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"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.""

"The climate crisis could prove AI's greatest challenge. While Google publicises AI-driven advances in flooding, wildfire and heatwave forecasts, like many big tech companies, it uses more energy than many countries. Today's large models are a major culprit. It can take 10 gigawatt-hours of power to train a single large language model like OpenAI's ChatGPT, enough to supply 1,000 US homes for a year."

"The alleged cybercriminals are thought to have carefully planned out an elaborate and hyper-targeted phishing scam that went after employees of large companies like MGM and Twilio. In fact, Scattered Spider's breach at MGM, which involved a phone call to the company's help desk, resulted in a temporary shut down of the company's hotel and casino operations, costing the company $100 million. The Scattered Spider plan of attack involved sending text messages to employees at the targeted companies while pretending to be part of their employer's IT department. The texts urged the employees to login to a link provided in the text message, otherwise, the text message claimed, their employee accounts would be deactivated."

"In 2021, Mr Kono had "declared war" on floppy disks. On Wednesday, almost three years later, he announced: "We have won the war on floppy disks!" Mr Kono has made it his goal to eliminate old technology since he was appointed to the job. He had earlier also said he would "get rid of the fax machine". Once seen as a tech powerhouse, Japan has in recent years lagged in the global wave of digital transformation because of a deep resistance to change. For instance, workplaces have continued to favour fax machines over emails - earlier plans to remove these machines from government offices were scrapped because of pushback."

"The research refers to tech executives discussing how AI models will be able to predict a user's intent and actions. It quotes the chief executive of the largest AI chipmaker, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who said last year that models will "figure out what is your intention, what is your desire, what are you trying to do, given the context, and present the information to you in the best possible way"."

"According to a new report from 404Media, as originally reported in Alexios Mantzarlis' Faked Up newsletter, the Crush AI modifier app receives the vast majority of its traffic from Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. According to Similarweb's data, last month Crush AI received more than a quarter of a million visits to its service - and roughly 90 percent of that traffic was from Meta's platforms. Crush AI makes it quite clear what the purpose of its service is in its advertisements. The company's ads include photos of real-life individuals like Instagram influencer and model Mikayla Demaiter and OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain. The ads boast that users can "upload a photo" and "erase anyone's clothes.""

"There has also been, he says, "a real push in opinion pieces and popular-press books that are sloppy scientifically but stated so confidently. The ideas in these books are not peer-reviewed." The published studies they cite tend to have small samples and no control groups, and to be based on associations rather than proving cause. "People will say: 'The iPhone was invented in 2007 and Instagram became popular in 2012 and, oh my God, look, tech use has gone up at the same time mental health has gone down!' It seems like common sense - that's why you have this kind of consensus. But it just isn't scientific." In 2023, Przybylski and his colleagues looked at data from almost 12,000 children in the US aged between nine and 12 and found no impact from screen time on functional connectivity ("how different parts of the brain kind of talk to each other", he explains), as measured with fMRI scans while the children completed tasks. They also found no negative impact on the children's self-reported wellbeing. "If you publish a study like we do, where we cross our Ts, we dot our Is, we state our hypotheses before we see the data, we share the data and the code, those types of studies don't show the negative effects that we expect to see.""

"Duolingo, on the other hand, is going full speed ahead with generative AI. The company announced this week that it would stop relying on human contractors for "work that AI can handle," while also committing to using AI in hiring and performance reviews. On top of that, Duolingo announced on Wednesday that it used generative AI to come up with 148 new language learning courses, doubling its total course offerings."

"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."

"Internet users have been told to change their passwords and upgrade their digital security after researchers claimed to have revealed the scale of sensitive information - 16bn login records - potentially available to cybercriminals. Researchers at Cybernews, an online tech publication, said they had found 30 datasets stuffed with credentials harvested from malicious software known as "infostealers" and leaks."

"However, Dimon is not alone in his belief that having foundational tech knowledge is still a lucrative career path. In fact, over 250 chief executives-the likes of Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Airbnb's Brian Chesky, and Salesforce's Marc Benioff-came together early this year to sign a letter demanding all students have access to computer science and AI education. "A basic foundation in computer science and AI is crucial for helping every student thrive in a technology-driven world. Without it, they risk falling behind," wrote the letter sent to lawmakers.  The push came on the heels of research from the University of Maryland that found that high school students who take a computer science class will have 8% greater earnings on average by the time they've secured their first job."

"It was robot accounts that caused "#TrumpWon" to trend after each TV debate and allowed Trump to claim "victory"."

"The performance of LipNet compares incredibly favorably to human lipreading experts on GRID corpus, the largest publicly-available sentence-level lipreading dataset. In fact, where human experts got just 52 percent, LipNet scored 93 percent. Its sentence-based approach to lip-reading also smashed the best previous attempt by a machine, which managed 79.6 percent accuracy on the same dataset."

"KFC has teamed up with Baidu - the search engine company often referred to as "China's Google" - to develop facial-recognition technology that can be used to predict customer's orders."

""Methbot" that generated $3M-$5M by creating 6,000 fake websites to embed videos in, then generating convincing bots that that appeared to watch 300,000,000 videos/day -- running virtual instances of various browsers (mostly Chrome) on virtual machines running MacOS X, from a huge pool of IP addresses"

"The Authors' Guild originally sued Google, saying that serving up search results from scanned books infringes on publishers' copyrights even though the search giant shows only restricted snippets of the work. The writers also claimed that Google's book search snippets provide an illegal free substitute for their work and that Google Books infringes their "derivative rights" in revenue they could gain from a "licensed search" market."

"A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers."

"But Lodge admits that the BYOD trend does have a number of flaws. His biggest concern? It encourages students to use technology during teaching time: "The major downside of BYOD is the potential for distraction. Students' own devices are likely to include all the applications they use on a regular basis. This cannot be controlled like it can be with computers provided by the institution.""