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"'Fredbot' is one example of a technology known as chatbots of the dead, chatbots designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. Other examples are plentiful: in 2016, Eugenia Kuyda built a chatbot from the text messages of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who was killed in a traffic accident. The first Roman Bot, like Fredbot, was selective, but later versions were generative, meaning they generated novel responses that reflected Mazurenko's voice. In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground's co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called 'life story avatars', that are based on loved ones' memories. Today, enterprises in the business of 'reinventing remembrance' abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December - the list goes on."

"Murky and misty streets, coughing townsfolk, and the distant toll of a plague doctor's bell all feature in Hogne's most-watched video, which has racked up 53 million views. It has sparked fascination among many, but historian Dr Amy Boyington describes the medieval-themed video as "amateurish" and "evocative and sensational" rather than historically accurate. "It looks like something from a video game as it shows a world that is meant to look real but is actually fake." She points out inaccuracies like the depiction of houses with large glazed windows and a train track running through the town which wouldn't have existed in the 1300s. Historian and archaeologist Dr Hannah Platts has also noticed significant inaccuracies in a video depicting the eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii. "Due to Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of the eruption, we know that it didn't start with lava spewing everywhere so to not use that wealth of historical information available to us feels cheap and lazy.""

"Some might scoff at this, and point out that news organisations make their own mistakes all the time - more consequential than my physicist/physician howler, if less humiliating. But cases of bad journalism are almost always warped representations of the real world, rather than missives from an imaginary one. Crucially, if an outlet gets big things wrong a lot, its reputation will suffer, and its audience are likely to vote with their feet, or other people will publish stories that air the mistake. And all of it will be out in the open. You may also note that journalists are increasingly likely to use AI in the production of stories - and there is no doubt that it is a phenomenally powerful tool, allowing investigative reporters to find patterns in vast financial datasets that reveal corruption, or analyse satellite imagery for evidence of bombing attacks in areas designated safe for civilians. There is a legitimate debate over the extent of disclosure required in such cases: on the one hand, if the inputs and outputs are being properly vetted, it might be a bit like flagging the use of Excel; on the other, AI is still new enough that readers may expect you to err on the side of caution. Still, the fundamental difference is not in what you're telling your audience, but what degree of supervision you're exercising over the machine."

"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."

"One of the biggest cases of hypocrisy was uncovered last year with little more than a whisper. Most of us will remember seeing the "You wouldn't steal a car" piracy adverts on every dvd we played in the early 00s. What most people have yet to discover is that the music for the anti-piracy campaign was actually pirated from a Dutch musician named Melchior Reitveldt. In a move that would have marketing specialists turning in their graves, Reitveldt's music (which had been sanctioned for a local film festival's anti-piracy campaign) was used repeatedly for the standardised anti-piracy warning that appeared constantly. In a tale that became pointlessly complicated, Reitveldt dealt with corrupt royalty collectors such as Jochem Gerrits (who tried to gain profit for himself through the situation) before finally reaping his just rewards in 2012, 6 years after he originally composed the music."

"Beth Hyland thought she had met the love of her life on Tinder.  In reality, the Michigan-based administrative assistant had been manipulated by an online scam artist who posed as a French man named 'Richard', used deepfake video on Skype calls and posted photos of another man to pull off his con. A 'deepfake' is manipulated video or audio made using artificial intelligence (AI) to look and sound real. They are often difficult to detect without specialised tools. In a matter of months, Hyland, 53, had taken out loans totalling $26,000, sent 'Richard' the money, and fallen prey to a classic case of romance baiting or pig butchering, named for the exploitative way in which scammers cultivate their victims."

"Illinois' prominent Chicago Sun-Times newspaper has confirmed that a summer reading list, which included several recommendations for books that don't exist, was created using artificial intelligence by a freelancer who worked with one of their content partners."

"Our findings show that both model and user behaviors can influence social and emotional outcomes. Effects of AI vary based on how people choose to use the model and their personal circumstances. This research provides a starting point for further studies that can increase transparency, and encourage responsible usage and development of AI platforms across the industry."

