"The European Commission has asked X to hand over internal documents about its algorithms, as it steps up its investigation into whether Elon Musk's social media platform has breached EU rules on content moderation. The EU's executive branch told the company it wanted to see internal documentation about its "recommender system", which makes content suggestions to users, and any recent changes made to it, by 15 February. X has been under investigation since December 2023 under the EU's content law - known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) - over how it tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation. The company has been accused of manipulating the platform's systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility over other political groups."

"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."

"That comment sparked interest and outrage, raising concerns that the kind of AI-generated "slop" that's prominent on Facebook would soon come straight from Meta and disrupt the core utility of social media - fostering human-to-human connection. As users began to sniff out some of Meta's AI accounts this week, the backlash grew, in part because of the way the AI accounts disingenuously described themselves as actual people with racial and sexual identities."

"Put more simply? We're in the midst of a digital slopaggedon, with the felt everyday impacts ranging from mild irritants like graphs about "uncoked kermelss" to more serious information erosions - the replacing of images of famous artworks and historical events with AI-generated fakes, for example, or the flooding of social media with fake AI-generated imagery during environmental disasters."

"This cycle is particularly painful for non-engineers because they lack the mental models to understand what's actually going wrong. When an experienced developer encounters a bug, they can reason about potential causes and solutions based on years of pattern recognition. Without this background, you're essentially playing whack-a-mole with code you don't fully understand."

"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."

"What we know about reducing misinformation Where the evidence stands for six strategies used to reduce the spread and impact of misinformation, according to the Prosocial Design Network"

"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."

"LEAKED META RULES: USERS ARE FREE TO POST "MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS ARE TRASH!" OR "TRANS PEOPLE ARE IMMORAL" Under Meta's relaxed hate speech rules, users can now post "I'm a proud racist" or "Black people are more violent than whites.""

"Umi is a digital wellness platform and personalized family wellness coach that integrates AI and a community of experts. By consolidating wellness data into personalized, actionable pathways for every family, Umi helps people build healthy habits and connect through wellness routines that work for everyone. And by leveraging the power of Anthropic's Claude AI model, Umi benefits from the advanced reasoning capabilities to navigate the unique challenges faced by individuals and families."

"Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a "zero-click" future, where search referral traffic-a mainstay of the web since before Google existed-vanishes from the scene.  I got a vision of that future last June, when I got a push alert from the Perplexity app on my phone. Perplexity is a startup trying to reinvent web search. But in addition to delivering deep answers to queries, it will create entire articles about the news of the day, cobbled together by AI from different sources. "

"The promise of Community Notes lies in its transparency and its ability to crowdsource moderation from across ideological divides. By emphasizing consensus, the system avoids the mistrust or perception of bias with platform-driven fact-checking or content removal. Last year YouTube adopted this approach, but as a complement to other products such as information panels, or their recent disclosure requirement when content is altered or synthetic."

"Zuckerberg has said that the platform, which has more than 3 billion people worldwide logging on to its apps every day, will be adopting an Elon Musk-style community notes format for policing what is and isn't acceptable speech on its platforms. Starting in the US, the company will be dramatically shifting the Overton window towards whoever can shout the loudest. The Meta CEO all but admitted that the move was politically motivated. "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression," he said, confessing that "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender […] are out of touch with mainstream discourse". He admitted to past "censorship mistakes" - here, probably meaning the past four years of tamping down political speech while a Democratic president was in office - and said he would "work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more"."

"Mats Steen's double life was first explored in 2019 by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and then in a BBC News article, which inspired Norwegian film-maker Benjamin Ree to tell the story as a documentary. "I think his story asks some questions that are really relevant today," he says. "Is it possible to become friends with someone you've never met? Is it possible to experience love with somebody you've never met? And how close a friendship can you have with someone you've never spoken to, just written to? And at the same time, I think it says something about the generational gap, about my generation's fascination for gaming - I'm 35 years old - and being in a virtual world. Mats really came of age within that game. Also, both Mats's friends and family have told me that towards the end of his life, he really wanted to have mattered. He seemed to have lived such a short life, but he wanted to be remembered.""

"Meet the Tokyo candidate for governor who live-streamed for 17 days straight, answering 8,600 questions from potential voters. How? Enter 'AI Takahiro', an avatar created by 33-year old candidate Anno Takahiro. The avatar's livestream on YouTube was just one part of this former software engineer-turned-science-fiction writer's ground-breaking campaign, born out of frustration with the one-sided nature of political communication."

"Halfway through their three-hour conversation, Brown said something that caught me off-guard. In hindsight, it isn't all that surprising-as long as you're aware of the latest advances-but it may still shock you coming from a physics university professor: A lot of physics professors are using [large language models] just as personal tutors.1"

"The research refers to tech executives discussing how AI models will be able to predict a user's intent and actions. It quotes the chief executive of the largest AI chipmaker, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who said last year that models will "figure out what is your intention, what is your desire, what are you trying to do, given the context, and present the information to you in the best possible way"."

"But we're not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate us totally. Silicon Valley's dirtiest design feature - which is everywhere once you spot it - is the infinite scroll, likened to the "bottomless soup bowl" experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a soup bowl if it keeps refilling. An online feed that constantly "refills" manipulates the brain's dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven loops of endless "seeking" can become addictive."

"I. Neither AI nor other people will take your job: While fears have shifted from AI taking jobs to people using AI replacing others, the reality is that you will most likely replace your non-AI-using self by adopting AI tools."