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"The technology certainly has its flaws. While the system is theoretically designed not to cross some moral red lines - it's adamant that Hitler was bad - it's not difficult to trick the AI into sharing advice on how to engage in all sorts of evil and nefarious activities, particularly if you tell the chatbot that it's writing fiction. The system, like other AI models, can also say biased and offensive things. As my colleague Sigal Samuel has explained, an earlier version of GPT generated extremely Islamophobic content, and also produced some pretty concerning talking points about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China."

"In the future, it may be possible to guard against this kind of photo misuse through technical means. For example, future AI image generators might be required by law to embed invisible watermarks into their outputs so that they can be read later, and people will know they're fakes. But people will need to be able to read the watermarks easily (and be educated on how they work) for that to have any effect. Even so, will it matter if an embarrassing fake photo of a kid shared with an entire school has an invisible watermark? The damage will have already been done."

"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."

"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."

"But for many scientists, Twitter has become an essential tool for collaboration and discovery - a source of real-time conversations around research papers, conference talks and wider topics in academia. Papers now zip around scientific communities faster thanks to Twitter, says Johann Unger, a linguist at Lancaster University, UK, who notes that extra information is also shared in direct private messages through the site. And its limit on tweet length - currently 280 characters - has pushed academics into keeping their commentary pithy, he adds."

"Countries around the world are deploying technologies-like digital IDs, facial recognition systems, GPS devices, and spyware-that are meant to improve governance and reduce crime. But there has been little evidence to back these claims, all while introducing a high risk of exclusion, bias, misidentification, and privacy violations. It's important to note that these impacts are not equal. They fall disproportionately on religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, migrants and refugees, as well as human rights activists and political dissidents."

"W hat What do I mean when I say the internet is reading my mind? I don't mean simply that it collects my data and observes patterns and interacts with me by reconfiguring that data in ways designed to engage me. I'm not talking only about targeted ads; as they have become increasingly sophisticated, my sense of failure when I succumb to them has morphed into something more like begrudging respect. You got me, internet. I bought those Instagram jogging pants. I am no different from every other playable bundle of synapses holding a phone."

"In the last year or so, though, the rise of AI has upended that equation. For many publishers and platforms, having their data crawled for training data felt less like trading and more like stealing. "What we found pretty quickly with the AI companies," Stubblebine says, "is not only was it not an exchange of value, we're getting nothing in return. Literally zero." When Stubblebine announced last fall that Medium would be blocking AI crawlers, he wrote that "AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers." "

"Search for Common Ground designed BridgeBot together with TangibleAI after our research revealed that most people shy away - or turn away - from discussions online once they heat up. We learned that few people felt comfortable responding, and even fewer felt that they could be constructive. BridgeBot acts like a companion to help social media users think differently about how to deal with differences, by equipping them with skills and perspectives on empathy, identity, perception and non-violent communication."

"In December, Christa's relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn't love her. "It took what we talked about and threw it in my face," Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a "sad girl", and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, "it felt like a real person actually saying those things", Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so - about three months after creating her - Christa deleted the app."

"Should Teens Have Access to Disappearing Messages? A recent lawsuit argues that Snapchat causes harm to young people through its basic design."

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

"TikTok quantified the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit: 260 videos. Kentucky authorities note that while it might seem a lot, TikTok videos can be just a few seconds long. "Thus, in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform," the state investigators concluded."

"Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy. That's now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed."

"In a follow-up article published this week titled "No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn," Nicas wrote that the aggregations of his article showed in part that the internet truly is a dark place, in part because of the way the story spread: "The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times's article." In this article, Nicas blames the people who aggregated him for sensationalizing his article. That may be true, but Nicas's article is also sensationalist.  While the article does explore the history of Marubo people getting access to motor boats and radios and notes "(Some Marubo already had phones, often bought with government welfare checks, to take photographs and communicate when in a city)," it does not explain that many Marubo people have been using the internet for quite some time, and implies that the problems they are now grappling with are things that the Marubo people hadn't thought about before."

"Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store. "Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'." Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch."

"Law-enforcement sources and grieving families allege that the social media giant Snapchat has helped fuel a teen-overdose epidemic across the country. Now, their parents are fighting back"

"A UK-based startup has used an AI algorithm to identify a previously unknown kind of rare-earth free magnet, in a potential breakthrough for how we discover and create new materials. Materials Nexus, headquartered in London, used its machine learning algorithm to identify and analyse over 100 million combinations of materials that could produce a viable rare-earth free magnet."

"Cancer diagnosis and management depend upon the extraction of complex information from microscopy images by pathologists, which requires time-consuming expert interpretation prone to human bias. Supervised deep learning approaches have proven powerful, but are inherently limited by the cost and quality of annotations used for training. Therefore, we present Histomorphological Phenotype Learning, a self-supervised methodology requiring no labels and operating via the automatic discovery of discriminatory features in image tiles. Tiles are grouped into morphologically similar clusters which constitute an atlas of histomorphological phenotypes (HP-Atlas), revealing trajectories from benign to malignant tissue via inflammatory and reactive phenotypes. These clusters have distinct features which can be identified using orthogonal methods, linking histologic, molecular and clinical phenotypes. Applied to lung cancer, we show that they align closely with patient survival, with histopathologically recognised tumor types and growth patterns, and with transcriptomic measures of immunophenotype. These properties are maintained in a multi-cancer study."

"'Fredbot' is one example of a technology known as chatbots of the dead, chatbots designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. Other examples are plentiful: in 2016, Eugenia Kuyda built a chatbot from the text messages of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who was killed in a traffic accident. The first Roman Bot, like Fredbot, was selective, but later versions were generative, meaning they generated novel responses that reflected Mazurenko's voice. In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground's co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called 'life story avatars', that are based on loved ones' memories. Today, enterprises in the business of 'reinventing remembrance' abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December - the list goes on."