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""What a bunch of malarkey." That's what thousands of New Hampshire voters heard last month when they received a robocall purporting to be from President Biden. The voice on the other end sounded like the President, and the catchphrase was his. But the message that Democrats shouldn't vote in the upcoming primary election didn't make sense. "Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday," the voice said."

"Google has announced a new control in its robots.txt indexing file that would let publishers decide whether their content will "help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products." The control is a crawler called Google-Extended, and publishers can add it to the file in their site's documentation to tell Google not to use it for those two APIs. In its announcement, the company's vice president of "Trust" Danielle Romain said it's "heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases.""

"In past months, an AI-generated image of an explosion at the Pentagon caused a brief dip in the stock market. AI audio parodies of US presidents playing video games became a viral trend. AI-generated images that appeared to show Donald Trump fighting off police officers trying to arrest him circulated widely on social media platforms. The Republican National Committee released an entirely AI-generated ad that showed images of various imagined disasters that would take place if Biden were re-elected, while the American Association of Political Consultants warned that video deepfakes present a "threat to democracy"."

"Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash after threatening to cut off social media networks as a means of stopping the spread of violence during periods of unrest. Élysée officials and government ministers responded on Wednesday by insisting the president was not threatening a "general blackout" but instead the "occasional and temporary" suspension of platforms. The president's comments came as ministers blamed young people using social media such as Snapchat and TikTok for organising and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting dead of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week."

"What is startling about the images in Furey's platform is that they contain mistakes so egregious and easy to spot that it makes one wonder how no one caught the issues, or if, alternatively, Furey believes the typical Toronto resident does in fact have three arms. An increasing number of political figures, particularly on the political right have been using generative AI images in campaigns. Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron Desantis released what look like AI-generated images of his competition, former president Donald Trump, hugging former chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci. The Trump campaign had weeks earlier released a video mocking Desantis' wobbly twitter spaces campaign launch using AI-generated voices."

"An army of fake social media accounts on Twitter and the blogging site Medium have been promoting and defending the controversial hosting of a UN climate summit by the United Arab Emirates. The president of the Cop28 climate talks is Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the state oil giant Adnoc, which has major net zero-busting expansion plans."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"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.""

"Google should know better, given that it already had a "hallucination problem" with its featured snippets(Opens in a new tab) at the top of search results back in 2017. The snippets algorithm seemed to particularly enjoy telling lies about U.S. presidents. Again, what could go wrong?"

"Facebook's gol' durn algorithm is acting up again, say humans working at Meta, who apparently have no control over the automated system that approved ads calling for the murder of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his children."

"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."

"A report by investigators from the Digital Forensic Lab, a global network of digital forensic researchers run by US-based thinktank the Atlantic Council, reveals how pro-Russian Facebook pages in Mali coordinated support for anti-democracy protests and the Wagner group, a controversial Russian private military contractor that was invited into the unstable country last year after the overthrow of President Bah N'daw by the military."

"Lawyers for the former president have claimed fair use, saying the ad was satire, exempt from copyright law, and used footage reposted without knowing its origin. They have also said Trump cannot be sued because of "presidential absolute immunity"."

"The university presidents' council said this morning that the security of its central admissions system has been upgraded after the personal data of around 23,000 students was advertised for sale on the dark web. The university presidents' council insisted that the leaked admissions data, which included personal information and examination results, was only current through last May after anger erupted over the data breach. #BanTCAS was surging on Thai Twitter this morning in reference to the Thai University Central Admission System, or TCAS."

"Social media giant, Facebook, announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its facial recognition system which automatically identifies users in photos and videos, citing growing societal concerns about the use of such technology. "Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook, in a blog post. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.""

""There has been a high degree of improvisation in the rollout of Chivo and a great deal of opacity," says Ricardo Castaneda, a local economist. "The app asks for access to your microphone and your contacts, which are not needed for a wallet. Bitcoin might be a distraction but given the decision to push ahead with the plan despite popular opposition and the advice of experts, it could also be an important pillar of Bukele's political project.""

""Mexico's capacity to spy on its citizens is immense. [And] it's extremely easy for the technology and the information obtained through the spyware to fall into private hands - be it organised crime or commercial," said Jorge Rebolledo, a Mexico City security consultant. "What we know about is only the tip of the iceberg." Andrés Manuel López Obrador Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The data leak is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, since 2016, are believed to have been selected as belonging to people of interest by government clients of NSO Group."

"El Salvador has become the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender after its congress approved President Nayib Bukele's proposal to embrace the cryptocurrency in an effort to promote "financial inclusion", investment and economic development."

"BuzzFeed said it took "less than 10 minutes" to find Biden's account, "using only a combination of the app's built-in search tool and public friends feature". "In the process," it said, it "found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials and all of their contacts on Venmo.""

"There, a Facebook-fuelled tsunami of lies had assisted an authoritarian into power. And she had seen where that had led: to opponents of the state being killed in their homes or turning up dead in ditches. As a Filipino American with a foot in both countries - she calls herself "the first of the CNN hybrids" - she was perfectly positioned to warn America about what happens when a populist president is allowed to spread out-of-control lies across a vast, unregulated tech platform. "A lie told a million times becomes a fact," she repeated again and again."