All you need to know about the US state becoming the first to prohibit the social video app for consumer users
TikTok has been banned in Montana. The first US state-level ban of the increasingly embattled social video app is already proving controversial, although it will not take effect until 2024.
Continue reading...Picture shared on verified accounts fuels concerns over AI’s potential to generate misinformation
An AI-generated image that appeared to show an explosion next to a building in the Pentagon complex circulated on social media platforms on Monday, in the latest incident to highlight concerns over misinformation generated by AI.
The image of a tall, dark gray plume of smoke quickly spread on Twitter, including through shares by verified accounts. It remains unclear where it originated.
Continue reading...The trailer for Gareth Edwards’ new film shows humanity being outsmarted by AI – and is released just as our overlords-to-be are rearing their terrifying heads
It’s been a while since we had a truly great movie about devious, dystopian AIs priming themselves to take over the world, in which the key choices made by mere humans will decide whether we end up as just an organic footnote in histories written by our machine conquerors. Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina (2014) springs to mind, while 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron was a fun comic book romp, if lacking the spiky gravitas and sly intellectual thrust of Garland’s debut. Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother explored similar territory in 2019 with a rather more claustrophobic, yet devastatingly incisive touch. Now there’s Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, the first trailer for which debuted this week, arriving just as very real concerns about the ability of artificial intelligence to really muck things up for us humans are rearing their terrifying digital heads.
At first glance, it looks as if Edwards has thrown in all our favourite sci-fi tropes. The basic scenario – tooled up military man fails in mission to wipe out robot child because she is just too cute – reminds us of kind-hearted Din Djarin’s inability to bounty hunt Grogu in early episodes of The Mandalorian.
Continue reading...The controversial author on the importance of updating his landmark book on animal liberation, being ‘flexibly vegan’ and the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence for the non-human world
Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good. He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.
Why write Animal Liberation Now?
The last full update was 1990. Though the philosophical arguments have stood up well, the chapters that describe factory farming and what we do to animals in labs needed to be almost completely rewritten. I also hadn’t really discussed factory farming’s contribution to the climate crisis and I wanted to reflect on our progress towards animal rights. Effectively, this is a new book for the next generation, hence the new title.
You can now hand your phone to your partner without any danger of them reading your chats. But what’s the big secret?
Name: Chat Lock.
Age: The Chat Lock feature on WhatsApp is new. Cheating, by contrast, has been going on since Venus was carrying on with Mars behind Vulcan’s back, and probably long before that.
Continue reading...The CEO of the social media giant has spent billions on his virtual reality dream – and still no one understands the idea. Now the world’s richest firm could change the game
In Meta’s quarterly earnings call in April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was on the defensive. The metaverse, the vision of a globe-spanning virtual reality that he had literally bet his multibillion-dollar empire on creating, had been usurped as the new hot thing by the growing hype around artificial intelligence (AI).
Critics had even noticed Meta itself changing its tune, highlighting the difference between a November statement from Zuckerberg, in which he described the project as a “high-priority growth area” and a March note that instead focused on how “advancing AI” was the company’s “single largest investment”.
Continue reading...AI can fight the climate crisis and fuel a renewable-energy revolution. It could also kill countless jobs or incite nuclear war
The last few months have been by far the most exciting of my 17 years working on artificial intelligence. Among many other advances, OpenAI’s ChatGPT – a type of AI known as a large language model – smashed records in January to become the fastest-growing consumer application of all time, achieving 100 million users in two months.
No one knows for certain what’s going to happen next with AI. There’s too much going on, on too many fronts, behind too many closed doors. However, we do know that AI is now in the hands of the world, and, as a consequence, the world seems likely to be transformed.
Michael Osborne is a professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford, and a co-founder of Mind Foundry
Continue reading...False news stories, images, video and audio could be tailored to audiences and created at scale by next spring
Next year’s elections in Britain and the US could be marked by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, experts have warned, as generated images, text and deepfake videos go viral at the behest of swarms of AI-powered propaganda bots.
Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington this week that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users.
