"OpenAI has taken ChatGPT offline in Italy after the government's Data Protection Authority on Friday temporarily banned the chatbot and launched a probe over the artificial intelligence application's suspected breach of privacy rules."

"Kids aged 5 or younger who experience two or more hours of daily screen time are nearly eight times more likely to be diagnosed with focus-related conditions including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), says Michael Manos, director of the ADHD Center for Evaluation and Treatment at the Cleveland Clinic.   That's because these devices likely impact the brain, he explains. Electronics allow for repeated stimulation and immediate gratification every few seconds. And when we become accustomed to such rapid and frequent stimulation, it can be hard to focus when things in the real world aren't as mesmerizing. "Screen time makes the regular world seem rather dull, like watching a plant grow," says Manos. "

"AI and the American Smile How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression."

"The question of why AI generates fake academic papers relates to how large language models work: they are probabilistic, in that they map the probability over sequences of words. As Dr David Smerdon of the University of Queensland puts it: "Given the start of a sentence, it will try to guess the most likely words to come next.""

"According to the website Lexica, which tracks over 10 million images and prompts generated by Stable Diffusion, Rutkowski's name has been used as a prompt around 93,000 times. Some of the world's most famous artists, such as Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci, brought up around 2,000 prompts each or less. Rutkowski's name also features as a prompt thousands of times in the Discord of another text-to-image generator, Midjourney. Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn't his. "It's been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won't be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art," Rutkowski says. "That's concerning.""

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."

"A fake, AI-generated image of Pope Francis stepping out in a stylish white puffer jacket and bejewelled crucifix racked up millions of views over the weekend - with many mistaking it for a real image. Experts fear the rapidly developing technology behind the image could soon undermine our ability to distinguish fake photos, which can be generated in seconds, from reality."

"Super-charged misinformation and the atrophy of human intelligence. By regurgitating information that is already on the internet, generative models cannot decide what is a good thing to tell a human and will repeat past mistakes made by humans, of which there are plenty."

"No matter how much our computers assure us they're backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole - from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs."

"The combination of ChatGPT with its Wolfram plug-in just scored 96% in a UK Maths A-level paper, the exam taken at the end of school, as a crucial metric for university entrance. (That compares to 43% for ChatGPT alone). If this doesn't shock you, it should. Maths A-level (like its equivalent in many other countries) is held up as the required and essential qualification for much of our populations-the way to be prepared for our upcoming AI age. And yet, here it is, done by those very AIs, better than most of our students."

"On Mar 16, 2023, The Copyright Office initiated an effort to investigate copyright law and policy concerns related to Generative AI. "This initiative is in direct response to the recent striking advances in generative AI technologies and their rapidly growing use by individuals and businesses. The Copyright Office has received requests from Congress and members of the public, including creators and AI users, to examine the issues raised for copyright, and it is already receiving applications for registration of works including AI-generated content.""

"The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has signed sweeping social media legislation requiring explicit parental permissions for anyone under 18 to use platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. He also signed a bill prohibiting social media companies from employing techniques that could cause minors to develop an "addiction" to the platforms."

"Tan, however, has misgivings. He says: "AI is in a sense cool and fun in the beginning but then you realise it's actually dangerous. It can imitate people and make them do things on screen and then you can have a whole societal belief that those people are disgraced for whatever they did on screen and in reality it wasn't even them. It's just a ploy to wind people up. "You see it in warfare, which I think Russia tried with Ukraine. There was this use that had the Ukrainian president saying they were giving up and soldiers should put their weapons down. That was done with AI. A simple tool which doesn't look dangerous suddenly can be very dangerous because now you are affecting reality with it.""

"First, the authors expect that 80% of the US workforce could see at least 10% of their tasks affected by GPT. In other words, most Americans could benefit at least a bit from these LLMs."

"The new tool was recently unveiled by Wonder Dynamics founders Nikola Todorovic, and Tye Sheridan, star of Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. The above video showcases the capabilities of Wonder Studio, where an amateur filmmaker can use their footage of an individual and replace them with a variety of different CGI characters. The video shows Wonder Studio is as simple as dragging and dropping different CGI characters into real-life actors within the footage, while also having more in-depth options for lighting, motion, grain, color, and more."

"In Ecuador, journalist Lenin Artieda opened an envelope he received in the newsroom of Ecuavisa TV. Inside was a USB flash drive. But when he inserted the device into his laptop, it exploded. Fortunately, Artieda only suffered minor injuries."

"In early December, Musk called ChatGPT "scary good" and warned, "We are not far from dangerously strong AI." But Altman has been warning the public just as much, if not more, even as he presses ahead with OpenAI's work. Last month, he worried about "how people of the future will view us" in a series of tweets. "We also need enough time for our institutions to figure out what to do," he wrote. "Regulation will be critical and will take time to figure out…having time to understand what's happening, how people want to use these tools, and how society can co-evolve is critical.""

"For many years, even TikTok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But TikTok couldn't resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop."