"For many experts however, the greatest risk to the internet isn't sabotage, espionage, or even rogue anchors - but the uneven spread of the cable infrastructure that threads across the globe, binding the world's digital networks together. "There aren't cables everywhere," says Starosielski. "There is a concentration in the north Atlantic Ocean connecting the United States and Europe but there are not that many in the South Atlantic.""

"The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked a panic about computers gaining power over humankind. But the real threat comes from falling for the hype"

"First, the problems were manually translated into formal mathematical language for our systems to understand. In the official competition, students submit answers in two sessions of 4.5 hours each. Our systems solved one problem within minutes and took up to three days to solve the others. AlphaProof solved two algebra problems and one number theory problem by determining the answer and proving it was correct. This included the hardest problem in the competition, solved by only five contestants at this year's IMO. AlphaGeometry 2 proved the geometry problem, while the two combinatorics problems remained unsolved."

"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."

"Last week we reported how Facebook and Instagram's algorithms are luring young men into the Manosphere. This week, we explore what happens when TikTok's algorithm is unleashed on a blank account in the absence of any interactions such as liking or commenting. In April, Guardian Australia set up a new TikTok account on a completely blank smartphone linked to a new, unused email address. A John Doe profile was set up as a generic 24-year-old male. We scrolled through the feed every couple of weeks."

"It's an interesting question. I'm almost not sure how to answer it, because there is no thinking happening on the part of an LLM. A large language model takes the prompts and the text that you give it and tries to come up with something that is responsive and useful in relation to that text. And what's interesting is that certain people - I'm thinking of Mark Andreessen most prominently - have talked about how amazing this is conceptually from an education perspective, because with LLMs you will have this infinitely patient teacher. But that's actually not what you want from a teacher. You want, in some sense, an impatient teacher who's going to push your thinking, who's going to try to understand what you're bringing to any task or educational experience, lift up the strengths that you have, and then work on building your knowledge in areas where you don't yet have it. I don't think LLMs are capable of doing any of that. As you say, there's no real thinking going on. It's just a prediction machine. There's an interaction, I guess, but it's an illusion. Is that the word you would use? Yes. It's the illusion of a conversation. "

"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.""

"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."

"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"."

"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."

""The problem is that we're really stuck in a digital monoculture, where decades of anti-competitive practices have created it so that just one system is responsible for so much of what we rely on from everything from airlines to hospitals to schools," Mir said. "One mistake that creates a big failure, it happens, it's an inevitability. But for it to have this sort of impact is a policy failure.""

"A source told Reuters that OpenAI has tested a model internally that achieved a 90 percent score on a challenging test of AI math skills, though it again couldn't confirm if this was related to project Strawberry. But another two sources reported seeing demos from the Q* project that involved models solving math and science questions that would be beyond today's leading commercial AIs."

"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."

"The Ukrainian military has used AI-equipped drones mounted with explosives to fly into battlefields and strike at Russian oil refineries. American AI systems identified targets in Syria and Yemen for airstrikes earlier this year. The Israel Defense Forces, meanwhile, used another kind of AI-enabled targeting system to label as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants during the first weeks of its war in Gaza."

"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."

"I started to feel that propaganda had fundamentally changed. The types of actors who could create it and spread it had shifted, and the impact it was having on our society was quite significant, but we weren't using the word. We were using words like "misinformation" or "disinformation", which seemed to be misdiagnoses of the problem. And so I wanted to write a book that asked, in this media ecosystem, what does propaganda look like?"

"In recent months, people have shared digitally altered sexual images of the new deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and celebrities including Taylor Swift. But you don't need to be famous to appear in one of these images or videos - the technology is readily accessible, and can easily be used by ex-partners or strangers to humiliate and degrade. As a tech luddite, I was still under the impression that one needed some digital skills to commit this kind of abuse. Not so. You can simply take someone's image, put it into a "nudify" app, and the app's AI will generate a fake nude picture. "It's quick and easy to create these images, even for anyone with absolutely no technical skills," Jake Moore, an adviser at a cybersecurity firm, told me."

"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."

"In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that 'novel solutions' such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as 'magic bullets' for the cancer crisis, but 'none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem'. A 'common fallacy' of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create 'additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy'. 'We caution against technocentric approaches without robust evaluation from an equity perspective,' the paper concludes."

"And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go? In the last decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and 750 youth centres shut down. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots music venues are closing every week. The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can't hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards. No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures - the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control."