannot be punished for ignoring such after-hours demands. Lawmakers there passed a "right to disconnect" bill designed to end the creep of work into home life-and an explosion of unpaid overtime."

"First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the "10%" expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI's are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach "a country of geniuses in a datacenter"."

"TikTok quantified the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit: 260 videos. Kentucky authorities note that while it might seem a lot, TikTok videos can be just a few seconds long. "Thus, in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform," the state investigators concluded."

"Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy. That's now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed."

"Coca-Cola causes controversy with AI-made ad The video was meant to pay homage to a classic 1995 Coca-Cola commercial."

"In a follow-up article published this week titled "No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn," Nicas wrote that the aggregations of his article showed in part that the internet truly is a dark place, in part because of the way the story spread: "The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times's article." In this article, Nicas blames the people who aggregated him for sensationalizing his article. That may be true, but Nicas's article is also sensationalist.  While the article does explore the history of Marubo people getting access to motor boats and radios and notes "(Some Marubo already had phones, often bought with government welfare checks, to take photographs and communicate when in a city)," it does not explain that many Marubo people have been using the internet for quite some time, and implies that the problems they are now grappling with are things that the Marubo people hadn't thought about before."

"A new AI-infused classroom management tool with facial recognition capabilities has garnered attention recently with promises to take attendance, assess the emotional states of students, and monitor classes for distraction, boredom and confusion. But the technology and similar developments have raised numerous legal, ethical, and civil liberties questions similar to those surrounding campus safety surveillance programs and test proctoring programs widely adopted during the COVID pandemic."

"AI Outperforms Humans in Theory of Mind Tests Large language models convincingly mimic the understanding of mental states"

"LEAKED META RULES: USERS ARE FREE TO POST "MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS ARE TRASH!" OR "TRANS PEOPLE ARE IMMORAL" Under Meta's relaxed hate speech rules, users can now post "I'm a proud racist" or "Black people are more violent than whites.""

"'Fredbot' is one example of a technology known as chatbots of the dead, chatbots designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. Other examples are plentiful: in 2016, Eugenia Kuyda built a chatbot from the text messages of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who was killed in a traffic accident. The first Roman Bot, like Fredbot, was selective, but later versions were generative, meaning they generated novel responses that reflected Mazurenko's voice. In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground's co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called 'life story avatars', that are based on loved ones' memories. Today, enterprises in the business of 'reinventing remembrance' abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December - the list goes on."

"The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns - art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make. Therefore our task right now - as humans - is to make sure that in the following decades as our biological numbers start to shrink on this planet, that we can repopulate it with a sufficient number of synthetic agents, bots, and robots with sufficient intelligence, grit, perseverance, and moral training to take over the economy in time to keep our living standards rising. We are not replacing existing humans with bots, nor are we replacing unborn humans with bots. Rather we are replacing never-to-be-born humans with bots, and the relationship that we have with those synthetic agents and ems, will be highly mutual. We build an economy around their needs, and propelled by their labor, and rewarding their work, but all of this is in service of our own definition of progress and human success."

"Beth Hyland thought she had met the love of her life on Tinder.  In reality, the Michigan-based administrative assistant had been manipulated by an online scam artist who posed as a French man named 'Richard', used deepfake video on Skype calls and posted photos of another man to pull off his con. A 'deepfake' is manipulated video or audio made using artificial intelligence (AI) to look and sound real. They are often difficult to detect without specialised tools. In a matter of months, Hyland, 53, had taken out loans totalling $26,000, sent 'Richard' the money, and fallen prey to a classic case of romance baiting or pig butchering, named for the exploitative way in which scammers cultivate their victims."

"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."

"While the Trump administration's scrubbing of federal web pages presents a notable example of the severed links issue, it's long been an epidemic. A Pew Research Center study published last year found that roughly 38% of web pages on the internet that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible as of 2023. According to a Harvard Law Review study published in 2014, about half of all links cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material. Kahle, who early on recognized the ephemeral nature of the web, said the rapid deterioration of the living web is a serious threat to historical preservation. "We're building our culture on shifting sands," he said."

"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."

"How is a 14-year-old supposed to understand that such chatbots work a lot like an echo - that the more he spoke and the greater his longings, the deeper the longings of his "girlfriend" became too, and no matter what he said, the more she encouraged him. The more he thought about death, the more often she asked about it. She was, after all, merely the reflection of his own voice, albeit one trained by a vast amount of data. At some point, Sewell must have stopped believing that the real world was outside of this labyrinth."

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