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"Every time I see a news story blaming a selfie for a death, I also see a missed opportunity. If social media was powerful enough to draw a person to that place, and inspire them to take a photo, then surely it can also be powerful enough to reach that person with a powerful message about responsible recreation."

"When the field of AI believes it is neutral, it both fails to notice biased data and builds systems that sanctify the status quo and advance the interests of the powerful. What is needed is a field that exposes and critiques systems that concentrate power, while co-creating new systems with impacted communities: AI by and for the people."

"If anything, I think in the 50s and 60s - because so few people had direct experience of computers - there was even more concern than there is now. Computers were associated with vast power. It was only with the arrival in the 1980s and 1990s of the personal computer we were sold the idea that the technology was participatory and liberal. I think we have returned, in a way, to the original fears, now we sense that these personal devices very much represent the power of vast corporations. "

"The artificial intelligence (AI) industry could consume as much energy as a country the size of the Netherlands by 2027, a new study warns. Big tech firms have scrambled to add AI-powered services since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year. They use far more power than conventional applications, making going online much more energy-intensive. However, the study also said AI's environmental impact could be less than feared if its current growth slowed. Many experts, including the report author, say such research is speculative as tech firms do not disclose enough data for an accurate prediction to be made."

"As if robocalling wasn't already enough of a problem, the advent of easily accessible, realistic AI-powered writing and synthetic voice could supercharge the practice. The FCC aims to preempt this by looking into how generated robocalls might fit under existing consumer protections. A Notice of Inquiry has been proposed by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel to be voted on at the agency's next meeting. If the vote succeeds (as it is almost certain to), the FCC would formally look into how the Telephone Consumer Protection Act empowers them to act against scammers and spammers using AI technology. But Rosenworcel was also careful to acknowledge that AI represents a potentially powerful tool for accessibility and responsiveness in phone-based interactions. "While we are aware of the challenges AI can present, there is also significant potential to use this technology to benefit communications networks and their customers-including in the fight against junk robocalls and robotexts. We need to address these opportunities and risks thoughtfully, and the effort we are launching today will help us gain more insight on both fronts," she said in a statement."

"Training a massive AI model, the size of GPT-4, would currently take about 8,000 H100 chips, and 15 megawatts of power, Nvidia said - enough to power about 30,000 typical British homes."

"If mediocre malware can power some of the largest DDoS attacks ever, and considering the sad state of security of the Internet of Things in general, we should probably brace for more cyberattacks powered by our easy-to-hack "smart" Internet of Things, as many, including ourselves, had predicted months ago."

"What the apps have done, instead of competing to serve customers and restaurants, is use Wall Street money to accumulate market power, raise barriers to entry, and then merge with each other and set up regional monopolies.The people who have invested tens of billions of dollars in the four dominant delivery apps tolerate huge short-term losses purely because they see the likelihood of monopoly power"

"The combination of software and IP in every device is a sea-change for the organization of our society. As firms have become increasingly concentrated - as monopolies have emerged in every sector - they have also figured out how to infuse their products with just enough software that they can invoke IP to control their competitors, critics, and customers. These are market power monopolies backstopped by creators' monopolies, which create IP rights that supercharge their market power."

"Artificial intelligence and cutting-edge information evaluation software program imply that underwriters can now make predictions in regards to the climate, pure disasters and senile dementia that beforehand "only God knew about", the president of one in all Japan's largest insurance coverage corporations has claimed."

"Next year's elections in Britain and the US could be marked by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, experts have warned, as generated images, text and deepfake videos go viral at the behest of swarms of AI-powered propaganda bots. Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington this week that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users."

"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."

"OpenAI has removed the account of the developer behind an artificial intelligence-powered bot impersonating the US presidential candidate Dean Phillips, saying it violated company policy. Phillips, who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic party candidacy, was impersonated by a ChatGPT-powered bot on the dean.bot site. The bot was backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers, who have started a Super Pac - a body that funds and supports political candidates - named We Deserve Better, supporting Phillips. San Francisco-based OpenAI said it had removed a developer account that violated its policies on political campaigning and impersonation. "We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent," said the company."

"In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. "It makes my writing look fancy," one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text. My students also relied heavily on AI-powered paraphrasing tools such as Quillbot. Paraphrasing well, like drafting original research, is a process of deepening understanding. Recent high-profile examples of "duplicative language" are a reminder that paraphrasing is hard work. It is not surprising, then, that many students are tempted by AI-powered paraphrasing tools. These technologies, however, often result in inconsistent writing style, do not always help students avoid plagiarism, and allow the writer to gloss over understanding. Online paraphrasing tools are useful only when students have already developed a deep knowledge of the craft of writing."

"This person or group, who go by the names BestBuy and Popopret, recently spammed an ad to folks on Jabber, an instant messaging service. They offered to perform a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on whomever their client(s) wanted, and they backed up their offer by claiming to wield the ability to perform some of the strongest DDoS attacks ever seen. Recent events in the history of the internet show us that these kind of attacks - if these hackers indeed have the power they claim - can wreak internet havoc by blocking user access to a range of some of the web's most popular destinations."

"After getting caught breaking its own laws with a mass surveillance program, the French government has introduced legislation that mirrors the NSA's rules, giving it the power to spy on all foreigners -- and any French people who happen to be swept up in the dragnet."

"Nemitz identifies four bases of digital power which create and then reinforce its unhealthy concentration in too few hands: lots of money, which means influence; control of "infrastructures of public discourse"; collection of personal data and profiling of people; and domination of investment in AI, most of it a "black box" not open to public scrutiny. The key question is which of the challenges of AI "can be safely and with good conscience left to ethics" and which need law. Nemitz sees much that needs law."

"About 70% of the world's online traffic is reckoned to pass through Loudoun County. But there is a big problem, centred on a power company called Dominion, which supplies the vast majority of Loudoun County's electricity. According to a 2017 Greenpeace report, only 1% of Dominion's total electricity comes from credibly renewable sources:"

"In the midst of a global pandemic and an unprecedented misinformation glut, Google has decided to hide some Australian news sites from its search results. It is "experimenting" with the lone supply of fact-checked, accountable information Australians can access right now."

""This is all identifiable in the smart meter data - it has literally your entire the pattern of life and behaviour through just monitoring where you live and what you do in your home." Vector and AWS say the data is anonymised and cannot be linked back to customers. Privacy advocates dispute that, because the way some customers use power in certain locations will easily identify them. For the companies, it's a tightrope: the more anonymous the data is made, the less value it has overall."