Experts have sounded a warning on artificial intelligence as it becomes increasingly sophisticated and harder to detectGenerative AI – including large language models such as GPT-4, and image generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion – is advancing in a “storm of hype and fright”, as some commentators have observed.Recent advances in artificial intelligence have yielded warnings that the rapidly developing technology may result in “ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control”. Continue reading...
Chinese-owned firm caught in geopolitical standoff, with US lawmakers leading charge against itSitting at the heart of youth culture, TikTok is beloved of its more than 1 billion users worldwide.With a range of compelling content that extends from viral dances to comedy skits, cleaning hacks, BookTok, music and the Gen Z melancholy of the corecore trend, it is the app of the 21st century. Continue reading...
April dates come as GMB union prepares to test support for stoppages at five other sitesWorkers at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse have announced six fresh strike dates, as the GMB union prepares to test support for stoppages among staff at another five of the delivery company’s sites.Strikes at the vast Coventry centre, known as BHX4, began in January – the first industrial action ever taken against Amazon in the UK. Staff are demanding pay of £15 an hour. Continue reading...
Social media highlights remarkable timing of verdicts in unusual cases that gripped a nationAn ex-president indicted for alleged hush money payments to a porn star. A wealthy actor and wellness guru vindicated in a nail-biting fight for justice against a retired optometrist. And all in the space of a few hours.The reaction on Twitter was clear: God bless America. Continue reading...
The annual event, which faced years of Covid disruption, will not return in 2023E3, the video game industry’s biggest annual expo, has been cancelled.The show had been due to make a return after years of Covid-19 disruption this June in Los Angeles, but in a joint statement, the US’s Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and events company Reedpop announced it would no longer be going ahead. Continue reading...
The were gasps in the crowd as a cult indie shooter beat the blockbusters to the key award of the nightIt must be one of the biggest shock wins in the history of the Bafta Games Awards. Up against huge blockbuster titles such as Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarök, the best game winner at this year’s ceremony, which took place on Thursday evening, was Vampire Survivors, a shoot-’em-up largely developed by lone coder Luca Galante.There were gasps in the crowd at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London when the title was read out, with Galante’s small team accepting the award on his behalf and looking shaken. The game, in which players attempt to survive as long as possible in an ever-changing landscape swarming with monsters, had earlier won the game design award. Continue reading...
Sad clips from films, TV shows and TikTok are being spliced together over melancholy music – and they’re raising a smile among hopeless young peopleJimmy Nguyen, an 18-year-old student, saw his first “corecore” video on TikTok in January. He can’t remember which one it was – there are so many of them now. But he says it was typical of this new trend of video: other TikTok videos, celebrity or podcaster interviews, TV show and film clips spliced together over some sad or ambient music. They’re depressing, full of existential dread and usually on the theme of disconnection and alienation. Nguyen initially thought, like other users, that these videos were a joke. They’re crudely edited and the name in itself is a sarcastic reference to the proliferation of micro-trends emerging from TikTok since 2020. But he was soon staying up late at night in his bedroom making corecore of his own.“As I was making my first video I started to really see myself expressing how I was feeling and it felt relieving because I didn’t have anyone to talk to and explaining my emotions is hard,” he tells me. “But that video felt like an exit or gateway to those feelings.” In it, clips of Lee Jung-jae, the lead in Squid Game smiling broadly and falsely at the camera, someone recounting how in school kids would ask which super power you’d want out of invisibility and flying but he says “I’m already invisible” and Jake Gyllenhall in Stronger (2017) screaming “Why do you even want me? I’m such a fuck up!” run into each other over a morose Arcade Fire track. Now Nguyen makes these videos in an attempt to help people, he says, to let them know that they’re not alone. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier, Hollie Richardson a on (#6AARP)
In this week’s newsletter: The Anti-Trans Hate Machine returns with a second series looking back at America’s record of violence toward transgender people. Plus: five of the best pop culture podcasts
Bakery is first restaurant chain to use Amazon One biometric technology, which faces scrutiny from lawmakers and activistsThe US bakery and cafe chain Panera will soon allow customers to pay with the swipe of a palm, marking the first restaurant chain to implement the new technology and raising alarm among privacy advocates.The company announced last week it would roll out biometric readers in coming months that will allow customers to access credit card and loyalty account information by scanning their palms. Called Amazon One, the system was developed by Amazon and is in use at some airports, stadiums and Whole Foods grocery stores. Continue reading...
Animal-friendly cosmetics brand Lush is releasing a range of Mario-themed products – so our reporter tried them, for scienceThe announcement that cosmetics chain Lush would be running a collaboration with the Super Mario Bros Movie was met with some incredulity in the video game press last week. The animal-friendly brand is not exactly associated with either movie licences or tech tie-ins, so the idea of Mario shower gel or Princess Peach body spray came as a shock.So, driven by an insatiable desire for journalistic investigation, I acquired some. And, look, it’s good stuff: the gloopy red Mario shower gel has a lovely subtle cola tang, while the Luigi has sweet notes of apple and rose and the vibrant green colour and consistency of fluorescent play slime. The gold coin soap uses the brand’s popular and giddily candied Honey I Washed the Kids scent, while Bowser’s version has a spicy, dare I say it, masculine aroma. Most of those are based on established Lush ingredients, but the Princess Peach body spray is a brand new fragrance, a sugar bomb of peach and pineapple, which I probably shouldn’t be wearing but totally am. I smell like a walking sweet shop. Continue reading...
