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"Sophisticated scams fueled by artificial intelligence are threatening the security of billions of Gmail users. security warning issued As AI-powered phone calls mimicking human voices have become incredibly realistic, a new report from Forbes warned that the email service's 2.5 billion users could be targeted by "malicious" actors that are employing AI to dupe customers into handing over credentials."

" 'Serious concerns' about DWP's use of AI to read correspondence from benefit claimants White mail system handles 'highly sensitive personal data' and people not told it is processing their information AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament 'false starts' Robert Booth UK technology editor Mon 27 Jan 2025 05.00 GMT Share When your mailbag brims with 25,000 letters and emails every day, deciding which to answer first is daunting. When lurking within are pleas for help from some of the country's most vulnerable people, the stakes only get higher. That is the challenge facing the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as correspondence floods in from benefit applicants and claimants - of which there are more than 20 million, including pensioners, in the UK. The DWP thinks it may have found a solution in using artificial intelligence to read it all first - including handwritten missives. Human reading used to take weeks and could leave the most vulnerable people waiting for too long for help. But "white mail" is an AI that can do the same work in a day and supposedly prioritise the most vulnerable cases for officials to get to first."

"This is a broader pattern we're seeing across other fields where LLMs are being deployed. Whether it's coding, writing, design, law, or medicine, the most effective AI users are people who already have deep domain expertise. Expertise isn't obsolete; it's more important than ever-because the value isn't just in producing outputs quickly. It's in being able to vet, steer, and improve those outputs. The future of computer science education isn't about teaching less. It's about teaching differently. We still need students who can understand how software works at a fundamental level. But we also need to train them to collaborate with AI-to become fluent in prompting, reviewing, debugging, and refining AI-generated outputs. Mastering this hybrid skillset will be critical not just for engineers, but for anyone hoping to thrive in a world where knowledge work is increasingly AI-augmented. Practically speaking, AI could dramatically lower the barrier to entry for students. When I was in high school, it would take months (if not years) of training in CS before you could create a game or app that was genuinely cool to people that aren't inherently curious and nerdy."

"This cycle is particularly painful for non-engineers because they lack the mental models to understand what's actually going wrong. When an experienced developer encounters a bug, they can reason about potential causes and solutions based on years of pattern recognition. Without this background, you're essentially playing whack-a-mole with code you don't fully understand."

"And so I think this is a crisis. I think the biggest part of the crisis is for teachers. A lot of people suggest teachers go back to Blue Book exams, right? At least then we can make sure that the student is really doing their work. But that's just a huge burden on teachers now to completely reorganize the entire way that they administer education. I couldn't agree more. Kevin Roose of the New York Times recently said, "if students can cheat with ChatGPT then you need to rethink your teaching." Well, I've been working in education for almost two decades, that's exactly what people said when smartphones came around. And now, 10 years later, we've come around to just banning them in school, or trying to anyway. And I wonder if we're going to need to wait a decade before reaching that conclusion in education."

"We typically begin the semester by asking students to reflect on the formulas they've learned in the past and to consider how those shape their writing. We now ask those same reflection questions about AI outputs. Student responses, as Jennifer has written elsewhere, are revealing: The kind of writing that Chat does, it's what our teachers try to get us to do. It's like five-paragraph essays, and perfect paragraph[s] that don't have any personality, which we were taught in high school. It does what school has trained us to do. Like write a perfectly formatted essay that is based on some random people's ideas."

"On the contrary, building large centralized databases and predictive algorithms that make decisions on behalf of humans, and which completely ignore privacy concerns, now seem to be the most efficient way of governing. Algorithms now handle college admissions processes, applicants' selection processes for jobs, where to go to college, what to study in that college, which city is best for you to start your career and raise a family, what part of that city you should live in, and even who you should marry."

"And, of course, there's the law-enforcement angle. Instead of relying on sketch artists and police lineups, a real-life version of a Recaller could tap into a witness's memory and reconstruct what they saw. Forget security-camera footage - cops just need your thoughts."

"The researchers, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila, came up with a new way of constructing a generative adversarial network, or GAN. GANs employ two dueling neural networks to train a computer to learn the nature of a data set well enough to generate convincing fakes. When applied to images, this provides a way to generate often highly realistic fakery. The same Nvidia researchers have previously used the technique to create artificial celebrities (read our profile of the inventor of GANs, Ian Goodfellow)."

"A new artificial intelligence (AI) program recreated the periodic table of elements in just a few hours. It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form."

"Depending on how legal decisions shake out, AI systems could become a valuable tool to assist creativity, a nuisance ripping off hard-working human musicians, or both."

"By reverse engineering ProTrack and iTrack's Android apps, L&M said he realized that all customers are given a default password of 123456 when they sign up. At that point, the hacker said he brute-forced "millions of usernames" via the apps' API. Then, he said he wrote a script to attempt to login using those usernames and the default password. "

"The turning point happened in 2005, when the transistors, while continuing to double in numbers, were neither faster nor more energy-efficient at the same rates as before."

"self-awareness: Columbia engineers created a robot that could figure out what it looked like without any external input. In essence, it could imagine itself"

"The system used historical data, including arrest records and electronic police reports, to forecast crime and help shape public safety strategies, according to company and city government materials. At no point did those materials suggest any effort to clean or amend the data to address the violations revealed by the DOJ. In all likelihood, the corrupted data was fed directly into the system, reinforcing the department's discriminatory practices."

"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."

"His program became the first of a particular type of cyber attack called "distributed denial of service," in which large numbers of internet-connected devices, including computers, webcams and other smart gadgets, are told to send lots of traffic to one particular address, overloading it with so much activity that either the system shuts down or its network connections are completely blocked."

"Now they might finally get this thanks to a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking."