Author: publisher

After years of horrendous scandals, OpenAI has seemingly admitted that ChatGPT wasn’t safe for teenage users.On Tuesday, the Sam Altman-led company rolled out an alternate version of the bot called “ChatGPT for Teens,” which is purportedly designed to help younger users “learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence.”The feature “provides stronger built-in safety protections for teens, including features to promote healthy use and additional controls for parents,” according to the company. OpenAI says that its system will “automatically” place users between the age of 13 and 17 into the new feature if it “estimates someone is under…

As vandalism against its license plate-reading cameras and backlash against civic leaders who embrace them grows, Flock Safety is losing its surveillance coverage at a breakneck pace.That isn’t just bad news for the company’s bottom line. It also means that its customers in law enforcement are able to draw on less and less data — making the company’s network a less attractive line item for local governments across the country.In the town of McFarland, Wisconsin, an $18,000 contract for six Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) from Flock was scrapped after the loss of 24 county-level cameras from earlier in the…

If you thought the online sports betting industry was running out of controversies, think again: they’re now letting users bet on ten-year-old baseball players in the Little League.As gambling experts Dustin Gouker and Eric Ramsey noted in a newsletter over the weekend, offshore sportsbooks are now allowing users to bet on the Little League World Series, an annual baseball tournament for children aged ten to 12 years that’s set to kick off later today.While the practice is forbidden on state-regulated sportsbooks, offshore ones aren’t beholden to those rules.“California is getting bet like they are the 1998 Yankees,” offshore sportsbook BetOnline…

A TikTok video shows a teenage girl walking through the front doors of a large high school. It’s filmed point-of-view style using smart glasses, and a hashtag in the caption reads “#metaglasses.”“Excuse me, could I get your Roblox?” the adolescent boy wearing the head-mounted camera badgers the girl. “No,” she responds, glaring unhappily as she quickly moves past him. She keeps walking, but the boy filming follows her.“Come back! Pleasepleaseplease!” he wheedles as the girl continues to walk away. “Your LinkedIn, at least? Your LinkedIn, please? Your Reddit? Come on, your Reddit? I know you have a Reddit!”

Students across the country are using AI models to complete assignments and write entire essays. Some of this constitutes cheating, but in many cases schools are allowing students to make some use of AI tools.This is a slippery slop. As some experts argue, any intrusion of automation into the writing process isn’t just threatening students’ composition skills, but their entire ability to think.“Writing is a technology for thinking,” cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg told the New York Times in a new essay mulling the consequences of sidestepping the hard work of writing.Writing, the piece notes, helps develop all sorts of…

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is no stranger to controversy, something he regularly uses to drum up press and raise the profile of his universally reviled surveillance company.While we may be giving him exactly what he wants, his latest outburst is so insulting we just have to push back. In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Langley defended the utility of his company’s automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), AI-integrated surveillance cameras which have turned Flock into one of the most widely hated brands in the US.When the interview went off-track into the tragic kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, Langley chose to…

When Donald Trump ascended to office for the second time, he promised to deploy an arsenal of high-tech surveillance gadgetry on the already dystopian US-Mexico border. At that point, tech in question concerned devices like AI-integrated camera towers and robot dogs. Now, it seems the federal government is looking to kick things up a notch as it seeks companies to fulfill a contract for humanoid robots.That’s according to Fox News, which reported that Department of Homeland Security officials have sat through at least one presentation from the humanoid robotics company Foundation.Though it’s still pretty early for humanoid robotics as a…

A journalist says that his Tesla running Full Self-Driving nearly drove his car off the highway and straight into a ditch.Fred Lambert, the editor-in-chief of the electric vehicle blog Electrek, described this close call in a harrowing new piece. Had he not intervened, he said, the software’s blunder could’ve been disastrous.“I was ready to take control, and I did, but it was scary,” Lambert wrote. “My girlfriend, sitting in the passenger seat, screamed in fear.”The incident took place on Sunday while Lambert was driving down Autoroute 55 in Quebec’s Mauricie region. He was running the latest version of FSD, v14.3.6.

Hospitals in the UK are taking a beating from the relentless summer heat.As The Guardian reports, indoor temperatures at hospitals have reached more than 107 degrees Fahrenheit — causing surgeries to be cancelled and staff to faint.The temperature data comes via comes from a freedom of information request filed by the Liberal Democrats, a UK political party. During the month of July, the data also revealed, the average temperature at National Health Service wards across the country was a sweltering 81.9 degrees Fahrenheit — well past the NHS’s maximum safe temperature threshold of around 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius).Hospitals…

We just got our first glimpse of Apple’s long-rumored camera-equipped AirPods — and they already look like a privacy nightmare.In a short demo video that MacRumors unearthed from the files of an upcoming macOS version, a man wearing the new AirPods holds up a book so the cameras in the device can see its title.Then, a voiceover says, “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable.”“See something you like?” it continues. “Just ask me to save it for later.”