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"But there have been corresponding sacrifices. Over 20 years, I have turned over whole areas of competence, memory, authority and independence to the machines in my life. Along the way, I have become anxious about problems that didn't used to exist, indecisive over choices I never used to have to make, and angry about things I would once have been wholly unaware of."

"One of the key features introduced is a "Correction" capability in Azure AI Content Safety. This tool aims to address the problem of AI hallucinations - instances where AI models generate false or misleading information. "When we detect there's a mismatch between the grounding context and the response… we give that information back to the AI system," Bird explained. "With that additional information, it's usually able to do better the second try.""

"A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science. Three years ago, we compiled evidence revealing that an error called leakage - the machine learning version of teaching to the test - was pervasive, affecting hundreds of papers from 17 disciplines. Since then, we have been trying to understand the problem better and devise solutions.  This post presents an update. In short, we think things will get worse before they get better, although there are glimmers of hope on the horizon."

"In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that 'novel solutions' such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as 'magic bullets' for the cancer crisis, but 'none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem'. A 'common fallacy' of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create 'additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy'. 'We caution against technocentric approaches without robust evaluation from an equity perspective,' the paper concludes."

"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?"

""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.""

"This election is the first time we face the danger of post-ChatGPT AI in a high-stakes sociopolitical scenario. That is new. Bots pass the Turing test (which means they write and speak indistinguishably from real people). They're also more persuasive. Image and video generators can make realistic faces, which people use mostly to make jokes but also to plant doubt. We will eventually adapt to perception-altering algorithms but for now, they're a big unsolved problem. Here are five ways the bad guys can weaponize AI to influence the US democratic election."

"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.""

"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."

"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died. Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died. Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."

"It is not simply that AI lacks originality; after all, so too does most human art. The problem runs far deeper: the essence of art is lost in the process of its machinic invention and, with it, the very possibility of a democratic society is put under threat. Art is a defining human endeavor, not just for those formally called "artists" but for everyone. It is not merely about arranging colors, forms, sounds or words into pleasing products. The essence of art inheres in its making: the belief that, in the act of creating art, one imbues an object with something ineffable from within one's own being. This belief, in turn, allows for another person to project their own sense of themselves onto the work and, in doing so, to commune with the artist at a level words cannot access."

"Dartmouth College experts recently conducted the first clinical trial of an AI chatbot designed specifically for providing mental health assistance. Called Therabot, the AI assistant was tested in the form of an app among participants diagnosed with serious mental health problems across the United States. "The improvements in symptoms we observed were comparable to what is reported for traditional outpatient therapy, suggesting this AI-assisted approach may offer clinically meaningful benefits," notes Nicholas Jacobson, associate professor of biomedical data science and psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine."

"A rise in online racism driven by fake images is "just the start of a coming problem" after the latest release of X's AI software, online abuse experts have warned. Concerns were raised after computer-generated images created using Grok, X's generative artificial intelligence chatbot, flooded the social media site in December last year. Signify, an organisation that works with prominent groups and clubs in sports to track and report online hate, said it has seen an increase in reports of abuse since Grok's latest update, and believes the introduction of photorealistic AI will make it far more prevalent."

"The findings from those examples were striking: overall, those who trusted the accuracy of the AI tools found themselves thinking less critically, while those who trusted the tech less used more critical thought when going back over AI outputs. "The data shows a shift in cognitive effort as knowledge workers increasingly move from task execution to oversight when using GenAI," the researchers wrote. "Surprisingly, while AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI, raising concerns about long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving." This isn't enormously surprising. Something we've observed in many domains, from self-driving vehicles to scrutinizing news articles produced by AI, is that humans quickly go on autopilot when they're supposed to be overseeing an automated system, often allowing mistakes to slip past."

"Ellie may be a computer simulation, but she's incredibly perceptive. By reading the body language and vocal inflections of real live humans, she can engage in surprisingly meaningful exchanges, and even evoke emotional openness from her conversation partners. Her creators believe her receptivity to human emotional cues could revolutionize the field of mental health. Watching Ellie in action, it's not hard to see why."

"While Keenan emphasised the capability was not a centralised biometric database, and was simply an improved way to share information already collected by different Australian jurisdictions, Gregory questioned how these images of Australians will be employed by law enforcement. "It's subtle changes in the way that things are used that need to be debated the most," he said. "In this case, we're talking about using our passport photos for a purpose for which we never gave permission.""