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"In recent months, people have shared digitally altered sexual images of the new deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and celebrities including Taylor Swift. But you don't need to be famous to appear in one of these images or videos - the technology is readily accessible, and can easily be used by ex-partners or strangers to humiliate and degrade. As a tech luddite, I was still under the impression that one needed some digital skills to commit this kind of abuse. Not so. You can simply take someone's image, put it into a "nudify" app, and the app's AI will generate a fake nude picture. "It's quick and easy to create these images, even for anyone with absolutely no technical skills," Jake Moore, an adviser at a cybersecurity firm, told me."

"Seeing an opportunity, Franklin decided to take advantage. On 9 July, the company said that it would begin to support digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like any other employee. "Today Lattice is making AI history," Franklin pronounced. "We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access and even a manager. Just as any person would be." The pushback was swift - and, in many cases, brutal, particularly on LinkedIn, which is generally not known for its savage engagement like X (formerly known as Twitter). "This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company," said Sawyer Middeleer, an executive at a firm that uses AI to help with sales research, on LinkedIn. "Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it implies that you view humans simply as 'resources' to be optimized and measured against machines. It's the exact opposite of a work environment designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.""

""It's an attack where someone has sent an AI generated image or a fake image and they have said if you don't send me money or don't send me another nude, I will then share this with other people," he said. In one case heard by a Childline counsellor, a 15-year-old girl said a stranger had made a "really convincing" fake nude of her that used her face and bedroom, having been apparently taken from their Instagram account. Childline said the "nude" images were typically made of the victim's face transposed on to someone else's body. In another apparent AI case, a 14-year-old boy sent some pictures of his face to a girl he had met online and they were used to make a deepfake pornography video. "This person has used some sort of deepfake AI thing to make a porn video with my face on it. Now they're demanding money from me, and they said if I don't pay my life will be over. I know it's not me in the video, but it looks so real," the boy told Childline."

"This election is the first time we face the danger of post-ChatGPT AI in a high-stakes sociopolitical scenario. That is new. Bots pass the Turing test (which means they write and speak indistinguishably from real people). They're also more persuasive. Image and video generators can make realistic faces, which people use mostly to make jokes but also to plant doubt. We will eventually adapt to perception-altering algorithms but for now, they're a big unsolved problem. Here are five ways the bad guys can weaponize AI to influence the US democratic election."

"Writing in the journal Science, Summerfield and colleagues from Google DeepMind report how they built the "Habermas Machine" - an AI system named after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The system works by taking written views of individuals within a group and using them to generate a set of group statements designed to be acceptable to all. Group members can then rate these statements, a process that not only trains the system but allows the statement with the greatest endorsement to be selected."

"Last week we reported how Facebook and Instagram's algorithms are luring young men into the Manosphere. This week, we explore what happens when TikTok's algorithm is unleashed on a blank account in the absence of any interactions such as liking or commenting. In April, Guardian Australia set up a new TikTok account on a completely blank smartphone linked to a new, unused email address. A John Doe profile was set up as a generic 24-year-old male. We scrolled through the feed every couple of weeks."

"The research, conducted at Vision and AI Lab of the Department of Computational and Data Sciences, offers a novel approach to mitigating bias in popular image-generative models without the need for additional data or model retraining."

"Perplexity then sent this knockoff story to its subscribers via a mobile push notification. It created an AI-generated podcast using the same (Forbes) reporting - without any credit to Forbes, and that became a YouTube video that outranks all Forbes content on this topic within Google search. Perplexity had taken our work, without our permission, and republished it across multiple platforms - web, video, mobile - as though it were itself a media outlet. As we dug, we found a similar rip-off of a second story at Forbes. And other stolen scoops - all the information, negligible citation - from Bloomberg and CNBC."

"huge public corporations launch products that are known to "hallucinate" "

In today's interconnected digital world, AI plays a pivotal role in both spreading and combating misinformation. It is revolutionizing the way information is created and disseminated, particularly in discussions about migration. On one side, generative AI (genAI) technologies can be weaponized to produce and spread disinformation rapidly. False statistics, sensational narratives and deep-seated stereotypes can take root in public discourse, influencing perceptions and policies.

"Her intervention emerged after Sir Paul McCartney became the latest star to back calls for laws to stop mass copyright theft by generative AI companies, warning the technology "could just take over". Bush, who shot to fame with Wuthering Heights in 1978 but whose last album was released in 2011, gave a rare interview this year in which she said she was "very keen" to make a new album, saying: "I've got lots of ideas … it's been a long time.""

"Mats Steen's double life was first explored in 2019 by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and then in a BBC News article, which inspired Norwegian film-maker Benjamin Ree to tell the story as a documentary. "I think his story asks some questions that are really relevant today," he says. "Is it possible to become friends with someone you've never met? Is it possible to experience love with somebody you've never met? And how close a friendship can you have with someone you've never spoken to, just written to? And at the same time, I think it says something about the generational gap, about my generation's fascination for gaming - I'm 35 years old - and being in a virtual world. Mats really came of age within that game. Also, both Mats's friends and family have told me that towards the end of his life, he really wanted to have mattered. He seemed to have lived such a short life, but he wanted to be remembered.""

Is it possible there are modes of attention that a younger generation is developing that might be difficult for those of us who are older to value, but which bring new types of benefit? What of the rapid, quick-fire, written exchanges of instant messaging? The art of the pithy, witty expression condensed into 140 or 280 characters? What of the dexterity and reflex-training physical and mental movement of the video game, or the socially dispersed forms of collective attention that are possible in online environments?

"That comment sparked interest and outrage, raising concerns that the kind of AI-generated "slop" that's prominent on Facebook would soon come straight from Meta and disrupt the core utility of social media - fostering human-to-human connection. As users began to sniff out some of Meta's AI accounts this week, the backlash grew, in part because of the way the AI accounts disingenuously described themselves as actual people with racial and sexual identities."

"Despite all the industry hype and genuine advances, generative AI models are still prone to odd, inexplicable, and downright worrisome quirks. There's also a growing body of research suggesting that the overall performance of many large language models (LLMs) may degrade over time. According to recent evidence, the industry's newer reasoning models may already possess the ability to manipulate and circumvent their human programmers' goals. Some AI will even attempt to cheat their way out of losing in games of chess. This poor sportsmanship is documented in a preprint study from Palisade Research, an organization focused on risk assessments of emerging AI systems."

""All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?" Wales said. As AI spreads across society and enters the courtroom, the US judicial conference advisory committee has announced that it will begin seeking public comment as part of determining how to regulate the use of AI-generated evidence at trial."

"Brands such as fintech company Ramp, jobs search site Indeed and Pernod Ricard-owned Scottish whisky maker Chivas Brothers have adopted the software. They are hoping to reach millions of users who regularly use generative AI products as a new method to search for information online - a shift that poses a long-term threat for Google's main business. "This is about much more than just getting your website indexed in their results. This is about recognising large language models as the ultimate influencer," said Jack Smyth, partner at marketing technology group Brandtech, which has created its own interface for brands. "

"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."

"Concerns about giving voice to the dead do not apply to AI guest speakers who are someone with a specific job, an animal, an object, or a concept such as the Water Cycle. But is it sound pedagogy? Let's consider what teachers can learn about students and AI chatbots from the Eliza Effect. The Eliza Effect is the tendency to project human characteristics onto computers that generate text. Its name comes from Eliza, a therapist chatbot computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created in the 1960s. Weizenbaum named the chatbot after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion."

"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."