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"Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a "kill switch" to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries, leaked files reveal. The instructions to block authorities from accessing its IT systems were part of a sophisticated global operation by the Silicon Valley company to thwart law enforcement."

"The upshot is that people are getting way more videos in their Instagram feeds, and it's going full screen for those videos, so it scrolls like TikTok. But that's not all: people are now also seeing "suggested posts", which works in a TikTok-style algorithm that brings in random posts from people you don't follow into your feed."

"It was a trick as audacious as it was ingenious. When police or regulators opened the Uber app, they would see exactly what the public saw: dozens of cars crawling around the city, waiting to be summoned. But there was one crucial difference: these cars were fake. Uber had built a dummy version of its own app, a secret tool known as Greyball, designed to throw regulators off the scent and help its unlicensed cab drivers evade the law."

"Parent "Portals," as utilized in K12 education, are doing significant harm to student development.[1] For those not familiar, Parent Portals are learning management systems that provide "real time" information to parents of school-aged children: "grades, attendance, assignments, and more." On a daily basis parents can monitor their child's performance in school and intervene at home. In theory, this seems like a good thing. But what is the difference between "real time" data and constant surveillance? In my view, not much. What if surveillance is not conducive to education? I'm working this one out. Let's see where it goes."

"Analyst Brian Nowak estimates that the AI technology will have a $4.1 trillion economic effect on the labor force - or affect about 44% of labor - over the next few years by changing input costs, automating tasks and shifting the ways companies obtain, process and analyze information. Today, Morgan Stanley pegs the AI effect at $2.1 trillion, affecting 25% of labor. "We see generative AI expanding the scope of business processes that can be automated," he wrote in a Sunday note. "At the same time, the input costs supporting GenAI functionality are rapidly falling, enabling a strongly expansionary impact to software production. As a result, Generative AI is set to impact the labor markets, expand the enterprise software TAM, and drive incremental spend for Public Cloud services.""

"Generative artificial-intelligence tools are unproven and expensive to operate, requiring muscular servers with expensive chips that consume lots of power. Microsoft MSFT -0.43%decrease; red down pointing triangle , Google, Adobe and other tech companies investing in AI are experimenting with an array of tactics to make, market and charge for it. Microsoft has lost money on one of its first generative AI products, said a person with knowledge of the figures. It and Google are now launching AI-backed upgrades to their software with higher price tags. Zoom Video Communications ZM 1.79%increase; green up pointing triangle has tried to mitigate costs by sometimes using a simpler AI it developed in-house. Adobe and others are putting caps on monthly usage and charging based on consumption. "A lot of the customers I've talked to are unhappy about the cost that they are seeing for running some of these models," said Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon.com's cloud division, Amazon Web Services, speaking of the industry broadly. "

"We submitted the grant on time. The next day, while speaking to a friend, I told him, "This week, I wrote my first ChatGPT grant." He replied that he had been doing it for months and that many other scientists are doing the same. A 2023 Nature survey of 1,600 researchers found that more than 25% use AI to help them write manuscripts and that more than 15% use the technology to help them write grant proposals. Some people might see the use of ChatGPT in writing grant proposals as cheating, but it actually highlights a much bigger problem: what is the point of asking scientists to write documents that can be easily created with AI? What value are we adding? Perhaps it is time for funding bodies to rethink their application processes."

"They said that a number of schools were reporting for the first time that pupils were using AI-generating technology to create images of children that legally constituted child sexual abuse material. Emma Hardy, UK Safer Internet Centre (UKSIC) director, said the pictures were "terrifyingly" realistic. "The quality of the images that we're seeing is comparable to professional photos taken annually of children in schools up and down the country," said Hardy, who is also the Internet Watch Foundation communications director."

