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"The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns - art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make. Therefore our task right now - as humans - is to make sure that in the following decades as our biological numbers start to shrink on this planet, that we can repopulate it with a sufficient number of synthetic agents, bots, and robots with sufficient intelligence, grit, perseverance, and moral training to take over the economy in time to keep our living standards rising. We are not replacing existing humans with bots, nor are we replacing unborn humans with bots. Rather we are replacing never-to-be-born humans with bots, and the relationship that we have with those synthetic agents and ems, will be highly mutual. We build an economy around their needs, and propelled by their labor, and rewarding their work, but all of this is in service of our own definition of progress and human success."

"Anthropic has an "AI policy" for job candidates that discourages the technology from being used during the application process. The company says it wants to field candidates' human communication skills. Anthropic is known for its AI innovations-but the company doesn't want job candidates using the technology."

"There is also a lot of research that both third-party fact-checking and Community Notes can be really effective at reducing misperceptions. But - and this is a significant caveat - neither works well as a complete solution for lies on social media. When Twitter was working on Birdwatch, they claimed it would "not replace other labels and fact checks Twitter currently uses". But as I've written about before, Musk scaled back Twitter's Trust and Safety team significantly and positioned Community Notes as the replacement. As Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, told WIRED, "The intention of Birdwatch was always to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Twitter's other misinformation methods." In fact, research on various attempts to mitigate COVID misinformation found that a layered, "Swiss cheese" approach might work best, where some efforts work well sometimes, but collectively the system catches most falsehoods."

"We both agree: The status quo, with these giant private companies controlling all of social media, is terrible. But if digital spaces really are public places, should the government play a part in managing them? Below, we attempt a speculative thought exercise about the future of platform ownership: Should governments control social media?"

"Meta is facing a second set of lawsuits in Africa over the psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse. Lawyers are gearing up for court action against a company contracted by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, after meeting moderators at a facility in Ghana that is understood to employ about 150 people. Moderators working for Majorel in Accra claim they have suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia and substance abuse as a direct consequence of the work they do checking extreme content."

"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."

"When was the last time your chatbot disagreed with you? Probably only when you told it to. Companion AIs-like Replika, Nomi, or Character.ai-are tuned to be supportive, affirming, and endlessly agreeable. That might feel good in the moment. But what happens when people start preferring digital "friends" over real ones-especially when real ones come with friction?"

"Dartmouth College experts recently conducted the first clinical trial of an AI chatbot designed specifically for providing mental health assistance. Called Therabot, the AI assistant was tested in the form of an app among participants diagnosed with serious mental health problems across the United States. "The improvements in symptoms we observed were comparable to what is reported for traditional outpatient therapy, suggesting this AI-assisted approach may offer clinically meaningful benefits," notes Nicholas Jacobson, associate professor of biomedical data science and psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine."

""Grok is a new rebel. Asking Grok questions will not put anyone in trouble. The right-wing has also responded by asking questions about Rahul Gandhi. And then it has become a competitive thing. This is not surprising at all," says Mr Sinha of Alt News. "Other AI bots are programmed to give politically correct answers to questions like 'Who's better, Congress or BJP?'. Grok, however, seems to lack that filter and appears unafraid to tackle controversial issues head-on," he adds."

"'Profiting from misery': how TikTok makes money from child begging livestreams Exploitation fears as people in extreme poverty perform stunts and beg for virtual gifts"

"Anvi Ahuja noticed a "freaky" new text message from a number she didn't know right after getting back to her downtown Toronto apartment last month.  The text was a transcript of the conversation she'd just had with her roommates during their eight-minute Lyft ride home from a friend's place. "I was like 'who is tapping me?'" Ahuja said. "The driver didn't inform us that we could be recorded.""

"How is a 14-year-old supposed to understand that such chatbots work a lot like an echo - that the more he spoke and the greater his longings, the deeper the longings of his "girlfriend" became too, and no matter what he said, the more she encouraged him. The more he thought about death, the more often she asked about it. She was, after all, merely the reflection of his own voice, albeit one trained by a vast amount of data. At some point, Sewell must have stopped believing that the real world was outside of this labyrinth."

""Deeply disturbing" research exposes how easy it is for children to encounter inappropriate content and interact unsupervised with adults on the gaming platform Roblox. It comes as parents shared their serious concerns about children experiencing addiction, seeing traumatising content and being approached by strangers on the hugely popular website and app. Roblox acknowledges that children using the platform may be exposed to harmful content and "bad actors". It says it is working hard to fix this, but that industry-wide collaboration and government intervention are needed."

"An NHS hospital in west London is pioneering the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help check for skin cancer. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital said its AI technology has been approved to give patients the all-clear without having to see a doctor. Once photos are uploaded to the system, the technology analyses and interprets the images, with 99% accuracy in diagnosing benign cases, the hospital said. Thousands of NHS patients have had urgent cancer checks using the AI tool, freeing up consultants to focus on the most serious cases and bringing down waiting lists. The system conducts the checks in minutes, with medical photographers taking photos of suspicious moles and lesions using an iPhone and the DERM app, developed by UK firm Skin Analytics."

"A rise in online racism driven by fake images is "just the start of a coming problem" after the latest release of X's AI software, online abuse experts have warned. Concerns were raised after computer-generated images created using Grok, X's generative artificial intelligence chatbot, flooded the social media site in December last year. Signify, an organisation that works with prominent groups and clubs in sports to track and report online hate, said it has seen an increase in reports of abuse since Grok's latest update, and believes the introduction of photorealistic AI will make it far more prevalent."

"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."

"Cancer patients in west Norfolk are benefiting from a new surgical robot. The £1m machine called Versius allows surgeons to perform long, complex procedures more comfortably. It has been bought by the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King's Lynn and is expected to be used to treat 100 patients in its first year. Currently it is used for colorectal surgery, but the plan is to use it for urology and gynaecological procedures as well."