"The researchers established a complex picture in terms of the impact. Voice-based chatbots initially appeared to help mitigate loneliness compared with text-based chatbots, but this advantage started to slip the more someone used them. After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialise with people than their male counterparts. Participants who interacted with ChatGPT's voice mode in a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment."

"Many respondents said they used chatbots to help them manage different aspects of their lives, from improving their mental and physical health to advice about existing romantic relationships and experimenting with erotic role play. They can spend between several hours a week to a couple of hours a day interacting with the apps. Worldwide, more than 100 million people use personified chatbots, which include Replika, marketed as "the AI companion who cares" and Nomi, which claims users can "build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor"."

"Instead, we need to preserve and protect these personal interactions. We need to bolster the working conditions of connective labour practitioners so they are able to see others well. We need to impose a "connection criterion" to help us decide which AI to encourage - the kind that creates new antibiotics, for instance, or decodes sperm whale language - and which to put the brakes on, that is, the kind that intervenes in human relationships. Each of us needs to decide how much we value the human connections in our lives and the lives of our neighbours."

"The announcement that Meta would be changing their approach to political content and discussions of gender is concerning, though it is unclear exactly what those changes are. Given that many product changes regarding those content areas were used in high-risk settings, a change intended to allay US free speech concerns could lead to violence incitement elsewhere. For example, per this post from Meta, reducing "content that has been shared by a chain of two or more people" was a content-neutral product change done to protect people in Ethiopia, where algorithms have been implicated in the spread of ethnic violence. A similar change - removing optimizations for reshared content - was discussed in this post concerning reductions in political content. Will those changes be undone? Globally? Such changes could also lead to increased amplification of attention getting discussions of gender. Per this report from Equimundo and Futures Without Violence, 40% of young men trust at least one "manosphere" influencer - who often exploit algorithmic incentives by posting increasingly extreme, attention-getting mixes of ideas about self-improvement, aggression, and traditional gender roles."

"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."

"But Duolingo now seems to have changed its tune, at least in terms of hiring. CEO Luis von Ahn wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this week: "To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are, in fact, continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it-and use it responsibly-the better off we will be in the long run." Though many language learners obviously appreciate the human touch on their materials, Duolingo isn't the only one leaning toward AI for language education. Last month, Google applied its flagship Google Gemini AI model to create three new tools, dubbed Little Language Lessons, accessible via the Google Labs page. However, Google did dub the new set of tools as "just an early exploration.""

"What if we could forecast how armed factions-and the communities around them-might respond to a draft peace deal before it's signed? What if we could test, virtually, whether a public apology would calm tensions… or make things worse? That's the provocative promise behind the growing use of digital twins in peacemaking: AI-powered simulations of complex social systems, designed to help us understand conflict-and imagine pathways out of it."

"We typically begin the semester by asking students to reflect on the formulas they've learned in the past and to consider how those shape their writing. We now ask those same reflection questions about AI outputs. Student responses, as Jennifer has written elsewhere, are revealing: The kind of writing that Chat does, it's what our teachers try to get us to do. It's like five-paragraph essays, and perfect paragraph[s] that don't have any personality, which we were taught in high school. It does what school has trained us to do. Like write a perfectly formatted essay that is based on some random people's ideas."

"Revealed: Thousands of UK university students caught cheating using AI Guardian investigation finds almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating - and experts says these are tip of the iceberg"

"A second major academic institution has accused Uber of using opaque computer code to dramatically increase its profits at the expense of the ride-hailing app's drivers and passengers. Research by academics at New York's Columbia Business School concluded that the Silicon Valley company had implemented "algorithmic price discrimination" that had raised "rider fares and cut driver pay on billions of … trips, systematically, selectively, and opaquely"."

"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."

""Equal access does imply equal opportunities," says the report, which goes on to point out that while anyone can use the internet to learn about the world, improve their skills or apply for a well-paid job, disadvantaged students are less likely to be aware of the opportunities that digital technology offers. "They may not have the knowledge or skills required to turn online opportunities into real opportunities," the report says."