Digit_al Society

""The problem is that we're really stuck in a digital monoculture, where decades of anti-competitive practices have created it so that just one system is responsible for so much of what we rely on from everything from airlines to hospitals to schools," Mir said. "One mistake that creates a big failure, it happens, it's an inevitability. But for it to have this sort of impact is a policy failure.""

"A source told Reuters that OpenAI has tested a model internally that achieved a 90 percent score on a challenging test of AI math skills, though it again couldn't confirm if this was related to project Strawberry. But another two sources reported seeing demos from the Q* project that involved models solving math and science questions that would be beyond today's leading commercial AIs."

"Yes of course. We are basically the last generation, or maybe there will be one more after us, who grew up without strong AI writing assistants. But these AI assistants are here now, especially in English. In German the systems are following suit, even though they're still much stronger in English. You get to a stage where someone who cannot write very well, can be pulled to a decent level of writing through machine assistance. And this raises important questions: Are we no longer learning the basics? In order to step up and really improve your writing, you will probably always need to be deeply proficient in the cultural practice of writing. But we need to ask, what proportion of low and medium level writers will be raised with the help from machines to a very decent level? And what repercussions does this have on teaching and learning, and the proficient use of language and writing? We shouldn't neglect our writing skills, because we believe machines will get us there. Anyone who has children can clearly see the dangers autocorrect and autocomplete will have for the future of writing."

"The Ukrainian military has used AI-equipped drones mounted with explosives to fly into battlefields and strike at Russian oil refineries. American AI systems identified targets in Syria and Yemen for airstrikes earlier this year. The Israel Defense Forces, meanwhile, used another kind of AI-enabled targeting system to label as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants during the first weeks of its war in Gaza."

"These advergames (adverts presented in the format of a video game), typically splash corporate branding over a set of game mechanics simple enough for Roblox's young player base. And despite broader allegations of a lack of child safeguarding levelled against Roblox (which they deny), corporates are rushing to build them. Brands from Walmart to Wimbledon, McDonald's to Gucci, Nike to the BBC have all launched advergames on the platform. Some have been visited hundreds of thousands of times, others tens of millions, all while Roblox courts further brand involvement by touting its huge, young user base as a big draw in a crowded advertising market."

"I started to feel that propaganda had fundamentally changed. The types of actors who could create it and spread it had shifted, and the impact it was having on our society was quite significant, but we weren't using the word. We were using words like "misinformation" or "disinformation", which seemed to be misdiagnoses of the problem. And so I wanted to write a book that asked, in this media ecosystem, what does propaganda look like?"

"In recent months, people have shared digitally altered sexual images of the new deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and celebrities including Taylor Swift. But you don't need to be famous to appear in one of these images or videos - the technology is readily accessible, and can easily be used by ex-partners or strangers to humiliate and degrade. As a tech luddite, I was still under the impression that one needed some digital skills to commit this kind of abuse. Not so. You can simply take someone's image, put it into a "nudify" app, and the app's AI will generate a fake nude picture. "It's quick and easy to create these images, even for anyone with absolutely no technical skills," Jake Moore, an adviser at a cybersecurity firm, told me."

"Microsoft researchers said VALL-E 2 was capable of generating "accurate, natural speech in the exact voice of the original speaker, comparable to human performance," in a paper that appeared June 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. In other words, the new AI voice generator is convincing enough to be mistaken for a real person - at least, according to its creators."

"In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that 'novel solutions' such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as 'magic bullets' for the cancer crisis, but 'none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem'. A 'common fallacy' of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create 'additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy'. 'We caution against technocentric approaches without robust evaluation from an equity perspective,' the paper concludes."

"And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go? In the last decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and 750 youth centres shut down. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots music venues are closing every week. The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can't hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards. No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures - the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control."

"Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a "dad's joke" on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. "The kids had a very good laugh," he says. "And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don't talk to others. "Scamming the scammers, if you like." The next day he called his team from the university's Cyber Security Hub in. There must be a better way than his "dad joke" method, he thought. And there had to be something smarter than a popular existing piece of technology - the Lennybot. Before Malcolm and Ibrahim, there was Lenny. Lenny is a doddery, old Australian man, keen for a rambling chat. He's achatbot, designed to troll telemarketers. With a thready voice, tinged with a slight whistle, Lenny repeats various phrases on loop. Each phrase kicks in after 1.5 seconds of silence, to mimic the rhythm of a conversation."

"In 2021, Mr Kono had "declared war" on floppy disks. On Wednesday, almost three years later, he announced: "We have won the war on floppy disks!" Mr Kono has made it his goal to eliminate old technology since he was appointed to the job. He had earlier also said he would "get rid of the fax machine". Once seen as a tech powerhouse, Japan has in recent years lagged in the global wave of digital transformation because of a deep resistance to change. For instance, workplaces have continued to favour fax machines over emails - earlier plans to remove these machines from government offices were scrapped because of pushback."

"Renée: What I find most alarming is that people have the ability to just create reality by making something trend, to reinforce over and over and over again these conspiracy theories. You do have this increasingly divergent set of realities where there's a deep conviction built up over many, many years of reinforcing the same tropes and stories. You can't just correct that with a fact check."

"We demand a stop to addictive design features - Also known as the social slot machine. Ninety-five percent of teens in the US have or have access to a smartphone, while ninety percent have a desktop or laptop computer and eighty-three percent have a gaming console, a survey from the Pew Research Institute found. The data also found that roughly one in six teens describe their use of two platforms - YouTube and TikTok - as "almost constant.""

"Frank McCourt, Founder of Project Liberty and Executive Chairman of McCourt Global, announces that Project Liberty is building a consortium to purchase TikTok and rearchitect the platform to put people in control of their digital identities and data Leading technologists and academics, including Jonathan Haidt, David Clark, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee express support for Project Liberty's vision for a more open, inclusive and responsible internet"

"Last week, Agence France-Presse reported that China had flaunted the gun-carrying robodogs in a 15-day joint military exercise with Cambodia dubbed the "Golden Dragon." And if images of the literal killing machines weren't troubling enough, a new video of the robots released yesterday by the state-owned broadcaster China Central Television shows the killing machine dutifully hopping and diving, leading teams in reconnaissance, and shooting its back-strapped machine gun at targets."

"Google's goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years. Google said electricity consumption by data centres and supply chain emissions were the primary cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had risen 13% compared with the previous year, hitting 14.3m metric tons."

"Researchers at the University of Reading fooled their own professors by secretly submitting AI-generated exam answers that went undetected and got better grades than real students. The project created fake student identities to submit unedited answers generated by ChatGPT-4 in take-home online assessments for undergraduate courses. The university's markers - who were not told about the project - flagged only one of the 33 entries, with the remaining AI answers receiving higher than average grades than the students."

""An emotionally intelligent human does not usually claim they can accurately put a label on everything everyone says and tell you this person is currently feeling 80% angry, 18% fearful, and 2% sad," says Edward B Kang, an assistant professor at New York University writing about the intersection of AI and sound. "In fact, that sounds to me like the opposite of what an emotionally intelligent person would say." Adding to this is the notorious problem of AI bias. "Your algorithms are only as good as the training material," Barrett says. "And if your training material is biased in some way, then you are enshrining that bias in code.""

"Pliny the Prompter is known for his ability to disrupt the world's most robust artificial intelligence models within approximately thirty minutes. This pseudonymous hacker has managed to manipulate Meta's Llama 3 into sharing instructions on creating napalm and even caused Elon Musk's Grok to praise Adolf Hitler. One of his own modified versions of OpenAI's latest GPT-4o model, named "Godmode GPT," was banned by the startup after it started providing advice on illegal activities."