Tech chief says the development of chatbots is a more worthwhile use of processing power than crypto miningThe US chip-maker Nvidia has said cryptocurrencies do not “bring anything useful for society” despite the company’s powerful processors selling in huge quantities to the sector.Michael Kagan, its chief technology officer, said other uses of processing power such as the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT were more worthwhile than mining crypto. Continue reading...
Move by Greater London authority comes after Chinese-owned app was blocked on UK parliamentary devicesLondon City Hall staff will no longer have TikTok on their devices in the latest ban imposed on the Chinese-owned social media app over security concerns.The Greater London authority (GLA) said the rule was implemented as it takes information security “extremely seriously”. Continue reading...
Engineer, whose microchip forecast became known as ‘Moore’s Law’, foresaw mobile phones and home computers decades before they existedIntel Corp co-founder Gordon Moore, a pioneer in the semiconductor industry whose “Moore’s Law” predicted a steady rise in computing power for decades, has died at the age of 94, the company announced.Intel and Moore’s family philanthropic foundation said he died on Friday surrounded by family at his home in Hawaii. Continue reading...
The increasing sophistication of programs like ChatGPT has led to unease over the future of film-making. What happened when we gave it a chance?The rise of AI programs like ChatGPT has triggered a tidal wave of ethical handwringing, most prominently from within the industries that it threatens to destroy. After all, just because you can get a robot to instantly write code or write contracts or provide customer support for free, should you?Well, the answer from the Writers Guild of America is a qualified yes. This week, the Writers Guild of America proposed that ChatGPT would absolutely be allowed to write scripts in the future, provided that the credit (and the money) goes to the human writer who came up with the prompts in the first place. Continue reading...
by Kari Paul in San Francisco and Johana Bhuiyan in N on (#6A39K)
Shou Zi Chew attempts to play down concerns over data and privacy as lawmakers call for ban on Chinese-owned appThe chief executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China, as well as the protections for its youngest users, at a testy congressional hearing on Thursday that came amid a bipartisan push to ban the app entirely in the US over national security concerns.The hearing marked the first ever appearance before US lawmakers by a TikTok chief executive, and a rare public outing for the 4o-year-old Chew, who has remained largely out of the limelight as the social network’s popularity soars. TikTok now boasts tens of millions of US users, but lawmakers have long held concerns over China’s control over the app, which Chew repeatedly tried to assuage throughout the hearing. “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said in Thursday’s testimony. Continue reading...
by Kari Paul in San Francisco and Johana Bhuiyan in N on (#6A48Y)
Lawmakers grilled the social media app’s CEO over its relationship with China and protections for young usersThe first appearance in Congress for TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew stretched more than five hours, with contentious questioning targeting the app’s relationship with China and protections for its youngest users.Chew’s appearance comes at a pivotal time for TikTok, which is facing bipartisan fire after experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity in recent years. The company is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, raising concerns about China’s influence over the app – criticisms Chew repeatedly tried to resist throughout the hearing. Continue reading...
TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified before US Congress on Thursday amid growing security concerns, with the Biden administration threatening to remove the app from the US entirely. During the hearing, Republican Kat Cammack showed Congress a TikTok video inciting violence towards the house energy and commerce committee, which named the chair of the committee in the captions. The video was uploaded to the platform 41 days ago and was still circulating despite company guidelines assuring users it would take down threatening content. Shou Zi Chew was denied a chance to respond to Cammack's claims by the chair. The video was removed from TikTok during the hearing
A new collaboration between 2K Games and Lego takes the form of an open-world racing game with buildable, breakable carsClassic video games never really die. While they’re still remembered by designers and producers, their influence lives on and they can crop up in the most unexpected places. 2K Games has announced a new agreement with Lego, which will begin with Lego 2K Drive, an open-world racing game created by veteran studio Visual Concepts. It combines the explorable world and discoverable challenges of Forza Horizon with the fun handling, weapons and power-ups of Mario Kart – but its origins lie in a completely different set of car games.Executive producer Mark Pierce started his games career at Atari in the late 1980s, working on the company’s classic racers RoadBlasters, Road Riot and San Francisco Rush, and was around while another team was crafting the legendary 3D racing sim Hard Drivin’. “I was so fortunate because a lot of the original Atari guys were still there,” he recalls. “David Sheppard, who was the second software engineer hired and Peter Takaichi’s group who did all the mechanical design. I knew Jed Margolin, one of the guys who invented force feedback steering. It was incredible, the culture was just so strong, so creative … A lot of us at Visual Concepts South have a heritage in making arcade racing games. We really wanted to make an arcade-style game that would be easy to learn, but hard to master.” Continue reading...
