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"Research suggests more than half of adolescents are on screens right before bedtime, and that can keep them from getting the sleep they need. Not only is poor sleep linked to all sorts of downsides, including poor mental health symptoms, poor performance in school and trouble regulating stress, Prinstein said, but "inconsistent sleep schedules are associated with changes in structural brain development in adolescent years. In other words, youths' preoccupation with technology and social media may deleteriously affect the size of their brains.""

"Commentary: Our emails are getting more impolite and that might be a problem Although some choose to dive into their content immediately, starting your emails with an opening greeting could raise the chances of them being read, says the Financial Times' Pilita Clark."

"In 2019, Genevieve (co-author of this article) and her husband applied for the same credit card. Despite having a slightly better credit score and the same income, expenses, and debt as her husband, the credit card company set her credit limit at almost half the amount. "

"Tan, however, has misgivings. He says: "AI is in a sense cool and fun in the beginning but then you realise it's actually dangerous. It can imitate people and make them do things on screen and then you can have a whole societal belief that those people are disgraced for whatever they did on screen and in reality it wasn't even them. It's just a ploy to wind people up. "You see it in warfare, which I think Russia tried with Ukraine. There was this use that had the Ukrainian president saying they were giving up and soldiers should put their weapons down. That was done with AI. A simple tool which doesn't look dangerous suddenly can be very dangerous because now you are affecting reality with it.""

"It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. "But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it-a broader impact on trust," he said. "Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it-well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself." Nyhan had a similar reaction. "There are genuine questions that are really important, but there's a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

"In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles-including some you really wouldn't want shared on the Internet. In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh. The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot's Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence."

"Such is the fallout from a surge in the manipulation of navigation signals - modern GPS warfare - that has played havoc with civilian smartphones, planes and vessels on three continents. So-called GPS jamming and spoofing have largely been the preserve of militaries over the past two decades, used to defend sensitive sites against drone or missile attacks or mask their own activities. But systematic interference by armed forces - particularly following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Israel's offensive against Hamas in Gaza - has caused widespread issues for civilian populations as well. The footprint of corrupted signals has become vast."

"The public is often supportive of the use of such tech: 59% of U.K. adults told a survey they "somewhat" or "strongly" support police use of facial recognition technology in public spaces, and a Pew Research study found 46% of U.S. adults said they thought it was a good idea for society. In China, one study found that 51% of respondents approved of facial recognition tech in the public sphere, while in India, 69% of people said in a 2023 report that they supported its use by the police. But while authorities generally pitch facial recognition as a tool to capture terrorists or wanted murderers, the technology has also emerged as a critical instrument in a very particular context: punishing protesters. "

""AI lowers the barriers to entry for creating content. You don't need coding skills or anything like that to generate these images. It is also symptomatic of far-right views going mainstream or being normalised," he said, adding that the far right appeared to have fewer moral concerns about AI imagery. Allchorn said more established political parties appeared warier of using AI in official campaigns: "Mainstream actors still have ethical concerns about the effectiveness, authenticity and reliability of these models that far-right or extremist actors are not beholden to.""

""People glamourise them types of things and the smallest thing can be escalated on social media," he said. "A fight can happen between two people and they can squash it [reach a truce], but because the video's out there on social media and it looks from a different perspective like one is losing, pride is going to be hurt so you might go out there and get some sort of revenge and let people know, you're not going to mess with me." It all created anxiety, explained St Clair-Hughes. "The fearmongering on social media puts you in a fight or flight state so when you leave the house now you are either on the front foot or on the back foot. So you step outside ready to do whatever you need to do … It's the subliminals - no one's telling you to pick up a knife and commit violence, it's just the more that you see it …""

""The problem is that we're really stuck in a digital monoculture, where decades of anti-competitive practices have created it so that just one system is responsible for so much of what we rely on from everything from airlines to hospitals to schools," Mir said. "One mistake that creates a big failure, it happens, it's an inevitability. But for it to have this sort of impact is a policy failure.""

"What do people really ask chatbots? It's a lot of sex and homework. AI chatbots are taking the world by storm. We analyzed thousands of conversations to see what people are really asking them and what topics are most discussed."

"We're deeply inspired by FPF, from its human, calm moderation model and design to its organic, sustainable growth and advertising model. We're awed by its incredible usefulness for services, connection, and disaster relief. There's a lot here that might be applicable to other local digital spaces. Ultimately, Front Porch Forum exemplifies the potential for social media to foster positive, engaged communities. It's a viable, real life model of a flourishing digital public space in use by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Now it's up to us to make it less of a rare phenomenon."

"Renée: What I find most alarming is that people have the ability to just create reality by making something trend, to reinforce over and over and over again these conspiracy theories. You do have this increasingly divergent set of realities where there's a deep conviction built up over many, many years of reinforcing the same tropes and stories. You can't just correct that with a fact check."

"Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a "dad's joke" on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. "The kids had a very good laugh," he says. "And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don't talk to others. "Scamming the scammers, if you like." The next day he called his team from the university's Cyber Security Hub in. There must be a better way than his "dad joke" method, he thought. And there had to be something smarter than a popular existing piece of technology - the Lennybot. Before Malcolm and Ibrahim, there was Lenny. Lenny is a doddery, old Australian man, keen for a rambling chat. He's achatbot, designed to troll telemarketers. With a thready voice, tinged with a slight whistle, Lenny repeats various phrases on loop. Each phrase kicks in after 1.5 seconds of silence, to mimic the rhythm of a conversation."

"With the release of artificial intelligence (AI) video generation products like Sora and Luma, we're on the verge of a flood of AI-generated video content, and policymakers, public figures and software engineers are already warning about a deluge of deepfakes. Now it seems that AI itself might be our best defense against AI fakery after an algorithm has identified telltale markers of AI videos with over 98% accuracy."

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.

The moral of that story is clear. The spreadsheet was a revolutionary technology when it first appeared in 1978, just as ChatGPT was in 2022. But now it's a routine, integral part of organisation life. The advent of AI "agents" built from GPT-like models looks like following a similar pattern. In turn, the organisations that have absorbed them will also evolve. And then the world may eventually rediscover that famous adage attributed to Marshall McLuhan's colleague John Culkin: "We shape our tools and then the tools shape us."