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"We've forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. We're forever "interrupting ourselves", as Lembke puts it, for a quick digital hit, meaning we rarely concentrate on taxing tasks for long or get into a creative flow. For many, the pandemic has exacerbated dependence on social media and other digital vices"

"Unrecord's appearance at the centre of gaming conversation raises another question: as game graphics improve, to the extent where you don't need millions of dollars and dozens of people to create games that look impressively realistic, how far do we go with it? Motorcycle racing game Ride 4 made waves recently with ultra-realistic gameplay footage of bikes zooming around rainy Northern Ireland; in that context, photorealism is a boon. But when games involve violence, as they often do, it becomes much more uncomfortable. I have suppressed mild disgust for years at the gratuitous neck-snapping or stabbing animations in most first-person shooters. How much worse would that instinctive ickiness be if the game and its characters looked more real?"

"Dr Kovanović believes this is a "pointless race to have", given the momentum of the technology and its potential positives. He says AI detection "misses the point". "I think it's much better to sink our effort into how we can use AI productively." He also argued the practice of using anti-plagiarism software to score university students on how likely it was their work was written by AI was causing unnecessary stress. "It's hard to trust that score," he said."

"Scientists are fascinated by ant colonies because they can form collectives called "superorganisms" that function as single organisms do. Investigation into how ants behave has revealed more about how such group behavior arises, and some researchers are using that knowledge to help build smarter robot swarms, said Simon Garnier, a scientist who studies animal behavior at the New Jersey Institute of Technology."

"Similarly to how voice cloning raises fears about the consequences of its potential misuse, increasingly many people worry that the proliferation of AI technology will put professionals' livelihoods at risk. At Eleven, we see a future in which voice actors are able to license their voices to train speech models for specific use, in exchange for fees. Clients and studios will still gladly feature professional voice talent in their projects and using AI will simply contribute to faster turnaround times and greater freedom to experiment and establish direction in early development. The technology will change how spoken audio is designed and recorded but the fact that voice actors no longer need to be physically present for every session really gives them the freedom to be involved in more projects at any one time, as well as to truly immortalize their voices."

"There's a similar problem in artificial intelligence: The people who develop AI are increasingly having problems explaining how it works and determining why it has the outputs it has. Deep neural networks (DNN)-made up of layers and layers of processing systems trained on human-created data to mimic the neural networks of our brains-often seem to mirror not just human intelligence but also human inexplicability."

"The post sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of fine-tuning an AI on the work of a specific living artist, even as new fine-tuned models are posted daily. The most-upvoted comment asked, "Whether it's legal or not, how do you think this artist feels now that thousands of people can now copy her style of works almost exactly?""

"Generational differences in learning techniques are apparent in how people of different ages approach technology. It has been said that we, the Net Generation, are closer to our grandparents-the Greatest Generation-in our work ethic and optimism about the future than to our parents' generation. But how we approach problems is totally different."

"How Ukraine turns cheap tablets into lethal weapons Army SOS, an activist-led NGO, converts Android-based tablets into smart units with automated precision guidance."

"As if robocalling wasn't already enough of a problem, the advent of easily accessible, realistic AI-powered writing and synthetic voice could supercharge the practice. The FCC aims to preempt this by looking into how generated robocalls might fit under existing consumer protections. A Notice of Inquiry has been proposed by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel to be voted on at the agency's next meeting. If the vote succeeds (as it is almost certain to), the FCC would formally look into how the Telephone Consumer Protection Act empowers them to act against scammers and spammers using AI technology. But Rosenworcel was also careful to acknowledge that AI represents a potentially powerful tool for accessibility and responsiveness in phone-based interactions. "While we are aware of the challenges AI can present, there is also significant potential to use this technology to benefit communications networks and their customers-including in the fight against junk robocalls and robotexts. We need to address these opportunities and risks thoughtfully, and the effort we are launching today will help us gain more insight on both fronts," she said in a statement."

"And Israeli company Optimove is helping. It normally gathers customer data to create targeted online ads, but as a service to gambling companies it has trained its AI to flag the online players who are most at risk.  It analyzes the behavior patterns characteristic of gambling addicts, which include the hours of the day and night when they place bets, the time they spend on the betting site, and how much they keep on playing to 'chase their losses'."

"If you were doubting how important recommender systems are to social media companies, a lawsuit filed last week against Meta makes it crystal clear. At the heart of this legal battle is a fundamental question: Shouldn't users have the power to decide what they do and don't see online? The lawsuit filed by Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of Professor Ethan Zuckerman directly challenges how social media feeds are curated. Professor Zuckerman's proposed browser extension, 'Unfollow Everything 2.0,' would enable Facebook users to disengage from the algorithmically driven content that dominates their feeds, by allowing them to unfollow friends, pages and groups en masse, thus resetting their digital interactions on their terms."

"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"

"But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally - and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days. However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy - many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion."

"It's an interesting question. I'm almost not sure how to answer it, because there is no thinking happening on the part of an LLM. A large language model takes the prompts and the text that you give it and tries to come up with something that is responsive and useful in relation to that text. And what's interesting is that certain people - I'm thinking of Mark Andreessen most prominently - have talked about how amazing this is conceptually from an education perspective, because with LLMs you will have this infinitely patient teacher. But that's actually not what you want from a teacher. You want, in some sense, an impatient teacher who's going to push your thinking, who's going to try to understand what you're bringing to any task or educational experience, lift up the strengths that you have, and then work on building your knowledge in areas where you don't yet have it. I don't think LLMs are capable of doing any of that. As you say, there's no real thinking going on. It's just a prediction machine. There's an interaction, I guess, but it's an illusion. Is that the word you would use? Yes. It's the illusion of a conversation. "

"How China's internet police went from targeting bloggers to their followers In recent months, followers of influential liberal bloggers have been interviewed by police as China widens its net of online surveillance"

"The tablets are scheduled to be introduced next year, and by 2028, teachers are supposed to be using these AI textbooks for all subjects except music, art, physical education and ethics. The government hasn't shared many details about how it will all work, except that the material is supposed to be customized for different speeds of learning, with teachers using dashboards to monitor how students are doing. In response, more than 50,000 parents have signed a petition demanding that the government focus less on new tech and more on students' overall well-being: "We, as parents, are already encountering many issues at unprecedented levels arising from [our children's] exposure to digital devices." Lee Sun-youn, a mother of two, told FT, "I am worried that too much usage of digital devices could negatively affect their brain development, concentration span and ability to solve problems - they already use smartphones and tablets too much.""

"When "I can has cheezburger?" became one of the first internet memes to blow our minds, it's unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up. But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is "dark data", meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family - from "All your base are belong to us", through Ryan Gosling saying "Hey Girl", to Tim Walz with a piglet - are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacentres will account for just under 6% of the UK's total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis. Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced."

"'Profiting from misery': how TikTok makes money from child begging livestreams Exploitation fears as people in extreme poverty perform stunts and beg for virtual gifts"

"In April, game developer Stamina Zero achieved what should have been a marketing slam-dunk: the launch trailer for the studio's game Little Droid was published on PlayStation's official YouTube channel. The response was a surprise for the developer. The game looks interesting, people wrote in the comments, but was "ruined" by AI art. But the game's cover art, used as the thumbnail for the YouTube video, was in fact made by a real person, according to developer Lana Ro. "We know the artist, we've seen her work, so such a negative reaction was unexpected for us, and at first we didn't know how to respond or how to feel," Ro said. "We were confused.""