Continue reading...The spinoff app is trying to do what Mastodon couldn’t and take a piece of Elon Musk’s pie. Plus: the race to save 1bn NSFW images on Imgur
Let’s check in on social media.
In February, Bluesky released its iOS app. The social network began as a spinoff within Twitter to build a fully “decentralised” protocol, something that could replicate the Twitter experience without placing the company itself at the centre of impossible decisions around content moderation.
Musk added on Friday that he looked forward to working with Yaccarino on transforming Twitter into X, the “everything app” along the lines of China’s multi-faceted WeChat.
Musk did not name Yaccarino in the initial post, but on Friday, NBCUniversal, the entertainment conglomerate behind the NBC TV network and the Universal film studio, announced that Yaccarino had left the business without revealing her onward destination. Musk’s confirmation came soon afterwards.
She interviewed Musk on stage at an advertising conference in Miami last month, in which she told the Tesla CEO that some advertisers “have a challenge with your points of view”, to which Musk replied that some of his tweets should be taken with a “grain of salt”. Yaccarino also said in the interview: “If freedom of speech, as he says, is the bedrock of this country, I’m not sure there’s anyone in this room who could disagree with that.”
In April, Yaccarino tweeted a clip from an interview between Musk and the comedian Bill Maher on the HBO show Real Time With Bill Maher, in which she tagged Musk with an “on fire” emoji. In the clip, Musk is asked by Maher about the “woke mind virus”, prompting Musk to state that the world needed to be “cautious” about anything that is “anti-meritocratic” and “results in the suppression of free speech”.
Continue reading...Justice department announces charges involving company’s self-driving car technology
The US has charged a former Apple engineer accused of stealing the company’s technology on autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, and then fleeing to China.
The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced charges in that case and several others involving the alleged theft of trade secrets and efforts to steal technology to benefit China, Russia and Iran.
Continue reading...Ignoring ChatGPT and its cousins won’t get us anywhere. In fact, these systems reveal issues we too often miss
In my spring lecture course of 120 students, my teaching assistants caught four examples of students using artificial-intelligence-driven language programs like ChatGPT to complete short essays. In each case, the students confessed to using such systems and agreed to rewrite the assignments themselves.
With all the panic about how students might use these systems to get around the burden of actually learning, we often forget that as of 2023, the systems don’t work well at all. It was easy to spot these fraudulent essays. They contained spectacular errors. They used text that did not respond to the prompt we had issued to students. Or they just sounded unlike what a human would write.
Continue reading...In this week’s newsletter: Why did Amanda Riley con the blogosphere into paying for her fake illness? Find out in Scamanda. Plus: five of the best podcasts to mend a broken heart
People Who Knew Me
BBC Sounds, episodes weekly from Tuesday
Rosamund Pike, pictured above, stars as Emily, a woman who faked her own death on 9/11 and is now living happily in California. That’s until she’s diagnosed with breast cancer and decides to confront her past. Pike is natural and relatable, which puts this adaptation of Kim Hooper’s novel streets ahead of the average radio drama. Convincing characters, 15-minute episodes and a gripping storyline fuel a need to hear more. Hannah Verdier
Linda Yaccarino is praised for understanding of advertisers – but Elon Musk must cede enough control
“I see I have some new followers,” said Linda Yaccarino, adding side-eyes and waving hand emojis to a tongue-in-cheek post responding to the social media explosion that followed her unveiling as Twitter’s new chief executive on Friday.
Still weeks away from taking up the role, Yaccarino, a respected media veteran known in advertising circles as the “Velvet Hammer” for her silky but tough negotiating style, has already had a taste of the shambolic corporate environment that has swept the platform since billionaire Elon Musk bought it for $44bn last October.
Continue reading...Holmes, who was charged with defrauding investors in her blood-testing start-up, hoped to stay out of jail while she appealed her conviction
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must begin serving her prison sentence while she appeals her conviction on charges of defrauding investors in the failed blood-testing startup, an appeals court in San Francisco ruled on Tuesday.
Holmes, who rose to fame after claiming Theranos’ small machines could run an array of diagnostic tests with just a few drops of blood, was convicted at trial in San Jose, California, last year and sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison.