"ChatGPT will see you now. The artificial intelligence tool may be better than a doctor at following recognised treatment standards for depression, and without the gender or social class biases sometimes seen in the physician-patient relationship, a study suggests. The findings were published in Family Medicine and Community Health, the open access journal owned by British Medical Journal. The researchers said further work was needed to examine the risks and ethical issues arising from AI's use."

" This is wholly unacceptable behavior. Our books are copyrighted material, not free fodder for wealthy companies to use as they see fit, without permission or compensation. Many, many hours of serious research, creative angst and plain old hard work go into writing and publishing a book, and few writers are compensated like professional athletes, Hollywood actors or Wall Street investment bankers. Stealing our intellectual property hurts. Well, sure, Mr Cohan, but I have to point out: there are humans out there reading your books and getting ideas from them. Or at least, one sure hopes there are, because otherwise all those many hours of serious research etc have really gone to waste. As writers, if we don't influence what people think, what's the point? Furthermore, if we get a chance to influence what robots write, shouldn't we leap at it?"

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."

"That is why we must demand transparency here, especially in the case of technology that uses human-like interfaces such as language. For any automated system, we need to know what it was trained to do, what training data was used, who chose that data and for what purpose. In the words of AI researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, mimicking human behaviour is a "bright line" - a clear boundary not to be crossed - in computer software development. We treat interactions with things we perceive as human or human-like differently. With systems such as LaMDA we see their potential perils and the urgent need to design systems in ways that don't abuse our empathy or trust."

""We are seeing deep fakes being used all the time, and the technology is going to allow still images, but ultimately also video images, to be synthesised [more easily] by bad actors," he says. DALL-E has content policy rules in place that prohibit bullying, harassment, the creation of sexual or political content, or creating images of people without their consent. And while Open AI has limited the number of people who can sign up to DALL-E, its lower-grade replica, DALL-E mini, is open access, meaning people can produce anything they want."

"Pornbots create fake accounts that are designed to mimic real people. They steal photos from public social media accounts, and follow the real profile's friends. They tack on suggestive captions and post links to external paid adult sites. The fake accounts choose @usernames that are deceptively similar to those they impersonate. And for good measure, the fake accounts block the person they're copying, making it difficult for the victim to see or interact with them."

"My prediction failed. For a decade and a half, Facebook resisted the fate of all the social networks that preceded it. In hindsight, it's easy to see why: it cheated. The company used investor cash to buy and neutralize competitors ("Kids are leaving Facebook for Insta? Fine, we'll buy Insta. We know you value choice!"). It allegedly spied on users through the deceptive use of apps such as Onavo and exploited the intelligence to defeat rivals. More than anything, it ratcheted up "switching costs.""

"But it feels less creepy once you learn that these technologies don't have to rely on a camera to see where you are and what you're doing. Instead, they use radar. Google's Advanced Technology and Products division-better known as ATAP, the department behind oddball projects such as a touch-sensitive denim jacket-has spent the past year exploring how computers can use radar to understand our needs or intentions and then react to us appropriately."

"Officially, Venmo is an app for transferring money from one person to another. In the US, where most banks do not offer instant free money transfers, it was revolutionary for simple things like splitting the bill on dinner, or sending their roommates half of the rent. But because the Venmo app has a "home feed", an endless scroll that shows payments between users, it's also a sneaky form of social media. You can see how your friends spend their money - and who they spend it with."

"But it's not hard to see how social media and a rise in misogyny are, in fact, related. Social media sites trap girls in spirals questioning their attractiveness and self-worth. They're encouraged to compare themselves to others and seek approval for the way they look, while reinforcing beauty standards that favor thinness and whiteness. They feel pressured to promote themselves as objects. There have been many studies establishing all this over about the last 10 years, including Facebook's own research into girls and Instagram - research that the company suppressed until exposed by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression," Facebook's study noted. "This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.""

"First, the authors expect that 80% of the US workforce could see at least 10% of their tasks affected by GPT. In other words, most Americans could benefit at least a bit from these LLMs."

"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.""