Digit_al Society

"A collaboration between Oxford University, The Education University of Hong Kong, Reading University and Durham University has found "no evidence to suggest abstaining from social media has a positive effect on an individual's well-being." The researchers noted that this contrasts popular beliefs about the benefits of digital detoxes. Moreover, this international study found that those who took a break from social media didn't replace online socializing with face-to-face, voice, or email interactions, as the researchers had expected. Taking a break from social media therefore led to reduced overall interaction and loneliness as social media was not replaced with forms of socializing."

"Prisma Labs has already gotten into trouble for accidentally generating nude and cartoonishly sexualised images - including those of children - despite a "no nudes" and "adults only" policy. Prisma Lab's CEO and co-founder Andrey Usoltsev told TechCrunch this behaviour only happened if the AI was intentionally provoked to create this type of content - which represents a breach of terms against its use. "If an individual is determined to engage in harmful behavior, any tool would have the potential to become a weapon," he said."

"If AI causes mass unemployment among the general populace, it will be the first time in history that any technology has ever done that. Industrial machinery, computer-controlled machine tools, software applications, and industrial robots all caused panics about human obsolescence, and nothing of the kind ever came to pass; pretty much everyone who wants a job still has a job. As Noah has written, a wave of recent evidence shows that adoption of industrial robots and automation technology in general is associated with an increase in employment at the company and industry level."

"The U-turn came after the majority of members on the 11-person board had voted last week to allow robots to be armed with explosives and use them to kill people "when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD". The board had also added an amendment saying that only high-ranking officers would be allowed to authorize deadly force."

"In some sense, GPT is like a glorified version of cut and paste, where everything that is cut goes through a paraphrasing/synonymy process before it is paste but together-and a lot of important stuff is sometimes lost along the way. When GPT sounds plausible, it is because every paraphrased bit that it pastes together is grounded in something that actual humans said, and there is often some vague (but often irrelevant) relationship between.. At least for now, it still takes a human to know which plausible bits actually belong together."

"A startup in Israel is tackling the problem, and saving lives, with a sophisticated algorithm that can analyze the almost infinite number of possible conflicts. Ask any doctor or pharmacist and they'll tell you about the minefield called "drug interaction". That's when a medicine designed to resolve one problem causes an adverse reaction with another medicine designed to resolve another problem. Or with anything else the patient puts in their body."

"ChatGPT can also give entirely wrong answers and present misinformation as fact, writing "plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers", the company concedes. OpenAI says that fixing this issue is difficult because there is no source of truth in the data they use to train the model and supervised training can also be misleading "because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows"."

"And some provinces are using some creepy Big Brother technology to do it. In Surat Thani, the province that contains the tourism hotspot islands of Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao, the immigration office is employing new technology. Officers have equipped Smart Patrol Cars that is using advanced facial recognition to check foreigners quickly. Immigration officers are patrolling in WiFi-enabled cars, usually a BMW, to crack down on foreigners who have overstayed."

"The brochure also advertised "Optional Demographic Profiling Facial analysis algorithms", including "gender, race/ethnicity, age" profiling. A second, Italian-based, company was also cited on Hikvision's website as offering racial profiling. The company removed both claims from its website following an inquiry from the Guardian, and said the technology had never been sold in the UK. The document, it said, detailed the "potential application of our cameras, with technology built independently by FaiceTech and other partners"."

"Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. "If you're unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam," the AI advised in part. "I would have given this a good grade," Gillmor said. "Academia has some very serious issues to confront.""

"Elon Musk's Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content according to the company's new head of trust and safety, amid a reported surge in hate speech on the social media platform. Ella Irwin has told the Reuters news agency that Musk, who acquired the company in October, was focused on using automation more, arguing that Twitter had in the past erred on the side of using time and labour-intensive human reviews of harmful content."

"Twitter has proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians' failure to cut pollution. But many are now fleeing Twitter due to a surge in climate misinformation, spam and even threats that have upended their relationship with the platform."

"Here's how the program, which has been developed in partnership with SWGfL, a UK-based non-profit behind the Revenge Porn Helpline, works. If you've shared an intimate image with someone and are worried that that person might do something nefarious with it, you can send the images to content moderators at Facebook to be "hashed"- essentially the image is assigned a digital fingerprint. If someone then tries to upload that image to Facebook it can be quickly identified and blocked. It's obviously not a silver bullet for stopping revenge porn, and it requires putting a lot of trust in Facebook and accepting that a random content moderator is going to be looking at your naked photos, but it gives people a little bit of control over their images."

"Twitter has been flooded with nuisance posts designed to obscure news of the coronavirus lockdown protests in China, in an apparent state-directed attempt to suppress footage of the demonstrations. Chinese bot accounts - not operated by humans - are being used to flood the social networking service with adverts for sex workers, pornography and gambling when users search for a major city in the country, such as Shanghai or Beijing, using Chinese script."

"The role of AI writing systems as drafting buddies is a big departure from how writers typically get help, yet so far it is their biggest selling point and use case. Most writing tools available today will do some drafting for you, either by continuing where you left off or responding to a more specific instruction. SudoWrite, a popular AI writing tool for novelists, does all of these, with options to "write" where you left off, "describe" a highlighted noun, or "brainstorm" ideas based on a situation you describe. Systems like Jasper.ai or Lex will complete your paragraph or draft copy based on instructions, and Laika is similar but more focused on fiction and drama. "

"The Italian supreme court ordered prosecutors last month to disclose how the Sky ECC data had been retrieved, arguing that it was impossible to have a fair trial if the accused is unable to access the evidence or assess its reliability and legality, a position supposed by the NGO Fair Trials. Whether prosecutors choose to do so could determine whether the arrests made this week lead to convictions or not. Prosecutors in the UK face a similar dilemma in relation to the hacking of EncroChat, another secret messaging platform that had the added facility of a "panic" button that when pressed would immediately erase the phone's contents."

"I don't trust it, David! It's the whole Lord of the Rings vibe - "one app to rule them all", which famously didn't work out great for Middle-earth. A lot of people have concerns, myself included. It's why there was a backlash to Meta - which provides Facebook and WhatsApp - trying to launch a digital currency. I think there's a broader issue of digital literacy here: when we give up our permissions to a super app, do we really know what we're agreeing to?"

"One of the beautiful things about the internet is the sheer amount of knowledge it contains: if you're interested in any topic, you can find a surfeit of information about it in an instant. But this can also have a downside. Search engines can end perpetuating bias, for example. And research by Adrian Ward from the University of Texas, Austin suggests that we can mistake information we've searched for as our own knowledge. Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Ward and colleagues have found that sharing information online also makes us feel that our knowledge has increased - even if we haven't read it."

"Until recently, I was deeply sceptical of the idea of AI art. I saw it as hype and casuistry, and with some cause: widely publicised efforts such as Ai-Da the robot artist obviously exaggerate the independence of the machine and play on our fascination with sentient artificial beings. But now the dream is coming true, at least in art. And art is surely one of the most inimitable expressions of the human mind."

"Social media giant TikTok has announced it will actively ban videos that encourage tanning and add educational content to its platform after alarm from Australian medical experts over the platform's sharing of pro-tanning material. In September, Melanoma Institute Australia co-medical directors Prof Georgina Long and Prof Richard Scolyer, speaking at the National Press Club, took issue with the video-sharing app for its popular #sunburnchallenge hashtag."