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"Artificial intelligence could bring to life lost texts, from imperial decrees to the poems of Sappho, researchers have revealed, after developing a system that can fill in the gaps in ancient Greek inscriptions and pinpoint when and where they are from."

"Our reliance on their information is now a matter of life and death. Misinformation online has real-world consequences. In the developing world, a hoax claimed India had banned coronavirus social posts, and in the US, 13 percent of people thought coronavirus was a hoax during the critical weeks where earlier notification to shelter-in-place would have saved thousands of lives. Tech platforms have an ability through their persuasive techniques and microtargeting to influence the behavior of society in ways traditional media can't. "

"It comes as a Guardian investigation reveals the human stories behind scams that originate on Meta's platforms, with a nationwide estimate released this week predicting the tech firm's failure to stamp out fraud will cost UK households £250m during 2023. With someone in the UK said to fall victim to a purchase scam starting on either Facebook or Instagram every seven minutes, the Guardian asked people who had been defrauded on these sites as well as its WhatsApp platform to get in touch. One Facebook user told us she was defrauded of her life savings and got pulled into debt, losing a total of £70,000, after being duped by an investment scam. While some people lost large amounts of money, a stream of unsuspecting online shoppers reported being conned out of smaller amounts when they placed orders with bogus online shops advertised on Facebook and Instagram."

"In a Copenhagen suburb, a fifth-grade classroom is having its weekly cake-eating session, a common tradition in Danish public schools. While the children are eating chocolate cake, the teacher pulls up an infographic on a whiteboard: a bar chart generated by a digital platform that collects data on how they've been feeling. Organized to display the classroom's weekly "mood landscape," the data shows that the class averaged a mood of 4.4 out of 5, and the children rated their family life highly. "That's great!" the teacher exclaims, raising two thumbs up in the air. She then moves to an infographic on sleep hygiene. Here the data shows the students struggling, and the teacher invites them to think of ways to improve their sleeping habits. After briefly talking among themselves, the children suggest "less screen time at night," "meditation before sleep," and "having a hot bath." They collectively make a commitment to implement these strategies. At next week's cake time, they will be asked whether or not they followed through."

"After lunch at a friend's house, his host motioned to him to observe his 11-year-old son, who "walked to the couch and lay on his side. With his arm extended in front of him cradling his phone, he… went vacant. For the next hour, he was comatose. No signs of life other than his open eyes and an occasional finger swipe. 'We have to make him stop, pull him out, every time,' his dad said. My head filled with images of opium dens in China. Something about the stillness, the lying on his side." There are two insights to be derived from this domestic scene. The first is that the addictive properties of social media have been ratcheted up a further notch. In metaphorical terms, if Instagram and YouTube dispense marijuana, then TikTok provides "digital crack cocaine", as Forbes magazine once colourfully expressed it."

"So what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we aren't as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? Are we so reliant on smartphones that they will ultimately change how our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just occasionally miss stuff when we don't remember the reminders?"

"In China, children are allowed to play for only one hour per day, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. But many gamers around the world say that their playing helps their mental health. Mike Dailly, who created Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, said the benefits were varied. "I'm not sure it's something that's measurable with a single 'well-being' state," he said. "As is everything in life, it's a balance. "Spend 24 hours a day playing, that's not good - but spend 24 hours a day eating or working out, that is also not good.""

"What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cellphone location technologies used by police is that it follows the devices through their advertising IDs, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the name of the phone's user, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police establish pattern-of-life analyses."

"Some experts see platforms like Appen as a new form of data colonialism, says Saiph Savage, director of the Civic AI lab at Northeastern University. "Workers in Latin America are labeling images, and those labeled images are going to feed into AI that will be used in the Global North," she says. "While it might be creating new types of jobs, it's not completely clear how fulfilling these types of jobs are for the workers in the region." Due to the ever moving goal posts of AI, workers are in a constant race against the technology, says Schmidt. "One workforce is trained to three-dimensionally place bounding boxes around cars very precisely, and suddenly it's about figuring out if a large language model has given an appropriate answer," he says, regarding the industry's shift from self-driving cars to chatbots. Thus, niche labeling skills have a "very short half-life." "From the clients' perspective, the invisibility of the workers in microtasking is not a bug but a feature," says Schmidt. Economically, because the tasks are so small, it's more feasible to deal with contractors as a crowd instead of individuals. This creates an industry of irregular labor with no face-to-face resolution for disputes if, say, a client deems their answers inaccurate or wages are withheld. The workers WIRED spoke to say it's not low fees but the way platforms pay them that's the key issue. "I don't like the uncertainty of not knowing when an assignment will come out, as it forces us to be near the computer all day long," says Fuentes, who would like to see additional compensation for time spent waiting in front of her screen. Mutmain, 18, from Pakistan, who asked not to use his surname, echoes this. He says he joined Appen at 15, using a family member's ID, and works from 8 am to 6 pm, and another shift from 2 am to 6 am. "I need to stick to these platforms at all times, so that I don't lose work," he says, but he struggles to earn more than $50

"ns Work in Progress It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber Test scores have been falling for years-even before the pandemic. By Derek Thompson A student looking at their phone Darrell Eager / Gallery Stock December 19, 2023 Saved Stories This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America's biggest problems. Sign up here. For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers' phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it's systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn't quite believed that last argument-until now."

""We submitted another two examples of real-life Amharic-language hate speech to them a week later," said Global Witness. "Both ads were, again, accepted by Facebook for publication within a matter of hours.""

"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."

"A Google employee named Blake Lemoine was put on leave recently after claiming that one of Google's artificial-intelligence language models, called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications), is sentient. He went public with his concerns, sharing his text conversations with LaMDA. At one point, Lemoine asks, "What does the word 'soul' mean to you?" LaMDA answers, "To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself." "I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt," Lemoine explained, citing his religious beliefs. "Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?""

"Launched on the eve of the millennium, Turkey's most popular homegrown social media website has weathered lawsuits, criticism from the highest levels of government and even death threats directed at one of its founders. A simple editable online dictionary turned national obsession, Ekşi Sözlük has for more than two decades spurred its own biting form of social satire while providing a rare haven for free expression on the Turkish internet. But this year's earthquakes that upended life across Turkey may prove to be the death knell for Ekşi Sözlük, which was abruptly blocked across the country in the weeks after the earthquakes first struck, without proper explanation."

"Why do some people get so upset, especially in an age where many people are taking digital detoxes for mental-health breaks, and others are busy juggling life tasks? People still communicate in different ways; some are constantly attached to their phones, while others want to disengage from them for chunks of time. But tensions over reply times may also come down to social norms - or the lack thereof. New developments in digital technology have outpaced the formulation of mutually agreed new communication paradigms, so when a text is sent, we're not all responding according to the same 'rules'."

"The new tool was recently unveiled by Wonder Dynamics founders Nikola Todorovic, and Tye Sheridan, star of Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. The above video showcases the capabilities of Wonder Studio, where an amateur filmmaker can use their footage of an individual and replace them with a variety of different CGI characters. The video shows Wonder Studio is as simple as dragging and dropping different CGI characters into real-life actors within the footage, while also having more in-depth options for lighting, motion, grain, color, and more."

"Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether-and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill. If you're looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life-and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators-is about to drastically change."

"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."

"Cory blames the gang who trafficked her daughter for destroying her life. She also blames Instagram, which she believes played a critical role in her daughter's sex trafficking. "If Instagram didn't exist, this wouldn't have happened to my daughter," she says. "Instagram is why it was so easy [for these people] to do this.""

"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."