Digit_al Society

"Roblox to give parents more control over children's activity after warnings over grooming Parents will be able to see who children interact with and ensure they cannot play games with graphic violence as report accuses company of lax safety controls"

"MPs are to summon Elon Musk to testify about X's role in spreading disinformation, in a parliamentary inquiry into the UK riots and the rise of false and harmful AI content, the Guardian has learned. Senior executives from Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok are also expected to be called for questioning as part of a Commons science and technology select committee social media inquiry."

"Coca-Cola causes controversy with AI-made ad The video was meant to pay homage to a classic 1995 Coca-Cola commercial."

"The alleged cybercriminals are thought to have carefully planned out an elaborate and hyper-targeted phishing scam that went after employees of large companies like MGM and Twilio. In fact, Scattered Spider's breach at MGM, which involved a phone call to the company's help desk, resulted in a temporary shut down of the company's hotel and casino operations, costing the company $100 million. The Scattered Spider plan of attack involved sending text messages to employees at the targeted companies while pretending to be part of their employer's IT department. The texts urged the employees to login to a link provided in the text message, otherwise, the text message claimed, their employee accounts would be deactivated."

"The climate crisis could prove AI's greatest challenge. While Google publicises AI-driven advances in flooding, wildfire and heatwave forecasts, like many big tech companies, it uses more energy than many countries. Today's large models are a major culprit. It can take 10 gigawatt-hours of power to train a single large language model like OpenAI's ChatGPT, enough to supply 1,000 US homes for a year."

"The breakdown in negotiations resulted in Meta blocking all news sources on Facebook in Canada "recklessly and dangerously" as all 10 provinces and three territories in the country burned, Canada's heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, told Guardian Australia. "Facebook is leaving disinformation and misinformation to spread on their platform, while choosing to block access to reliable, high-quality, independent journalism," St-Onge said. "Facebook is just leaving more room for misinformation during need-to-know situations like wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical times for people to make decisions on matters that affect them.""

"Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy. That's now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed."

""People glamourise them types of things and the smallest thing can be escalated on social media," he said. "A fight can happen between two people and they can squash it [reach a truce], but because the video's out there on social media and it looks from a different perspective like one is losing, pride is going to be hurt so you might go out there and get some sort of revenge and let people know, you're not going to mess with me." It all created anxiety, explained St Clair-Hughes. "The fearmongering on social media puts you in a fight or flight state so when you leave the house now you are either on the front foot or on the back foot. So you step outside ready to do whatever you need to do … It's the subliminals - no one's telling you to pick up a knife and commit violence, it's just the more that you see it …""

""AI lowers the barriers to entry for creating content. You don't need coding skills or anything like that to generate these images. It is also symptomatic of far-right views going mainstream or being normalised," he said, adding that the far right appeared to have fewer moral concerns about AI imagery. Allchorn said more established political parties appeared warier of using AI in official campaigns: "Mainstream actors still have ethical concerns about the effectiveness, authenticity and reliability of these models that far-right or extremist actors are not beholden to.""

"The company, Spines, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed and distributed with the help of AI. Independent publisher Canongate said "these dingbats … don't care about writing or books", in a Bluesky post. Spines is charging "hopeful would-be authors to automate the process of flinging their book out into the world, with the least possible attention, care or craft". "These aren't people who care about books or reading or anything remotely related," said author Suyi Davies Okungbowa, whose most recent book is Lost Ark Dreaming, in a post on Bluesky. "These are opportunists and extractive capitalists.""

"Or, as the New York Times summarised it, "doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers' surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors." More interesting, though, were two other revelations: the experiment demonstrated doctors' sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they had made, even when ChatGPT suggested a better one; and it also suggested that at least some of the physicians didn't really know how best to exploit the tool's capabilities. Which in turn revealed what AI advocates such as Ethan Mollick have been saying for aeons: that effective "prompt engineering" - knowing what to ask an LLM to get the most out of it - is a subtle and poorly understood art."

"But do these options make Bluesky a more prosocial experience? Prosocial design is a "set of design patterns, features and processes which foster healthy interactions between individuals and which create the conditions for those interactions to thrive by ensuring individuals' safety, wellbeing and dignity," according to the Prosocial Design Network. Giving users control over their feeds is a step in this direction, but it's not a new concept. The Panotpykon Foundation's Safe by Default briefing advocates for human-centric recommender systems that prioritize conscious user choice and empowerment. They propose features like: Sliders for content preferences (e.g., informative vs. entertaining content), A "hard stop" button to suppress unwanted content, and Prompts for users to define their interests or preferences."

"ChatGPT can help with reframing thoughts and situations, similar to cognitive behavioural therapy - but "some clients can start to use it as a substitute for therapy", Masterson says. "I've had clients telling me they've already processed on their own, because of what they've read - it's incredibly dangerous." She has had to ask some clients to cease their self-experiments while in treatment with her. "It's about you and me in the room," she says. "You just cannot have that with text - let alone a conglomeration of lots of other people's texts." Self-directed chatbot therapy also risks being counterproductive, shrinking the area of inquiry. "It's quite affirmative; I challenge clients," says Masterson. ChatGPT could actually cement patterns as it draws, over and again, from the same database: "The more you try to refine it, the more refined the message becomes.""

""Quantum processors are peeling away at a double exponential rate and will continue to vastly outperform classical computers as we scale up," said Hartmut Neven, the founder of the firm, who said that the latest test results, published on Monday in Nature magazine, "cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years". He said the far greater speed of the new chip than classical computers "lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse". Simply put, if a quantum computer can be in many different states at once, it can get more done at the same time."

Tenant-screening systems like SafeRent are often used in place of humans as a way to 'avoid engaging' directly with the applicants and pass the blame for a denial to a computer system, said Todd Kaplan, one of the attorneys representing Louis and the class of plaintiffs who sued the company. The property management company told Louis the software alone decided to reject her, but the SafeRent report indicated it was the management company that set the threshold for how high someone needed to score to have their application accepted. Louis and the other named plaintiff alleged SafeRent's algorithm disproportionately scored Black and Hispanic renters who use housing vouchers lower than white applicants. SafeRent has settled. In addition to making a $2.3m payment, the company has agreed to stop using a scoring system or make any kind of recommendation when it comes to prospective tenants who used housing vouchers for five years.

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More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism. The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi. The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.

In today's interconnected digital world, AI plays a pivotal role in both spreading and combating misinformation. It is revolutionizing the way information is created and disseminated, particularly in discussions about migration. On one side, generative AI (genAI) technologies can be weaponized to produce and spread disinformation rapidly. False statistics, sensational narratives and deep-seated stereotypes can take root in public discourse, influencing perceptions and policies.