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"Disappearing messages is a feature offered by apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving users the option to have conversations that self-destruct. They're not the only platforms that have tapped into the allure of digital ephemerality. The very premise of Snapchat is that content is only viewable for a short window; Instagram stories similarly vanish after 24 hours. Those who are chronically online may remember the last day of X's own foray into expiring content called "fleets", when countless users threw whatever remaining posting-caution they had to the wind to share revealing, horny or outright unhinged posts for one final hurrah before the feature itself vanished. I can't tell you what people posted or link you to evidence of this because, well, it's gone."

"Search for Common Ground designed BridgeBot together with TangibleAI after our research revealed that most people shy away - or turn away - from discussions online once they heat up. We learned that few people felt comfortable responding, and even fewer felt that they could be constructive. BridgeBot acts like a companion to help social media users think differently about how to deal with differences, by equipping them with skills and perspectives on empathy, identity, perception and non-violent communication."

"Deepfakes have arrived to US elections, with a faked audio call purporting to be Joe Biden reaching voters in New Hampshire earlier this year. Artificial intelligence tools allow people to create spoofed audio easily and cheaply - so easily and cheaply that a journalist can do it! We created some fake audio clips of both Biden and Donald Trump using Parrot AI, an app with audio renditions of public figures that users can input words into. You can make audio of what sounds like Biden, Trump or a host of other high-profile speaking, and it sounds real-ish."

"Google has put a temporary block on its new artificial intelligence model producing images of people after it portrayed German second world war soldiers and Vikings as people of colour. The tech company said it would stop its Gemini model generating images of people after social media users posted examples of images generated by the tool that depicted some historical figures - including popes and the founding fathers of the US - in a variety of ethnicities and genders."

"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.""

"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."

"For Bejar, the controls in place on social networks like Instagram are not sufficient because they turn "inherently human interactions into an objective assessment". There are too few options for users to hide content or flag comments and DMs and explain why it made them uncomfortable even if it doesn't violate Meta's specific policies, he said. "There's a question of how clearly bad does the content need to be to warrant removal? And that means you set a line somewhere and have to define a criterion where either a computer system or a human can evaluate a piece of content," Bejar said."

"The use of "geofence warrants" have exploded in recent years, in large part thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones coupled with hungry data companies like Google vacuuming up and storing huge amounts of its users' location data, which becomes obtainable by law enforcement requests. Police can use geofence warrants (also known as reverse-location warrants) to demand that Google turn over information on which users' devices were in a particular geographic area at a certain point in time."

"TikTok faces questions over safeguards for child users after a Guardian investigation found that moderators were being told to allow under-13s to stay on the platform if they claimed their parents were overseeing their accounts."

"This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt."

"The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew - but never disclosed - it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an "open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents. In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage"."

"Nepal has said it will ban TikTok, citing negative effects on the country's "social harmony". The popular video-sharing platform, which has around a billion monthly users, has faced restrictions in many countries for alleged breaches of data rules and for the potentially harmful impact on youth of some content. "The decision to ban was made today, and relevant authorities are currently addressing the technical issues," the minister for communications and information technology, Rekha Sharma, said on Monday."

"A boarding prep school in West Sussex, Cottesmore School, has made history by appointing an AI robot, Abigail Bailey, as its "principal headteacher". Created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence developer, the robot is designed to support the school's headmaster, Tom Rogerson, by providing advice on various issues such as supporting staff members and helping pupils with ADHD. Abigail Bailey functions similarly to the AI service ChatGPT, where users ask questions and receive answers from the chatbot's algorithms. The AI principal has been developed with extensive knowledge in machine learning and educational management, allowing it to analyze vast amounts of data. According to Mr. Rogerson, having the AI robot to assist him is calming and reassuring. He considers the role of a school leader to be lonely and believes that having an entity to rely on is invaluable. He also intends to make the publicly-available online robot accessible to state school headteachers."

"Meta has apologised after inserting the word "terrorist" into the profile bios of some Palestinian Instagram users, in what the company says was a bug in auto-translation. The issue, which was first reported by 404media, affected users with the word "Palestinian" written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word "alhamdulillah" written in Arabic. When auto-translated to English the phrase read: "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom." TikTok user YtKingKhan posted earlier this week about the issue, noting that different combinations still translated to "terrorist"."

"Word of the layoffs comes over a year after the company made a big hiring push, doubling its size to over 500 people. Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom that has stuffed chatbots into every corner of the tech industry, including coding. That presents clear challenges for a personal coding help forum, as developers get comfortable with AI coding assistance and the very tools that do that are blended into products they use. AI-generated coding answers have also posed problems for the company over the past year. The company issued a temporary ban on users generating answers with the help of an AI chatbot in December last year, but its alleged under-enforcement led to a months-long strike among moderators that was resolved in August; the ban is still in place today. Stack Overflow also announced it would start charging AI companies to train on its site. "

"Racists on the notorious troll site 4chan are using a powerful new and free AI-powered image generator service offered by Microsoft to create antisemitic propaganda, according to posts reviewed by Bellingcat. Users of 4chan, which has frequently hosted hate speech and played home to posts by mass shooters, tasked Bing Image Creator to create photo-realistic antisemitic caricatures of Jews and, in recent days, shared images created by the platform depicting Orthodox men preparing to eat a baby, carrying migrants across the US border (the latter a nod to the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory), and committing the 9/11 attacks."

"The folks at Signal are taking one of the four post-quantum cryptography algorithms that have been chosen by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to withstand attacks by quantum computers, but instead of using it to replace their existing public-key encryption system, they are layering the new algorithm on top of what they already have. "We are augmenting our existing cryptosystems," they say, "such that an attacker must break both systems in order to compute the keys protecting people's communications." And they will be rolling out this augmented system to all users in the next few months."

""We know [geofence warrants] are a ubiquitous policing tool, and as long as companies make it possible to comply with these sorts of court orders, they're putting their users at risk," Fox Cahn said. "Whether it's Google or Uber or Lyft or payment companies, by segregating their user data in a way which prevents the aggregated location searches, you can keep that data while preventing compliance with a geofence warrant.""

"Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is considering charging users in the EU €13 (£11) a month to access an ad-free version of Instagram or Facebook on their phones, as the company grapples with regulatory pressure on how it uses people's data. Meta is also weighing a €17 charge to use Instagram and Facebook without adverts on desktop, according to sources close to the discussions. Accessing both apps on smartphones would cost about €19 a month."

"Ah, but isn't creativity a slippery concept - something that's hard to define but that we nevertheless recognise when we see it? That hasn't stopped psychologists from trying to measure it, though, via tools such as the alternative uses test and the similar Torrance test. And it turns out that one LLM - GPT-4 - beats 91% of humans on the former and 99% of them on the latter. So as the inveterate artificial intelligence user Ethan Mollick puts it: "We are running out of creativity tests that AIs cannot ace.""