"Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in "maybe possibly some remote chance," but as in "that is the obvious thing that would happen." It's not that you can't, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it's that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers."

"Actually, ChatGPT was freaking out in many ways yesterday, but one recurring theme was that it would be prompted with a normal question - typically something involving the tech business or the user's job - and respond with something flowery to the point of unintelligibility. For instance, according to an X post by architect Sean McGuire, the chatbot advised him at one point to ensure that "sesquipedalian safes are cross-keyed and the consul's cry from the crow's nest is met by beatine and wary hares a'twist and at winch in the willow.""

"The organisation is a pioneer of the "ransomware as a service" model, whereby it outsources the target selection and attacks to a network of semi-independent "affiliates", providing them with the tools and infrastructure and taking a commission on the ransoms in return. As well as ransomware, which typically works by encrypting data on infected machines and demanding a payment for providing the decryption key, LockBit copied stolen data and threatened to publish it if the fee was not paid, promising to delete the copies on receipt of a ransom."

"The end result of that was, of course, the foundational contribution that the French revolution made to democracy. But now here we are, those of us living in liberal democratic states that depend on an educated, engaged population for their continued existence, facing a 21st-century arbre de Cracovie. Except this one is incalculably more ubiquitous, more instantaneous, more overwhelming, and more powerful. And as voters around the world proceed through the biggest election year in history, I find myself increasingly wondering: can democracy survive social media?"

"The problem extends beyond the Pegasus project. Installed in Mexico City is one of the largest urban surveillance systems in the Americas: El Centro de Comando, Control, Cómputo, Comunicaciones y Contacto Ciudadano, better known as El C5. The network, connected to panic buttons and command centers, is spread over 1,485 kilometers with software designed to automatically detect license plates. On top of that, the number of installed cameras grew from 18 million to 65 million between 2018 and 2022, with stated plans to add at least an additional 16 million more. Despite its apparent pre-eminence, issues have arisen with the C5, from false identifications to mishandling of personal data. Technological malfunctions have also been shown to impact the outcomes of criminal cases because of the assumption of objectivity that video surveillance supposedly construes. The sprawling C5 system is dwarfed only by the Titan, an expansive intelligence and security database, both in terms of scale and threat to civil liberties. The software is used by several Mexican state governments to combine location data with other private information, including financial, government, and telecom data, to geolocate individuals across the country in real time. Governmental officials have been criticized for the controversial use of the database to target public figures, but, more problematically, access to Titan-enabled intel can be gained through an underground market, making it a further liability. The extent to which artificial intelligence has been incorporated into the C5 and Titan is still not clear, but the specter of surveillance remains large and is set to cause more worries with the addition of new smart technologies."

"Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?"

"But there have been corresponding sacrifices. Over 20 years, I have turned over whole areas of competence, memory, authority and independence to the machines in my life. Along the way, I have become anxious about problems that didn't used to exist, indecisive over choices I never used to have to make, and angry about things I would once have been wholly unaware of."

"In the last year or so, though, the rise of AI has upended that equation. For many publishers and platforms, having their data crawled for training data felt less like trading and more like stealing. "What we found pretty quickly with the AI companies," Stubblebine says, "is not only was it not an exchange of value, we're getting nothing in return. Literally zero." When Stubblebine announced last fall that Medium would be blocking AI crawlers, he wrote that "AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers." "

"Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world. Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies - including Elon Musk's X - are also signing on to the accord."

"Air Canada came under further criticism for later attempting to distance itself from the error by claiming that the bot was "responsible for its own actions". Amid a broader push by companies to automate services, the case - the first of its kind in Canada - raises questions about the level of oversight companies have over the chat tools."

"Jailed former prime minister Imran Khan on Saturday claimed victory in the Pakistan general elections 2024 through a pre-recorded audio-visual message created using artificial intelligence, hours after his political rival and ex-PM Nawaz Sharif claimed to have won the election."

"Should Teens Have Access to Disappearing Messages? A recent lawsuit argues that Snapchat causes harm to young people through its basic design."

"AI-generated voices are extremely convincing and can converse without the obvious repetitions and scripted lines, making a dream tool for fraudsters, marketers and political campaigns. The Federal Communications Commission sees the costs of all this coming and is banning their use in robocalls. "Bad actors are using AI-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities and misinform votes," said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a press release. "State attorneys general will now have new tools to crack down on these scams and ensure the public is protected from fraud and misinformation.""

"Facebook and Instagram users will start seeing labels on AI-generated images that appear on their social media feeds, part of a broader tech industry initiative to sort between what's real and not. Meta said Tuesday it's working with industry partners on technical standards that will make it easier to identify images and eventually video and audio generated by artificial intelligence tools."

" A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."

"What bothered Jeff, however, was not so much the loot boxes or the skins in themselves but another phenomenon that they have spawned: skins gambling. This works like any other casino. You load up your account with funds, place a bet, watch the graphics spin and either win or lose. The big difference in this case is that the casino taking your bet has no gambling licence and, in some cases, no reliable mechanism to stop under-18s getting their first taste of gambling - via an online ecosystem that is, to many parents, a total mystery."

"Customize the phone as your child grows The Bark Phone enables you to allow or remove features to tailor the experience to your kid."

"This week the Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell had her photo edited to enlarge her breasts and insert a crop into her top that hadn't been there. Having previously been a victim of image-based abuse, Purcell said the incident felt violating, and that the explanation given by Nine News failed to address the issue. For its part, Nine blamed an "automation" tool in Photoshop - the recently launched "generative fill", which, as the name suggests, fills in the blanks of an image when it is resized using artificial intelligence. Nine said the company was working from an already-cropped version of the original image, and used the tool to expand beyond the image's existing borders. But whoever did alter the image presumably still exported the modified version without considering the impact of their changes."

"The tools - which aim to cut the time and cost of filtering mountains of job applications and drive workplace efficiency - are enticing to employers. But Schellmann concludes they are doing more harm than good. Not only are many of the hiring tools based on troubling pseudoscience (for example, the idea that the intonation of our voice can predict how successful we will be in a job doesn't stand up, says Schellmann), they can also discriminate."

"Cory blames the gang who trafficked her daughter for destroying her life. She also blames Instagram, which she believes played a critical role in her daughter's sex trafficking. "If Instagram didn't exist, this wouldn't have happened to my daughter," she says. "Instagram is why it was so easy [for these people] to do this.""