Continue reading...From farming and education to healthcare and the military, artificial intelligence is poised to make sweeping changes to the workplace. But can it have a positive impact – or are we in for a darker future?
In 1965, the political scientist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon declared: “Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” Today, in what is increasingly referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace is igniting similar concerns.
The European parliament’s forthcoming Artificial Intelligence Act is likely to deem the use of AI across education, law enforcement and worker management to be “high risk”. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI”, recently resigned from his position at Google, citing concerns about the technology’s impact on the job market. And, in early May, striking members of the Writers Guild of America promised executives: “AI will replace you before it replaces us.”
Continue reading...Attack has caused worst disruption in decades to city’s paper of record and it is unclear when normal editorial services will resume
The Philadelphia Inquirer is scrambling to restore its systems and resume normal operations after it became the latest major media organization to be targeted in a cyber-attack.
With no regular Sunday newspaper and online stories also facing some delays, the cyber-attack has triggered the worst disruption to the Inquirer in decades.
Continue reading...Thursday’s vote in EU parliament seen as key test in formation of world’s first artificial intelligence laws
Moves to ban live “Big Brother” real time facial recognition technology from being deployed across the streets of the EU or by border officials will be tested in a key vote at the European parliament on Thursday.
The amendment is part of a package of proposals for the world’s first artificial intelligence laws, which could result in firms being fined up to €10m (£8.7m) or removed from trading within the EU for breaches of the rules.
Continue reading...From restoring artefacts destroyed by Isis to training robot vacuum cleaners, architects, artists and game developers are discovering the potential – and pitfalls – of the virtual world
A shower of pink petals rains down in slow motion against an ethereal backdrop of minimalist white arches, bathed in the soft focus of a cosmetics advert. The camera pulls back to reveal the petals have clustered together to form a delicate puffy armchair, standing in the centre of a temple-like space, surrounded by a dreamy landscape of fluffy pink trees. It looks like a luxury zen retreat, as conceived by Glossier.
The aesthetic is eerily familiar: these are the pastel tones, tactile textures and ubiquitous arches of Instagram architecture, an amalgamation of design tropes specifically honed for likes. An ode to millennial pink, this computer-rendered scene has been finely tuned to seduce the social media algorithm, calibrated to slide into your feed like a sugary tranquilliser, promising to envelop you in its candy-floss embrace.
What makes it different from countless other such CGI visions that populate the infinite scroll is that this implausible chair now exists in reality. In front of the video, on show in the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK), stands the Hortensia chair, a vision of blossomy luxury plucked from the screen and fabricated from thousands of laser-cut pink fabric petals – yours for about £5,000.
It is the work of digital artist Andrés Reisinger, who minted the original digital chair design as an NFT after his images went viral on Instagram in 2018. He was soon approached by collectors asking where they could buy the real thing, so he decided to make it – with the help of product designer Júlia Esqué and furniture brand Moooi – first as a limited edition, and now adapted for serial production. It was the first time that an armchair had been willed into being by likes and shares, a physical product spawned from the dark matter of the algorithm.
Continue reading...The feature, rolled out to users in the US and UK last year, can send details including location without phone reception to trained specialists
Apple has launched a new emergency feature on all iPhone 14 models in Australia and New Zealand that enables users to message emergency services and alert family and friends if they’re in strife, even when there is no phone reception.
The Emergency SOS feature works by connecting directly to satellites located more than a 1,000km from Earth.
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Continue reading...Tech advances that make it easier to recreate human voices also raise ethical questions about the rights of actors and musicians
When the epic open-world PlayStation 4 game Red Dead Redemption 2 was developed in 2013, it took 2,200 days to record the 1,200 voices in the game with 700 voice actors, who recited the 500,000 lines of dialogue.
It was a massive feat that is nearly impossible for any other studio to replicate – let alone a games studio smaller than Rockstar Games.
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Continue reading...Here are the best Black Friday deals you can already get Image: Elen Winata for The Verge From noise-canceling earbuds to robot vacuums a...
