Digit_al Society

" More than half of top 100 mental health TikToks contain misinformation, study finds Guardian investigation reveals promotion of dubious advice, questionable supplements and quick-fix healing methods"

"'One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT': the workers who lost their jobs to AI From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?"

"We typically begin the semester by asking students to reflect on the formulas they've learned in the past and to consider how those shape their writing. We now ask those same reflection questions about AI outputs. Student responses, as Jennifer has written elsewhere, are revealing: The kind of writing that Chat does, it's what our teachers try to get us to do. It's like five-paragraph essays, and perfect paragraph[s] that don't have any personality, which we were taught in high school. It does what school has trained us to do. Like write a perfectly formatted essay that is based on some random people's ideas."

"What if we could forecast how armed factions-and the communities around them-might respond to a draft peace deal before it's signed? What if we could test, virtually, whether a public apology would calm tensions… or make things worse? That's the provocative promise behind the growing use of digital twins in peacemaking: AI-powered simulations of complex social systems, designed to help us understand conflict-and imagine pathways out of it."

"And so I think this is a crisis. I think the biggest part of the crisis is for teachers. A lot of people suggest teachers go back to Blue Book exams, right? At least then we can make sure that the student is really doing their work. But that's just a huge burden on teachers now to completely reorganize the entire way that they administer education. I couldn't agree more. Kevin Roose of the New York Times recently said, "if students can cheat with ChatGPT then you need to rethink your teaching." Well, I've been working in education for almost two decades, that's exactly what people said when smartphones came around. And now, 10 years later, we've come around to just banning them in school, or trying to anyway. And I wonder if we're going to need to wait a decade before reaching that conclusion in education."

"Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become "commonplace" in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches."

"The idea that we need a technological solution for too much technology is, at best, the Internet era's great placebo effect. We feel like we're getting a little better, but that's just part of the same addiction. Because it's their business, tech companies really have no choice but to try to convince us that we're just one more piece of technology away from the solution; but it's like telling us we can use heroin to kick our methadone habit-when we all know deep down that the off switch is the only true killer app. (But who has the attention span to go deep down anymore?)"

"It is not simply that AI lacks originality; after all, so too does most human art. The problem runs far deeper: the essence of art is lost in the process of its machinic invention and, with it, the very possibility of a democratic society is put under threat. Art is a defining human endeavor, not just for those formally called "artists" but for everyone. It is not merely about arranging colors, forms, sounds or words into pleasing products. The essence of art inheres in its making: the belief that, in the act of creating art, one imbues an object with something ineffable from within one's own being. This belief, in turn, allows for another person to project their own sense of themselves onto the work and, in doing so, to commune with the artist at a level words cannot access."

"Illinois' prominent Chicago Sun-Times newspaper has confirmed that a summer reading list, which included several recommendations for books that don't exist, was created using artificial intelligence by a freelancer who worked with one of their content partners."

"Concerns about giving voice to the dead do not apply to AI guest speakers who are someone with a specific job, an animal, an object, or a concept such as the Water Cycle. But is it sound pedagogy? Let's consider what teachers can learn about students and AI chatbots from the Eliza Effect. The Eliza Effect is the tendency to project human characteristics onto computers that generate text. Its name comes from Eliza, a therapist chatbot computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created in the 1960s. Weizenbaum named the chatbot after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion."

"The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren't Happy About It Students call it hypocritical. A senior at Northeastern University demanded her tuition back. But instructors say generative A.I. tools make them better at their jobs."

"I believe the answer has a lot to do with the fact that few things created by humans with artsy aspirations are worth anything in isolation. Their worth comes from what surrounds them, from the human context that birthed them and the human lives that were impacted by them. That's how masterpieces are judged as such."

"Beth Hyland thought she had met the love of her life on Tinder.  In reality, the Michigan-based administrative assistant had been manipulated by an online scam artist who posed as a French man named 'Richard', used deepfake video on Skype calls and posted photos of another man to pull off his con. A 'deepfake' is manipulated video or audio made using artificial intelligence (AI) to look and sound real. They are often difficult to detect without specialised tools. In a matter of months, Hyland, 53, had taken out loans totalling $26,000, sent 'Richard' the money, and fallen prey to a classic case of romance baiting or pig butchering, named for the exploitative way in which scammers cultivate their victims."

""All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?" Wales said. As AI spreads across society and enters the courtroom, the US judicial conference advisory committee has announced that it will begin seeking public comment as part of determining how to regulate the use of AI-generated evidence at trial."

"When was the last time your chatbot disagreed with you? Probably only when you told it to. Companion AIs-like Replika, Nomi, or Character.ai-are tuned to be supportive, affirming, and endlessly agreeable. That might feel good in the moment. But what happens when people start preferring digital "friends" over real ones-especially when real ones come with friction?"

"One of the biggest cases of hypocrisy was uncovered last year with little more than a whisper. Most of us will remember seeing the "You wouldn't steal a car" piracy adverts on every dvd we played in the early 00s. What most people have yet to discover is that the music for the anti-piracy campaign was actually pirated from a Dutch musician named Melchior Reitveldt. In a move that would have marketing specialists turning in their graves, Reitveldt's music (which had been sanctioned for a local film festival's anti-piracy campaign) was used repeatedly for the standardised anti-piracy warning that appeared constantly. In a tale that became pointlessly complicated, Reitveldt dealt with corrupt royalty collectors such as Jochem Gerrits (who tried to gain profit for himself through the situation) before finally reaping his just rewards in 2012, 6 years after he originally composed the music."

"Duolingo, on the other hand, is going full speed ahead with generative AI. The company announced this week that it would stop relying on human contractors for "work that AI can handle," while also committing to using AI in hiring and performance reviews. On top of that, Duolingo announced on Wednesday that it used generative AI to come up with 148 new language learning courses, doubling its total course offerings."

"Brands such as fintech company Ramp, jobs search site Indeed and Pernod Ricard-owned Scottish whisky maker Chivas Brothers have adopted the software. They are hoping to reach millions of users who regularly use generative AI products as a new method to search for information online - a shift that poses a long-term threat for Google's main business. "This is about much more than just getting your website indexed in their results. This is about recognising large language models as the ultimate influencer," said Jack Smyth, partner at marketing technology group Brandtech, which has created its own interface for brands. "

"Meta is facing a second set of lawsuits in Africa over the psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse. Lawyers are gearing up for court action against a company contracted by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, after meeting moderators at a facility in Ghana that is understood to employ about 150 people. Moderators working for Majorel in Accra claim they have suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia and substance abuse as a direct consequence of the work they do checking extreme content."