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"The difference between skimming and reading with all our intelligence is the difference between fully activated reading brains and their short-circuited, screen-dulled versions."

"Empirical evidence for this is beginning to appear. A recent large-scale study by the National Bureau for Economic Research in the US, using data from more than 3 million workers, found that the number of meetings per person had gone up 12.9% and the number of attendees per meeting increased by 13.5% during the pandemic. The researchers also found "significant and durable" increases in length of the average workday - up 8.2%, or 48.5 minutes - along with short-term increases in email activity."

"Dubbed SilentFade (short for "Silently running Facebook Ads with Exploits"), the malware compromised Facebook accounts and used them to promote malicious ads, steal browser cookies and more. The social-media giant said that the Chinese malware campaign started in 2016, but it was first discovered in December 2018, due to a suspicious traffic spike across a number of Facebook endpoints. After an extensive investigation, Facebook shut down the campaign and pursued legal action against the cybercriminals behind the attack in December 2019. "

"Drowning in literature? Scientists often must manage research, teaching, and acquiring funding, and more. It can be hard to find time to read new papers in the field. It can also help non-specialists who are reading complicated papers and struggling to find the gist. Using this tool, you can enter a paper's abstract. The site will then generate a short summary. "The free tool, which creates what the team calls TLDRs (the common Internet acronym for 'Too long, didn't read'), was activated this week for search results at Semantic Scholar, a search engine created by the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington."

"He quit the same way he'd been given the job: through a WhatsApp message. He had neither a contract nor any documents regulating his employment. For Felipe, the plan to make a little quick money became a hellish experience. With TikTok's short-form video format, much of the audio that needed transcription was only a few seconds long. The payment, made in U.S. dollars, was supposed to be $14 for every hour of audio transcribed. Amassing the secondslong clips into an hour of transcribed audio took Felipe about 20 hours. That worked out to only about 70 cents per hour - or 3.85 Brazilian reals, about three-quarters of Brazil's minimum wage."

"Henle was surprised by how much she felt seen by this technology. She also tried using Bard and Bing AI for the same purpose, but both fell short. ChatGPT was much more convincing. "I felt like it was taking the best parts of my mom and the best parts of psychology and fusing those things together," she says. While Henle had initially hoped ChatGPT would give her the chance to converse with what she describes as "a reincarnated version of her mother", she says has since used it with a different intent. "I think I'm going to use it when I'm doubting myself or some part of our relationship," she says. "But I will probably not try to converse with it as if I really believe it's her talking back to me. What I'm getting more out of it is more just wisdom. It's like a friend bringing me comfort.""

"Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy."

"Their tools analyze content using sophisticated algorithms, picking up on subtle signals to distinguish the images made with computers from the ones produced by human photographers and artists. But some tech leaders and misinformation experts have expressed concern that advances in A.I. will always stay a step ahead of the tools. To assess the effectiveness of current A.I.-detection technology, The New York Times tested five new services using more than 100 synthetic images and real photos. The results show that the services are advancing rapidly, but at times fall short."

"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

"The lawsuit accused Anthropic of infringing the publishers' copyrights by copying their lyrics without permission as part of the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet to train Claude to respond to human prompts. The publishers also say that Claude illegally reproduces the lyrics by request, and in response to "a whole range of prompts that do not seek Publishers' lyrics", including "requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter"."

"There's no concrete evidence of long-term harm to our children caused by using our phones around them, but there's enough evidence of potential short-term effects that it makes sense to be mindful of it. Some amount of phone use around our kids is probably okay, but if we're absorbed in our devices in a way that interferes with our ability to connect with and respond to them, this can become a problem. Also, let's be kind to ourselves."

"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."

"In short, Klarna offers shoppers something similar to a store credit card - rather than paying $500 now, you might split it into 12 payments with a micro-loan from Klarna that gets issued within minutes. The e-commerce provider then pays Klarna a fee (usually around 6 percent, higher than what they'd pay for a Visa or Mastercard transaction, but still a good deal if it makes it easier for the customer to buy the product). As you might imagine, Klarna has lots of customers and those customers have a lot of questions. This means they hire lots of customer service representatives. And those customer service reps are the first major, public casualty in the conflict between AI and human jobs."

""After cutting me off, the AI would respond, 'Great! Sounds good! Perfect!' and move on to the next question," Ty said. "After the third or fourth question, the AI just stopped after a short pause and told me that the interview was completed and someone from the team would reach out later." (Ty asked that their last name not be used because their current employer doesn't know they're looking for a job.) A survey from Resume Builder released last summer found that by 2024, four in 10 companies would use AI to "talk with" candidates in interviews. Of those companies, 15% said hiring decisions would be made with no input from a human at all."

"Disappearing messages is a feature offered by apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving users the option to have conversations that self-destruct. They're not the only platforms that have tapped into the allure of digital ephemerality. The very premise of Snapchat is that content is only viewable for a short window; Instagram stories similarly vanish after 24 hours. Those who are chronically online may remember the last day of X's own foray into expiring content called "fleets", when countless users threw whatever remaining posting-caution they had to the wind to share revealing, horny or outright unhinged posts for one final hurrah before the feature itself vanished. I can't tell you what people posted or link you to evidence of this because, well, it's gone."

"Exposure to false and inflammatory content is remarkably low, with just 1% of Twitter users accounting for 80% of exposure to dubious websites during the 2016 U.S. election. This is heavily concentrated among a small fringe of users actively seeking it out. Examples: 6.3% of YouTube users were responsible for 79.8% of exposure to extremist channels from July to December 2020, 85% of vaccine-sceptical content was consumed by less than 1% of US citizens in the 2016-2019 period. Conventional wisdom blames platform algorithms for spreading misinformation. However, evidence suggests user preferences play an outsized role. For instance, a mere 0.04% of YouTube's algorithmic recommendations directed users to extremist content. It's tempting to draw a straight line between social media usage and societal ills. But studies rigorously designed to untangle cause and effect often come up short. "

"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."

"First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the "10%" expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI's are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach "a country of geniuses in a datacenter"."

"Mats Steen's double life was first explored in 2019 by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and then in a BBC News article, which inspired Norwegian film-maker Benjamin Ree to tell the story as a documentary. "I think his story asks some questions that are really relevant today," he says. "Is it possible to become friends with someone you've never met? Is it possible to experience love with somebody you've never met? And how close a friendship can you have with someone you've never spoken to, just written to? And at the same time, I think it says something about the generational gap, about my generation's fascination for gaming - I'm 35 years old - and being in a virtual world. Mats really came of age within that game. Also, both Mats's friends and family have told me that towards the end of his life, he really wanted to have mattered. He seemed to have lived such a short life, but he wanted to be remembered.""

"A complex problem that took microbiologists a decade to get to the bottom of has been solved in just two days by a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool. Professor José R Penadés and his team at Imperial College London had spent years working out and proving why some superbugs are immune to antibiotics. He gave "co-scientist" - a tool made by Google - a short prompt asking it about the core problem he had been investigating and it reached the same conclusion in 48 hours."