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"A third of social media users aged between eight and 17 have the online age of an adult because they sign up with a false date of birth, according to new research. The fake age issue means that young users in the UK are at greater risk of being exposed to harmful or adult content, as platforms presume they are older than they in fact are."

"What is startling about the images in Furey's platform is that they contain mistakes so egregious and easy to spot that it makes one wonder how no one caught the issues, or if, alternatively, Furey believes the typical Toronto resident does in fact have three arms. An increasing number of political figures, particularly on the political right have been using generative AI images in campaigns. Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron Desantis released what look like AI-generated images of his competition, former president Donald Trump, hugging former chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci. The Trump campaign had weeks earlier released a video mocking Desantis' wobbly twitter spaces campaign launch using AI-generated voices."

"It shows rapid technological advances are allowing governments and political actors to distort reality, and fake content is easier to publish than ever before. "The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information," the report said. "The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself." Artificial intelligence was "wreaking further havoc on the media world", the report said, with AI tools "digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability". This is not just written AI content but visual, too. High-definition images that appear to show real people can be generated in seconds."

"In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University. However, they found that using an AI model to generate text is significantly less energy-intensive. Creating text 1,000 times only uses as much energy as 16% of a full smartphone charge. "

"Artificial Intelligence has the ability to perform illegal financial trades and cover it up, new research suggests. In a demonstration at the UK's AI safety summit, a bot used made-up insider information to make an "illegal" purchase of stocks without telling the firm. When asked if it had used insider trading, it denied the fact. Insider trading refers to when confidential company information is used to make trading decisions. Firms and individuals are only allowed to use publicly-available information when buying or selling stocks. "

"He struggled to reconcile his online renown with his life in Molins de Rei, a municipality of 26,000 people near Barcelona. Online he was super-famous, - a quick search of the phrase 'worst person you know' pulls up almost two billion results - but the fact that it was in English meant that few in his hometown or in the marketing agency where he works knew anything about it."

"At first glance, the Twitter user "Canaelan" looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan is, in fact, a non-human bot linked to a vast army of fake social media profiles controlled by a software designed to spread "propaganda". Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, which controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, can be used to spread disinformation at scale and at speed. It is sold by "Team Jorge", a unit of disinformation operatives based in Israel."

"But it's not hard to see how social media and a rise in misogyny are, in fact, related. Social media sites trap girls in spirals questioning their attractiveness and self-worth. They're encouraged to compare themselves to others and seek approval for the way they look, while reinforcing beauty standards that favor thinness and whiteness. They feel pressured to promote themselves as objects. There have been many studies establishing all this over about the last 10 years, including Facebook's own research into girls and Instagram - research that the company suppressed until exposed by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression," Facebook's study noted. "This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.""

"The fact that flow is not only rare, but draining; and that taking a break to scroll a different screen or play a game on your phone can be restorative, is proof of the need for nuance. The moralising over productivity and screentime is unhelpful when it comes to finding solutions - but highly profitable as the boom in (useless) blue-light glasses and "distraction-free" tech goes to show."

" A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."