"How China's internet police went from targeting bloggers to their followers
In recent months, followers of influential liberal bloggers have been interviewed by police as China widens its net of online surveillance"
"What do people really ask chatbots? It's a lot of sex and homework.
AI chatbots are taking the world by storm. We analyzed thousands of conversations to see what people are really asking them and what topics are most discussed."
"In 1987, economist Robert Solow famously observed that the computer age was evident everywhere except in productivity statistics. Manyika warned that we could face a similar scenario with AI.
"We could have a version of that-where we see this technology everywhere, on our phones, in all these chatbots, but it's done nothing to transform the economy in that real fundamental way," he told the FT."
"Students using ChatGPT solved 48% more of the problems correctly, and those with the AI tutor solved 127% more problems correctly, according to the report.
But their peers who did not use ChatGPT outscored them on the related tests. In fact, students using ChatGPT scored 17% worse on tests.
Kids working on their own performed the same on practice assignments and tests.
Researchers told The Hechinger Report that students are using the chatbot as a "crutch" and that it can "substantially inhibit learning.""
"The internet, including social media, was not made with children and young people in mind. This is why online experiences are not always good for children and sometimes even exploitative, risky, and deeply problematic. No wonder parents are worried, educators are at a loss and the government feels compelled to act. But banning children from social media is not the answer."
"Australia plans to ban children from social media. Is checking and enforcing an age block possible?
As the Albanese government pledges a ban, age verification trials in the UK and US show possible hurdles and privacy concerns"
"Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn't have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning. "
"National police agency says it is investigating 513 cases of deepfake pornography as a new scandal grips the country
Raphael Rashid in Seoul and Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Fri 13 Sep 2024 21.00 BST
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The anger was palpable. For the second time in just a few years, South Korean women took to the streets of Seoul to demand an end to sexual abuse. When the country spearheaded Asia's #MeToo movement, the culprit was molka - spy cams used to record women without their knowledge. Now their fury was directed at an epidemic of deepfake pornography."
"Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse?
Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than official tally"
"But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally - and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days.
However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy - many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion."
"Russia propaganda group behind fake Kamala Harris hit-and-run story, says Microsoft
Microsoft researchers found that the group created a video, paid an actor to appear as the alleged victim, and spread the claim through a fake website"
"research consistently shows that social media is exploited to facilitate political intimidation and violence. What's more, certain features of social media platforms make them particularly susceptible to such exploitation, and some of those features can be changed to reduce the danger. "
"To find more glyphs, researchers led by archaeologist Masato Sakai of Yamagata University trained an AI program to identify relief-type glyphs in high-resolution drone images taken of the entire region. The program identified 1309 possible geoglyphs, and the team confirmed 303 of them with on-the-ground surveys, almost doubling the number of known geoglyphs of this type, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
"One of the key features introduced is a "Correction" capability in Azure AI Content Safety. This tool aims to address the problem of AI hallucinations - instances where AI models generate false or misleading information. "When we detect there's a mismatch between the grounding context and the response… we give that information back to the AI system," Bird explained. "With that additional information, it's usually able to do better the second try.""
"On a zoomed-out time scale, technological progress follows an exponential curve. Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture).
The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason. To the three great technological revolutions-the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational-we will add a fourth: the AI revolution. This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly.
The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we've made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear."
"As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI's benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we'll run out of things to do (even if they don't look like "real jobs" to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.
Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable."
