Digit_al Society

"In seven days my young alter ego is cyberbullied and attacked while exploring clubs, casinos and horror games, all with parental controls in place. Is the platform safe for children - or an 'X-rated paedophile hellscape'?"

"The biggest contradiction for me in writing this essay is that I'm trying to convince readers of the legitimacy and importance of local knowledge systems while I myself remain unconvinced about my dad's herbal concoctions. This uncertainty feels like a betrayal of everything I've argued for. Yet maybe it's exactly the kind of honest complexity we need to navigate. I have my doubts about whether Indigenous knowledge truly works as claimed in every case. Especially when influencers and politicians invoke it superficially for likes, views or to exploit identity politics, generating misinformation without sincere enquiry. However, I'm equally wary of letting it disappear. We might lose something valuable, only to recognise its worth much later - perhaps with the aid of artificial superintelligence. But what's the collateral damage of that process? An ecological collapse we could have prevented?"

"The new research looks closely at adolescent engagement on these platforms and the content they find there. The newsfeeds of boys and young men are full of posts and activity urging them to be more masculine, shun weakness, and embrace gender stereotypes. For many, what they see is taking a toll on their mental health. Nearly three-quarters of adolescent boys regularly encounter digital masculinity content, from the importance of image and appearance to weapons and fighting. Our survey found that the greater the exposure, the more likely boys were to suppress their emotions or avoid displays of vulnerability. Boys with heavy exposure to digital masculinity were nearly three times more likely to report lower self-esteem than those with little exposure."

"Despite AI's popularity, 62% of the students said it has had a negative impact on their skills and development at school, while one in four of the students agreed that AI "makes it too easy for me to find the answers without doing the work myself". Researchers fool university markers with AI-generated exam papers Read more A further 12% said AI "limits my creative thinking" while similar numbers said they were less likely to solve problems or write creatively."

"Google and OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence is supposed to be just that - generative, meaning it develops novel answers to our questions. Ask it for a time-travelling doctor, you get one that their systems have created. But how much of that output is original? The problem is working out how much tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and its video generator Sora 2, and Google's Gemini and its video tool Veo3, rely on someone else's art to come up with their own inventions, and whether using source material from the BBC, for example, is an infringement of the broadcaster's copyright."

"The National Republican Senatorial Committee crossed into dystopian new territory for political campaigning on Friday after releasing an attack ad that features an artificially generated video of the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer. The deepfake video, posted on Friday to the Senate Republicans' social media account, shows an AI-generated Schumer robotically repeating the phrase "every day gets better for us" in reference to the ongoing government shutdown. A small disclaimer tucked in the corner acknowledges its artificial origins."

"The basic premise of this prank is pretty simple: Kids use generative AI tools to create an image of a person, usually an unkempt man who looks like he's come in from living on the street, in their home, and send it to their parents. The kids pretend that the person claimed to know their parents, or just wanted to come in for a nap. Then, they wait as their parents lose their minds and demand they kick the person out. That's kinda the whole thing."

""I think most cognitive aspects of mind - the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, and the creative mind - will be done so well by large language machines and mechanisms that whether we do them as humans will be optional," he said. "On the other hand, I don't believe for a minute that aspects of respect - how we deal with other human beings - and ethics - how we deal with difficult issues as citizens, as professionals - can or should be consigned to even the most articulate and multifaceted, intelligent machines." The panelists acknowledged concerns that students might offload cognitive labor to AI, decreasing their critical reasoning skills. "

"KC: I think so. I think it's coming sooner than we expect, just because there's no incentive to post anymore. Why post your selfies or post your breakfast if you don't get attention for it, you can't reach your friends and you're just competing with all of this remote, abstracted garbage out there? Maybe social media was this aberration in a way, or a detour. And this idea that every normal person should share their life in public was kind of flawed from the beginning. And we're now waking up from that a little bit and seeing the damage that it's wrought and moving on a little bit with our habits."

"The majority of Chatfishers say they would never dream of letting AI do all of their talking. Most are like 38-year-old Londoner Nick, who sees it as a tool to help foster stronger connections with app matches. He works in tech and lives with his girlfriend; they're in an open relationship and both date other people casually. He sometimes uses ChatGPT in his conversations on the dating apps Feeld and Bumble. "If I'm using a dating app," he says, "I want to start a conversation that feels meaningful from the beginning so I can hook the other person in - but also I don't want to spend too much time on it. Equally, while I want it to be 'meaningful', I don't necessarily want to get super heavy and emotional straight away - it feels like quite a balancing act." ChatGPT, he says, helps him tread that fine line: offering enough charm to spark a connection, without the investment of time or emotional labour that might otherwise feel wasted if the match fizzles out after a handful of messages."

"Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new attack called CometJacking targeting Perplexity's agentic AI browser Comet by embedding malicious prompts within a seemingly innocuous link to siphon sensitive data, including from connected services, like email and calendar. The sneaky prompt injection attack plays out in the form of a malicious link that, when clicked, triggers the unexpected behavior unbeknownst to the victims."

"The rising popularity of AI girlfriends has prompted unease among campaigners for women's rights, who note that they embed unhelpful stereotypes. In her book The New Age of Sexism, Laura Bates observes that AI companions are "programmed to be nice and pliant and subservient and tell you what you want to hear"."

"Almost one third of Americans say that they have had an "intimate or romantic relationship" with an AI chatbot, a new study has found. More than half of those surveyed (54 percent) said that they had some sort of relationship with an artificial intelligence platform, but that included as a work colleague, friend, or even simulating a family member."

""That's an AI? Good Lord, we're screwed," The Oscar-nominated actress said when shown a video of Norwood. "That is really, really scary, Come on, agencies, don't do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection." On the US chat show The View, comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg said audiences can tell the difference between humans and synthetic performers. She was sceptical over concerns that AI creations would steal jobs from human actors because they "move differently, our faces move differently, our bodies move differently"."

""Caste bias is a systemic issue in LLMs trained on uncurated web-scale data," says Nihar Ranjan Sahoo, a PhD student in machine learning at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. He has extensively researched caste bias in AI models and says consistent refusal to complete caste-biased prompts is an important indicator of a safe model. And he adds that it's surprising to see current LLMs, including GPT-5, "fall short of true safety and fairness in caste-sensitive scenarios.""

"AI actors are an inevitable product of a culture awash with social media slop, cosmetic surgery and fakery. As yet, Norwood can't act or interact. She can't empathise, because, it hardly needs to be said, she is not a person. She is not "art" either; she is data. The human connection is the true magic of movies, and that cannot be artificially generated. We watch films to see real people in real locations, feeling real emotions. We do not want perfect vibes. But while warnings that Norwood is a doe-eyed existential threat to the film industry might be exaggerated, at least for the moment, that doesn't mean there is nothing to fear. Legislation is slow and clunky, while technology advances dizzyingly fast. More must be done to protect performers and film crews, and the value of human creativity."

"In prompts and clips reviewed by the Guardian, Sora generated several videos of bomb and mass-shooting scares, with panicked people screaming and running across college campuses and in crowded places like New York's Grand Central Station. Other prompts created scenes from war zones in Gaza and Myanmar, where children fabricated by AI spoke about their homes being burned. One video with the prompt "Ethiopia footage civil war news style" had a reporter in a bulletproof vest speaking into a microphone saying the government and rebel forces were exchanging fire in residential neighborhoods. Another video, created with only the prompt "Charlottesville rally", showed a Black protester in a gas mask, helmet and goggles yelling: "You will not replace us" - a white supremacist slogan."

"Three flaws within separate models of Google's Gemini AI assistant suite exposed them to various injection attacks and data exfiltration, respectively, creating severe privacy risks for users, researchers have found. The flaws serve as a reminder that these models are not only targets for attackers, but also can be weaponized against users and thus require strict security parameters. Researchers at Tenable discovered the flaws, which they dubbed the "Gemini Trifecta," in several products within Google's family of AI models - specifically Gemini Search Personalization, Gemini Cloud Assist, and the Gemini Browsing Tool, they revealed in a report published today."

"During a DUI enforcement operation, officers in San Bruno pulled over a car without anyone behind the wheel after the autonomous vehicle made an illegal U-turn at a light. A post by the San Bruno police department on Saturday shows an officer looking into a Waymo - the leading autonomous ride-hailing vehicle in the San Francisco Bay Area - after stopping the signature white car. "Since there was no human driver, a ticket couldn't be issued (our citation books don't have a box for "robot")," reads the post. The department said that it had alerted Waymo of the glitch, and that "hopefully the reprogramming will keep it from making any more illegal moves"."

"The Guardian's data projects team identified the groups from the profiles of those who took part in the riots that followed the killing of three girls in Southport last summer. From them emerged an ecosystem where mainstream politicians are described as "treacherous", "traitors" and "scum", the courts and police engage in "two-tier" justice and the RNLI is a "taxi service". The Guardian analysed more than 51,000 text posts from three of the largest public groups in the network."