Digital Content

Artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology, and policymakers must move equally quickly to figure out how to respond, a group of economists and researchers are warning. The statement, titled “We Must Act Now,” was signed by nearly 200 people, including 15 Nobel laureates and the chief economists of two of the leading A.I. labs, Open AI and Anthropic.

What I’ve realized is that responsible A.I. governance may really come down to something resembling a First Amendment approach. Large language models, to me, are simply artifacts: objects made from the language expressed by tens of millions of people. And Anthropic, to me, is a software publisher. I do not see Claude as a living thing; I see it as a reference work prone to glitching, a surreal encyclopedia with wild side effects.

Although health providers are the most common place Americans turn for information about their health, social media influencers and podcasts also play a major role. This is especially true for young women: 57% of women ages 18 to 29 say they ever get health and wellness information from influencers.

Decades of mergers and acquisitions have reduced the number of major U.S. media companies to a handful of transnational conglomerates that dominate the production and circulation of news, film, television, sports, games, and other forms of media and culture. If Paramount Skydance acquires Warner Bros.

For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue. Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.

The European Commission preliminarily found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act for the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook. The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems.

OpenAI is rolling out a new generation of voice models for ChatGPT, aiming to make conversations with its AI sound more natural while routing these queries to its best models. OpenAI says its smartest voice models yet, GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini, make conversations feel more human by allowing users to interrupt naturally and pause speech without the model cutting them off. The voice models will now route queries to OpenAI's latest frontier text models, addressing what executives acknowledge has been a limitation for users.

The Supreme Court allowed a Texas law prohibiting minors from downloading apps without their parent's consent to go into effect. Multiple organizations had sued the state, arguing that the law violates children's freedom of speech. But in an unsigned, unexplained order, the high court allowed Texas to enforce the law as lawsuits continue in lower courts.

Wikipedia is in peril. In a world where trust in truth is crumbling, the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front.

Is social media safe enough for children? Today, parents must primarily rely on claims that social media companies make about their products to answer that question. But how accurate are these claims? To answer that question, we undertook a methodical independent analysis of features claimed to be provided by: Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube. We found that most features do not live up to the promises that companies make about the safety they provide. Of the 86 features that we tested, 51 failed, or ~60%.