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"In the beginning, we thought anonymity was part of the problem - that people being able to hide behind their screens without being identified were willing to say more extreme things than people who are named. But now you see people don't care about being named. They're willing to go to a public white supremacist rally unmasked with their full identity showing. They're proud of it. It doesn't make me believe more in humanity."

"These new tracking measures may someday be repurposed to advance governments' mass surveillance programs, Snowden warned"

"Physicist creates AI algorithm that may prove reality is a simulation"

"Ah, but isn't creativity a slippery concept - something that's hard to define but that we nevertheless recognise when we see it? That hasn't stopped psychologists from trying to measure it, though, via tools such as the alternative uses test and the similar Torrance test. And it turns out that one LLM - GPT-4 - beats 91% of humans on the former and 99% of them on the latter. So as the inveterate artificial intelligence user Ethan Mollick puts it: "We are running out of creativity tests that AIs cannot ace.""

"Perkins' report offers a dizzying list of data the TikTok app can access while it's running, including the device location, calendar, contacts, other running applications, wi-fi networks, phone number and even the SIM card serial number. He concludes: For the TikTok application to function properly, most of the access and device data collection is not required. This leads us to believe that the only reason this information has been gathered is for data harvesting. It is also notable that the device only needs to ask the user for permission to perform each of these actions once and then follow the user's preferences. The application however has a culture of persistent access or continuously asking for a decision reversal by the user. The hourly checking of location is also unnecessary. Finally, device mapping, external storage access, contacts and third-party applications data collection allows TikTok the ability to reimage the phone in the likeness of the original device."

"As if robocalling wasn't already enough of a problem, the advent of easily accessible, realistic AI-powered writing and synthetic voice could supercharge the practice. The FCC aims to preempt this by looking into how generated robocalls might fit under existing consumer protections. A Notice of Inquiry has been proposed by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel to be voted on at the agency's next meeting. If the vote succeeds (as it is almost certain to), the FCC would formally look into how the Telephone Consumer Protection Act empowers them to act against scammers and spammers using AI technology. But Rosenworcel was also careful to acknowledge that AI represents a potentially powerful tool for accessibility and responsiveness in phone-based interactions. "While we are aware of the challenges AI can present, there is also significant potential to use this technology to benefit communications networks and their customers-including in the fight against junk robocalls and robotexts. We need to address these opportunities and risks thoughtfully, and the effort we are launching today will help us gain more insight on both fronts," she said in a statement."

"There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

"It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. "But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it-a broader impact on trust," he said. "Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it-well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself." Nyhan had a similar reaction. "There are genuine questions that are really important, but there's a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

Is it possible there are modes of attention that a younger generation is developing that might be difficult for those of us who are older to value, but which bring new types of benefit? What of the rapid, quick-fire, written exchanges of instant messaging? The art of the pithy, witty expression condensed into 140 or 280 characters? What of the dexterity and reflex-training physical and mental movement of the video game, or the socially dispersed forms of collective attention that are possible in online environments?