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"TikTok quantified the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit: 260 videos. Kentucky authorities note that while it might seem a lot, TikTok videos can be just a few seconds long. "Thus, in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform," the state investigators concluded."

"Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store. "Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'." Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch."

"The research, conducted at Vision and AI Lab of the Department of Computational and Data Sciences, offers a novel approach to mitigating bias in popular image-generative models without the need for additional data or model retraining."

"Police officers are watching TikTok in an attempt to catch far-right demonstrators livestreaming self-incriminating footage of their illegal behaviour. TikTok's Live function has become one of the defining outlets for coverage of this summer's riots, with hundreds of thousands of viewers watching live streams of rioting over the last week in cities such as Stoke, Leeds, Hull and Nottingham."

"These advergames (adverts presented in the format of a video game), typically splash corporate branding over a set of game mechanics simple enough for Roblox's young player base. And despite broader allegations of a lack of child safeguarding levelled against Roblox (which they deny), corporates are rushing to build them. Brands from Walmart to Wimbledon, McDonald's to Gucci, Nike to the BBC have all launched advergames on the platform. Some have been visited hundreds of thousands of times, others tens of millions, all while Roblox courts further brand involvement by touting its huge, young user base as a big draw in a crowded advertising market."

"However, this relationship between social media use and political polarization seems to depend a lot on duration of exposure and does not appear in all the samples surveyed. Thus, recent studies exploring the effects of stopping Facebook and Instagram use failed to observe that social media noticeably polarize users' political opinions. Let us always remember that narratives pointing to threats on society enjoy a considerable competitive advantage on the market of ideas and conversations, due to their attractiveness to our minds. One should thus approach the question of the relationship between social media, and political hostility and polarisation, by avoiding the symmetrical pitfalls of naive optimism and collective panic."

"Apple is banking on its upcoming AI features to boost iPhone sales especially in China, where demand has been lagging. But there's a problem: ChatGPT - soon to be integrated into Siri - is banned in China. "

"Security fears about Chinese influence over Bytedance, TikTok's owner, are undoubtedly part of the reason why UK politicians have been reluctant to get involved, and the political context is also different - Biden is reacting to Donald Trump's social media clout - but US strategists such as Teddy Goff have suggested that building up an army of TikTokers who can share and amplify political messages is vital."

"The greatest gains came when gaming met needs the kids couldn't meet in real life. Different games support different aspects of well-being depending on how they are designed."

"Recent experiments suggest AI peer reviews tend to be surprisingly good, with 82.4% of scientists finding AI peer reviews more useful than at least some of the human reviews they received from on a paper, and other work suggests AI is reasonably good at spotting errors, though not as good as humans, yet. Regardless of how good AI gets, the scientific publishing system was not made to support AI writers writing to AI reviews for AI opinions for papers later summarized by AI. The system is going to break."

"A new AI-infused classroom management tool with facial recognition capabilities has garnered attention recently with promises to take attendance, assess the emotional states of students, and monitor classes for distraction, boredom and confusion. But the technology and similar developments have raised numerous legal, ethical, and civil liberties questions similar to those surrounding campus safety surveillance programs and test proctoring programs widely adopted during the COVID pandemic."

"huge public corporations launch products that are known to "hallucinate" "

"ChatGPT can help with reframing thoughts and situations, similar to cognitive behavioural therapy - but "some clients can start to use it as a substitute for therapy", Masterson says. "I've had clients telling me they've already processed on their own, because of what they've read - it's incredibly dangerous." She has had to ask some clients to cease their self-experiments while in treatment with her. "It's about you and me in the room," she says. "You just cannot have that with text - let alone a conglomeration of lots of other people's texts." Self-directed chatbot therapy also risks being counterproductive, shrinking the area of inquiry. "It's quite affirmative; I challenge clients," says Masterson. ChatGPT could actually cement patterns as it draws, over and again, from the same database: "The more you try to refine it, the more refined the message becomes.""

"But do these options make Bluesky a more prosocial experience? Prosocial design is a "set of design patterns, features and processes which foster healthy interactions between individuals and which create the conditions for those interactions to thrive by ensuring individuals' safety, wellbeing and dignity," according to the Prosocial Design Network. Giving users control over their feeds is a step in this direction, but it's not a new concept. The Panotpykon Foundation's Safe by Default briefing advocates for human-centric recommender systems that prioritize conscious user choice and empowerment. They propose features like: Sliders for content preferences (e.g., informative vs. entertaining content), A "hard stop" button to suppress unwanted content, and Prompts for users to define their interests or preferences."

"Her intervention emerged after Sir Paul McCartney became the latest star to back calls for laws to stop mass copyright theft by generative AI companies, warning the technology "could just take over". Bush, who shot to fame with Wuthering Heights in 1978 but whose last album was released in 2011, gave a rare interview this year in which she said she was "very keen" to make a new album, saying: "I've got lots of ideas … it's been a long time.""

"Users who once came to Facebook to connect with friends and family are increasingly complaining of random, spammy, junk content - much of it apparently generated by artificial intelligence - showing up in their feeds. Sometimes it's obviously fake, AI-generated images, like the now-infamous "Shrimp Jesus." Other times, it's old posts from real creators that look like they're being reshared by bot accounts for engagement. In some cases, it's pages sharing streams of seemingly benign but random content - memes or movie clips, shared every few hours."

"The Google owner, Alphabet, has dropped its promise not to use artificial intelligence for purposes such as developing weapons and surveillance tools. The US technology company said on Tuesday, just before it reported lower-than-forecast earnings, that it had updated its ethical guidelines around AI, and they no longer referred to not pursuing technologies that could "cause or are likely to cause overall harm". Google's AI head, Demis Hassabis, said the guidelines were being overhauled in a changing world and that AI should protect "national security"."

"One company working on that is Denmark's Corti, which has developed AI that can listen to healthcare consultations, either over the phone or in person, and suggest follow-up questions, prompts, treatment options, as well as automating note taking. Corti says its technology processes about 150,000 patient interactions per day across hospitals, GP surgeries and healthcare institutions across Europe and the US, totalling about 100 million encounters per year. "The idea is the physician can spend more time with a patient," says Lars Maaløe, co-founder and chief technology officer at Corti. He says the technology can suggest questions based on previous conversations it has heard in other healthcare situations."

"Both industries are at an impasse: tech insisting that enforcing copyright laws on AI is unfeasible and regressive, creatives that opting out is unworkable and unjust. It is up to government to foster a fair agreement in which both flourish. This is a pivotal moment for our cultural future. The artistic community has spoken. Now ministers must listen, take their concerns seriously and respond. We must protect our creators at all costs."

"'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."