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"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."

"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."

"However, this relationship between social media use and political polarization seems to depend a lot on duration of exposure and does not appear in all the samples surveyed. Thus, recent studies exploring the effects of stopping Facebook and Instagram use failed to observe that social media noticeably polarize users' political opinions. Let us always remember that narratives pointing to threats on society enjoy a considerable competitive advantage on the market of ideas and conversations, due to their attractiveness to our minds. One should thus approach the question of the relationship between social media, and political hostility and polarisation, by avoiding the symmetrical pitfalls of naive optimism and collective panic."

"The greatest gains came when gaming met needs the kids couldn't meet in real life. Different games support different aspects of well-being depending on how they are designed."

"A new AI-infused classroom management tool with facial recognition capabilities has garnered attention recently with promises to take attendance, assess the emotional states of students, and monitor classes for distraction, boredom and confusion. But the technology and similar developments have raised numerous legal, ethical, and civil liberties questions similar to those surrounding campus safety surveillance programs and test proctoring programs widely adopted during the COVID pandemic."

"Teenagers in a remote Brazilian tribe have become hooked on pornography months after they were given high-speed internet access via Elon Musk's Starlink. The indigenous Marubo people, who for hundreds of years have existed in small huts along the Itui River in the Amazon, were connected to the billionaire's satellite network in September."

"Meeting your next significant other naturally is slowly becoming unheard of, especially amid a pandemic. Plus, with online apps like Bumble, Tinder, OK Cupid, Plenty of Fish, and Hinge gaining popularity, it's no wonder people are willing to give virtual dating a try. In fact, I bet most of your single friends are swiping right and left while you're reading this. I even gave it a try or two, but it never worked out where I found my Prince Charming. "

"The first social media babies are adults now. Some are pushing for laws to protect kids from their parents' oversharing"

"We demand a stop to addictive design features - Also known as the social slot machine. Ninety-five percent of teens in the US have or have access to a smartphone, while ninety percent have a desktop or laptop computer and eighty-three percent have a gaming console, a survey from the Pew Research Institute found. The data also found that roughly one in six teens describe their use of two platforms - YouTube and TikTok - as "almost constant.""

"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."

"Microsoft researchers said VALL-E 2 was capable of generating "accurate, natural speech in the exact voice of the original speaker, comparable to human performance," in a paper that appeared June 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. In other words, the new AI voice generator is convincing enough to be mistaken for a real person - at least, according to its creators."

"And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go? In the last decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and 750 youth centres shut down. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots music venues are closing every week. The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can't hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards. No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures - the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control."

"I started to feel that propaganda had fundamentally changed. The types of actors who could create it and spread it had shifted, and the impact it was having on our society was quite significant, but we weren't using the word. We were using words like "misinformation" or "disinformation", which seemed to be misdiagnoses of the problem. And so I wanted to write a book that asked, in this media ecosystem, what does propaganda look like?"

"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.""

"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."