Digit_al Society

" Virtual reality games helping UK's deaf children to understand speech Scientists have found that immersing kids in computer games can train their brains to localise sounds better Robin McKie Science Editor Sat 25 May 2024 13.00 BST Share Scientists have recruited an unusual ally in their efforts to help children overcome profound deafness. They are using computer games to boost the children's ability to localise sounds and understand speech. The project is known as Bears - for Both Ears - and it is aimed at youngsters who have been given twin cochlea implants because they were born with little or no hearing. "These are children who are profoundly deaf," said audio engineer Lorenzo Picinali, a scientist on the project from Imperial College London. "They require major interventions to restore their hearing and we have found that computer games can make these much more effective.""

""This is mega!" said Daisy Greenwell from the Smartphone-Free Childhood campaign. "We are absolutely thrilled and we believe it's going to have a domino effect." She was reacting to news that St Albans in Hertfordshire is attempting to become the first UK city to go smartphone-free for all children under 14. Before St Albans, it was Greystones in Ireland last year, where parents banded together to collectively tell their children they could not have a smartphone until secondary school. Greenwell believes others will now take similar steps."

"How to summarise, then, the personality changes that the internet brings out in us? Tribalism, bullying, the wildfire spread of "crazes", "instant gratification culture", the triumph of the temper tantrum: future anthropologists might observe that the behaviour of adults online very much resembles that of children offline. I am often amazed at the rational common sense of those who don't bother with social media, when asked about some topic tearing the internet apart. Online, there is a level of adult sophistication that simply seems beyond us. Some call the internet a town square, some a wild west. In fact, it's a playground."

"Parents Of Kids 13 And Under Are Sharing How Their Kids Are Being Affected By The Viral "Sephora Kids" Trend"

"How China is using AI news anchors to deliver its propaganda News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible"

"While GPT-4o's flirtatiousness was glossed over by a lot of male-authored articles about the release, Parmy Olson addressed it head-on in a piece for Bloomberg headlined Making ChatGPT 'Sexy' Might Not End Well for Humans. "What are the social and psychological consequences of regularly speaking to a flirty, fun and ultimately agreeable artificial voice on your phone, and then encountering a very different dynamic with men and women in real life?" Olson asks."

"Such is the fallout from a surge in the manipulation of navigation signals - modern GPS warfare - that has played havoc with civilian smartphones, planes and vessels on three continents. So-called GPS jamming and spoofing have largely been the preserve of militaries over the past two decades, used to defend sensitive sites against drone or missile attacks or mask their own activities. But systematic interference by armed forces - particularly following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Israel's offensive against Hamas in Gaza - has caused widespread issues for civilian populations as well. The footprint of corrupted signals has become vast."

"When individuals migrate, their data migrates with them. When people leave their countries to travel and live in different places whether as migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, they are not only seeking physical safety, they also need to be sure that their digital identity and information will be safe. However, if they are not careful or protected, their data could unwittingly leave a trail of their movements, potentially exposing them to various threats. Whether they are fleeing war, authoritarian regimes, or other adversaries, this data could inadvertently connect their identities to their pursuers."

""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."

"Contrary to the images circulating on social media, Katy Perry was not one of them. "Couldn't make it to the MET, had to work," the singer posted on Instagram, alongside a video of herself singing in the studio - as well as two photos seemingly showing her at the gala. They were actually made with AI."

""As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious," said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research. Park was prompted to investigate after Meta, which owns Facebook, developed a program called Cicero that performed in the top 10% of human players at the world conquest strategy game Diplomacy. Meta stated that Cicero had been trained to be "largely honest and helpful" and to "never intentionally backstab" its human allies."

"In a paper published in Nature, we introduce AlphaFold 3, a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life's molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy."

"The children's safety codes, introduced as part of the Online Safety Act, let Ofcom set new, tight rules for internet companies and how they can interact with children. It calls on services to make their platforms child-safe by default or implement robust age checks to identify children and give them safer versions of the experience. For those sites with age checks, Ofcom will require algorithmic curation to be tweaked to limit the risks to younger users. That would require sites such as Instagram and TikTok to ensure the suggested posts and "for you" pages explicitly take account of the age of children."

"If you were doubting how important recommender systems are to social media companies, a lawsuit filed last week against Meta makes it crystal clear. At the heart of this legal battle is a fundamental question: Shouldn't users have the power to decide what they do and don't see online? The lawsuit filed by Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of Professor Ethan Zuckerman directly challenges how social media feeds are curated. Professor Zuckerman's proposed browser extension, 'Unfollow Everything 2.0,' would enable Facebook users to disengage from the algorithmically driven content that dominates their feeds, by allowing them to unfollow friends, pages and groups en masse, thus resetting their digital interactions on their terms."

"The foreign ministry's press service said that the statements given by Shi would not be generated by AI but "written and verified by real people". "It's only the visual part that the AI helps us to generate," Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, said, adding that the new spokesperson was a "technological leap that no diplomatic service in the world has yet made"."

""Elderly Chinese still often prefer to pay with cash and some struggle with using mobile payments." Less than a year ago, state media was lauding China's trajectory towards becoming the world's top country for cashless transactions. Xinhua reported cash had dropped to just 3.7% of the total money in circulation. But in recent months China's government has appeared to push back, with numerous announcements about "streamlining" payment systems for visitors and elderly people."

"It is too late to stop the emergence of AI. Instead, we need to think about what we want next, how to design and nurture spaces of knowledge creation and communication for a human-centric world. Search engines need to act as publishers instead of usurpers, and recognize the importance of connecting creators and audiences. Google is testing AI-generated content summaries that appear directly in its search results, encouraging users to stay on its page rather than to visit the source. Long term, this will be destructive."

"Can AI ever be unbiased? As AI systems become more integrated into our daily lives, it's crucial that we understand the complexities of bias and how it impacts these technologies. From chatbots to hiring algorithms, the potential for AI to perpetuate and even amplify existing biases is a genuine concern. "

"The new AI Index report notes that in 2023, AI still struggled with complex cognitive tasks like advanced math problem-solving and visual commonsense reasoning. However, 'struggled' here might be misleading; it certainly doesn't mean AI did badly. Performance on MATH, a dataset of 12,500 challenging competition-level math problems, improved dramatically in the two years since its introduction. In 2021, AI systems could solve only 6.9% of problems. By contrast, in 2023, a GPT-4-based model solved 84.3%. The human baseline is 90%. "

"Children are "saturated" with betting promotions and gambling-like content while using the internet, despite restrictions on ad campaigns targeting young people, new research reveals. GambleAware, the charity funded by donations from gambling firms, commissioned research that found the risks of online gambling were not understood by children because of the "blurred line" between betting ads and popular online casino-style games. It warns gambling ads with cartoon graphics are likely to be strongly appealing to children. Last week, one gambling firm was promoting a new online slots game on social media with three cartoon frogs, urging people to "take a dip" with the "ribbiting rascals"."