Epic Games, the developer of the popular video game Fortnite, agreed to pay $520 million over allegations the company violated digital privacy protections for children and used so-called “dark patterns” to trick users into making unintentional purchases, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Monday.
“As early as 2017, Epic employees urged the company to change the default settings to require users to opt in for voice chat, citing concern about the impact on children in particular,” the FTC said in its announcement. “Despite this and reports that children had been harassed, including sexually, while playing the game, the company resisted turning off the default settings.”
“Epic ignored more than one million user complaints and repeated employee concerns that ‘huge’ numbers of users were being wrongfully charged,” the FTC said. “In fact, Epic’s changes only made the problem worse… Using internal testing, Epic purposefully obscured cancel and refund features to make them more difficult to find.”
Twitter will no longer allow users to promote their presence on certain social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post. In a post outlining these changes, Twitter says it will take action against users that violate this policy “at both the Tweet level and the account level.”
The panic and hype around the surprisingly dumb chatbot is stopping us from talking about real issues with AI.
ChatGPT is more about bullshitting than creativity, which serves as a neat metaphor for what has happened with our technology sector and how it “feels like a giant organ for bullshittery―for upscaling human access to speech and for amplifying lies.” When Bogost sat down with ChatGPT, he found something similar to what moderators at Stack Overflow did.
Nuclear fusion occurs when atoms merge together, a process that unleashes an enormous amount of energy. These reactions are the reason that stars shine, and scientists on Earth hope that they could one day form the basis of a clean power system that could ease our civilization’s transition away from fossil fuels.
A Canadian Superior Court judge has authorized a lawsuit brought forward by three parents who say their children would not sleep, eat, or shower because they were addicted to playing Fortnite.
The parents allege the game was deliberately made to be highly addictive and that it has had a lasting effect on their children.
A close-up image of a silicon mono-crystal. Silicon is a crucial component in AI. Image: Catherine Breslin / Better Images of AI / Silicon Closeup / CC-BY 4.0
Capability overhang is a technical term, but it also perfectly describes what’s happening right now as AI enters the public domain. For years, researchers have been on a tear, pumping out new models faster than they can be commercialized. But in 2022, a glut of new apps and programs have suddenly made these skills available to a general audience, and in 2023, as we continue scaling this new territory, things will start changing — fast.
Apple Music Sing will utilize Apple Music’s real-time lyrics to allow users to sing to their favorite songs using adjustable vocals, background vocals, and duet view to allow more than one singer.
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