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"It's sometime in the near future. Your beloved father, who suffered from Alzheimer's for years, has died. Everyone in the family feels physically and emotionally exhausted from his long decline. Your brother raises the idea of remembering Dad at his best through a startup "digital immortality" program called 4evru. He promises to take care of the details and get the data for Dad ready. After the initial suggestion, you forget about it until today, when 4evru emails arrive to say that your father's bot is available for use. After some trepidation, you click the link and create an account. You slide on the somewhat unwieldy VR headset and choose the augmented-reality mode. The familiar walls of your bedroom briefly flicker in front of you."

"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. "

"The specific engineering of ChatGPT has made it quite compelling. But ultimately (at least until it can use outside tools) ChatGPT is "merely" pulling out some "coherent thread of text" from the "statistics of conventional wisdom" that it's accumulated. But it's amazing how human-like the results are. And as I've discussed, this suggests something that's at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more "law like" in their structure than we thought. ChatGPT has implicitly discovered it. But we can potentially explicitly expose it, with semantic grammar, computational language, etc."

"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 question of why AI generates fake academic papers relates to how large language models work: they are probabilistic, in that they map the probability over sequences of words. As Dr David Smerdon of the University of Queensland puts it: "Given the start of a sentence, it will try to guess the most likely words to come next.""

"A Belgian man recently died by suicide after chatting with an AI chatbot on an app called Chai, Belgian outlet La Libre reported. The incident raises the issue of how businesses and governments can better regulate and mitigate the risks of AI, especially when it comes to mental health. The app's chatbot encouraged the user to kill himself, according to statements by the man's widow and chat logs she supplied to the outlet. When Motherboard tried the app, which runs on a bespoke AI language model based on an open-source GPT-4 alternative that was fine-tuned by Chai, it provided us with different methods of suicide with very little prompting. "

"The model is AI-generated, a digital rendering of a human being that will start appearing on Levi's e-commerce website later this year. The brand teamed with LaLaLand.ai, a digital studio that makes customized AI models for companies like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, to dream up this avatar. Amy Gershkoff Bolles, Levi's global head of digital and emerging technology strategy, announced the model's debut at a Business of Fashion event in March. AI models will not completely replace the humans, she said, but will serve as a "supplement" intended to aid in the brand's representation of various sizes, skin tones and ages."

"All of this probably means I should be worried about recent trends in artificial intelligence, which is encroaching on voice-over work in a manner similar to how it threatens the labour of visual artists and writers-both financially and ethically. The creep is only just beginning, with dubbing companies training software to replace human actors and tech companies introducing digital audiobook narration. But AI poses a threat to work opportunities across the board by giving producers the tools to recreate their favourite voices on demand, without the performer's knowledge or consent and without additional compensation. It's clear that AI will transform the arts sector, and the voice-over industry offers an early, unsettling model for what this future may look like."

""As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious," said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research. Park was prompted to investigate after Meta, which owns Facebook, developed a program called Cicero that performed in the top 10% of human players at the world conquest strategy game Diplomacy. Meta stated that Cicero had been trained to be "largely honest and helpful" and to "never intentionally backstab" its human allies."

""What a bunch of malarkey." That's what thousands of New Hampshire voters heard last month when they received a robocall purporting to be from President Biden. The voice on the other end sounded like the president, and the catchphrase was his. But the message that Democrats shouldn't vote in the upcoming primary election didn't make sense. "Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday," the voice said."

"Doctors' appointments, job applications, personal banking, key services and more are today mostly managed online. While the UK government details its plans for a digital future to transform public services, one in seven Britons are forced to live without the internet. This film is voiced by three individuals experiencing digital exclusion, revealing how varied and complex the repercussions can be. Through enacted scenes from their lives, it makes visible the expanding digital divide - an issue too often unseen or ignored by policy makers, businesses and society at large. "

"While GPT-4o's flirtatiousness was glossed over by a lot of male-authored articles about the release, Parmy Olson addressed it head-on in a piece for Bloomberg headlined Making ChatGPT 'Sexy' Might Not End Well for Humans. "What are the social and psychological consequences of regularly speaking to a flirty, fun and ultimately agreeable artificial voice on your phone, and then encountering a very different dynamic with men and women in real life?" Olson asks."

"How China is using AI news anchors to deliver its propaganda News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible"

"Parents Of Kids 13 And Under Are Sharing How Their Kids Are Being Affected By The Viral "Sephora Kids" Trend"

"How to summarise, then, the personality changes that the internet brings out in us? Tribalism, bullying, the wildfire spread of "crazes", "instant gratification culture", the triumph of the temper tantrum: future anthropologists might observe that the behaviour of adults online very much resembles that of children offline. I am often amazed at the rational common sense of those who don't bother with social media, when asked about some topic tearing the internet apart. Online, there is a level of adult sophistication that simply seems beyond us. Some call the internet a town square, some a wild west. In fact, it's a playground."

""This is mega!" said Daisy Greenwell from the Smartphone-Free Childhood campaign. "We are absolutely thrilled and we believe it's going to have a domino effect." She was reacting to news that St Albans in Hertfordshire is attempting to become the first UK city to go smartphone-free for all children under 14. Before St Albans, it was Greystones in Ireland last year, where parents banded together to collectively tell their children they could not have a smartphone until secondary school. Greenwell believes others will now take similar steps."

" Virtual reality games helping UK's deaf children to understand speech Scientists have found that immersing kids in computer games can train their brains to localise sounds better Robin McKie Science Editor Sat 25 May 2024 13.00 BST Share Scientists have recruited an unusual ally in their efforts to help children overcome profound deafness. They are using computer games to boost the children's ability to localise sounds and understand speech. The project is known as Bears - for Both Ears - and it is aimed at youngsters who have been given twin cochlea implants because they were born with little or no hearing. "These are children who are profoundly deaf," said audio engineer Lorenzo Picinali, a scientist on the project from Imperial College London. "They require major interventions to restore their hearing and we have found that computer games can make these much more effective.""

"That is, in a way, Orion's most powerful and dangerous feature: they're so normal that people will want to wear them; they're so normal that people won't notice them. On the other hand, Meta has created a new gadget that, like every other before, can be enhanced or modified for other purposes, for better or worse. Should Meta stop building tech because a small number of people will use it for evil? If they had served this use case on a silver platter then yes, they should be held accountable. They didn't. Sure, Zuck's no friend, but he's not the one sneaking into your privacy."

"A 24-hour news channel startup based in southern California comes with a twist: all of the reporters and production are AI-generated. CBC's Jean-François Bélanger explores what Channel 1 is promising and why some are concerned about what it could mean for the news industry."