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"Google announced on Thursday that it would refine and retool its summaries of search results generated by artificial intelligence, posting a blog explaining why the feature was returning bizarre and inaccurate answers that included telling people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce. The company will reduce the scope of searches that will return an AI-written summary."

"Google's goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years. Google said electricity consumption by data centres and supply chain emissions were the primary cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had risen 13% compared with the previous year, hitting 14.3m metric tons."

"Last week, Agence France-Presse reported that China had flaunted the gun-carrying robodogs in a 15-day joint military exercise with Cambodia dubbed the "Golden Dragon." And if images of the literal killing machines weren't troubling enough, a new video of the robots released yesterday by the state-owned broadcaster China Central Television shows the killing machine dutifully hopping and diving, leading teams in reconnaissance, and shooting its back-strapped machine gun at targets."

"Roblox to give parents more control over children's activity after warnings over grooming Parents will be able to see who children interact with and ensure they cannot play games with graphic violence as report accuses company of lax safety controls"

""AI lowers the barriers to entry for creating content. You don't need coding skills or anything like that to generate these images. It is also symptomatic of far-right views going mainstream or being normalised," he said, adding that the far right appeared to have fewer moral concerns about AI imagery. Allchorn said more established political parties appeared warier of using AI in official campaigns: "Mainstream actors still have ethical concerns about the effectiveness, authenticity and reliability of these models that far-right or extremist actors are not beholden to.""

"Or, as the New York Times summarised it, "doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers' surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors." More interesting, though, were two other revelations: the experiment demonstrated doctors' sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they had made, even when ChatGPT suggested a better one; and it also suggested that at least some of the physicians didn't really know how best to exploit the tool's capabilities. Which in turn revealed what AI advocates such as Ethan Mollick have been saying for aeons: that effective "prompt engineering" - knowing what to ask an LLM to get the most out of it - is a subtle and poorly understood art."

"Microsoft researchers said VALL-E 2 was capable of generating "accurate, natural speech in the exact voice of the original speaker, comparable to human performance," in a paper that appeared June 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. In other words, the new AI voice generator is convincing enough to be mistaken for a real person - at least, according to its creators."

"Your email inbox is full of spam. Your letterbox is full of junk mail. Now, your web browser has its own affliction: slop. "Slop" is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated material up on the web for anyone to view. Unlike a chatbot, the slop isn't interactive, and is rarely intended to actually answer readers' questions or serve their needs. Instead, it functions mostly to create the appearance of human-made content, benefit from advertising revenue and steer search engine attention towards other sites."

"How do the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram affect what you see in your news feed? To find out, Guardian Australia unleashed them on a completely blank smartphone linked to a new, unused email address. Three months later, without any input, they were riddled with sexist and misogynistic content."

"I'm not the only one who has been struggling with Google recently. Many users are saying its principal product, its search engine, isn't working as well as it should. They claim the ingenious vehicle that has enabled us to navigate the internet's infinite scroll of information is beginning to rust and decay. That's not to mention the company's endless court battles with rival companies and world governments, or the rise of ChatGPT, which many tout as a search engine killer; even Bill Gates said last year that once a company perfects the AI assistant or "personal agent", "you will never go to a search site again"."

"Yes of course. We are basically the last generation, or maybe there will be one more after us, who grew up without strong AI writing assistants. But these AI assistants are here now, especially in English. In German the systems are following suit, even though they're still much stronger in English. You get to a stage where someone who cannot write very well, can be pulled to a decent level of writing through machine assistance. And this raises important questions: Are we no longer learning the basics? In order to step up and really improve your writing, you will probably always need to be deeply proficient in the cultural practice of writing. But we need to ask, what proportion of low and medium level writers will be raised with the help from machines to a very decent level? And what repercussions does this have on teaching and learning, and the proficient use of language and writing? We shouldn't neglect our writing skills, because we believe machines will get us there. Anyone who has children can clearly see the dangers autocorrect and autocomplete will have for the future of writing."

"Seeing an opportunity, Franklin decided to take advantage. On 9 July, the company said that it would begin to support digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like any other employee. "Today Lattice is making AI history," Franklin pronounced. "We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access and even a manager. Just as any person would be." The pushback was swift - and, in many cases, brutal, particularly on LinkedIn, which is generally not known for its savage engagement like X (formerly known as Twitter). "This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company," said Sawyer Middeleer, an executive at a firm that uses AI to help with sales research, on LinkedIn. "Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it implies that you view humans simply as 'resources' to be optimized and measured against machines. It's the exact opposite of a work environment designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.""

"What do people really ask chatbots? It's a lot of sex and homework. AI chatbots are taking the world by storm. We analyzed thousands of conversations to see what people are really asking them and what topics are most discussed."

"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."

"Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn't have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning. "

"The mother of a teenager who killed himself after becoming obsessed with an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot now accuses its maker of complicity in his death. Megan Garcia filed a civil suit against Character.ai, which makes a customizable chatbot for role-playing, in Florida federal court on Wednesday, alleging negligence, wrongful death and deceptive trade practices. Her son Sewell Setzer III, 14, died in Orlando, Florida, in February. In the months leading up to his death, Setzer used the chatbot day and night, according to Garcia."