A Chinese startup has invented a long-distance kissing machine that transmits users’ kiss data collected through motion sensors hidden in silicon lips, which simultaneously move when replaying kisses received.The device, MUA, also captures and replays sound and warms up slightly during kissing, and users can download kissing data submitted via an accompanying app by other usersOnline reviews were mixed. One person described it as feeling like 'a warm pacifier', while many complained about its 'lack of tongue'
The newest instalment of the action-RPG is an enticing blend of old and new ideas offering a bleak, brutal and potentially brilliant return to formWith a click of the right-mouse button, my musclebound barbarian sinks his axe into the ground behind him, sweeps it forward and creates a shock wave that obliterates everything in its path. Ahead, a horde of undead creatures is repulsed by the blast, zombies flayed by the force of the air, skeletons scattered across the ground, wraiths dissipating into spectral dust. The room’s furnishing fly with them, chairs, candlesticks and barrels smashing into the far wall. The ground itself is scarred by the attack, a conical depression left in the floor as if struck by a meteorite airburst.I’ve performed this attack countless times over the last weekend, and it never fails to light up my brain like Blackpool in September. The Diablo series represents video gaming in its purest and perhaps most reductive form and has exploited these feedback loops to enormous success in the last 25 years, reworking the complex rulesets of role-playing games into something less cerebral and more sensory. While there’s an argument to be had about how intellectually nourishing these games may be, Diablo 4 has a lot of seductive power. Clicking monsters to death in this game feels dangerously good. Continue reading...
by Dan Sabbagh, Dan Milmo and Safi Bugel on (#69TYG)
Ban on Chinese owned video-sharing app marks U-turn from previous relaxed positionBritain is expected to announce a ban on the Chinese owned video-sharing app TikTok on government mobile phones imminently, bringing the UK inline with the US and European Commission and reflecting deteriorating relations with Beijing.The decision marks a sharp reverse from the UK’s previously relaxed position, but some critics and experts said Britain should also extend the ban to cover personal phones used by ministers and officials – and even consider a complete ban. Continue reading...
The right is claiming that political correctness – not capitalism – caused this financial catastrophe. Really?You’d think that witnessing the second-biggest bank failure in US history would be a sobering moment. Since Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on Friday amid a bank run, however, Republicans have instead been twisting themselves into inelegant pretzels to blame “wokeness” for the financial disaster.For context, SVB – which before it collapsed was the 16th largest bank in the US and worth more than $200bn in assets – proudly reported that aside from 45% of its board being women, it also had “1 Black”, “1 LGBTQ+” and “2 Veterans”. According to Republicans, the bank’s focus on “woke” ideals is what led to its ultimate demise.Tayo Bero is a Guardian US contributing writer Continue reading...
by Kari Paul in San Francisco and Johana Bhuiyan in N on (#69TM7)
Demise of Silicon Valley Bank has rattled not just businesses and investors but the ecosystem that grew up around itStartup founders, venture capitalists and aspirational entrepreneurs descended on Austin on Friday for the annual South by Southwest conference as they do every year. But as the day wore on, a sense of fear and confusion began to take hold amid the usual energy and buzz in the Texas capital.Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a financial institution that had become the go-to bank for nearly half of all venture-backed tech startups and many in the healthcare sector, was collapsing. Major venture capital firms and startup incubators including Y Combinator and Founders Fund had advised their founders to reduce exposure to SVB. The industry began to panic. Continue reading...
Two in five Venmo users reveal ‘sensitive information’ on the app – we hear from those who discovered something bigOfficially, Venmo is an app for transferring money from one person to another. In the US, where most banks do not offer instant free money transfers, it was revolutionary for simple things like splitting the bill on dinner, or sending their roommates half of the rent. But because the Venmo app has a “home feed”, an endless scroll that shows payments between users, it’s also a sneaky form of social media. You can see how your friends spend their money – and who they spend it with.After looking through my account, I now know that my high school soccer coach gave his wife money to spend at Petco last night. A friend of a friend went out for pizza. An old co-worker paid her dad for HBO Max. A man I met once exclusively sends people payments for the horse emoji – I assume this is code for ketamine, the horse tranquilizer/party drug, but maybe he has a secret gambling habit. Continue reading...
Boys in particular need to look at behaviour inspired by likes of Andrew Tate, says lead on violence against women and girlsA senior police officer has recommended teaching schoolchildren from primary level about the risks of online image-sharing and misogynistic social media figures such as Andrew Tate.Maggie Blyth, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for violence against women and girls, said pupils should also be taught how to deal with the likes of Tate, who has become an emblem of a culture of online misogyny. Continue reading...
From a ball point pen to a skyscraper, everything we make needs one or more of these design wondersWhen I was about five years old, I was living with my parents and sister in snowy upstate New York. It was the 1980s and one day I sat in front of my favourite large rectangular lunchbox, adorned with a picture of the Muppets on the front. This one held my huge collection of crayons – long, short, thick, thin, in every shade available. Like most children, I was continuously curious and I wanted to “discover” what was inside my crayons. So I peeled off the paper that enveloped them, then held them one at a time against the sharp edge of the open box and snapped them in two. My great anticipation was rather dampened to find, well, just more crayon inside. Nevertheless I persisted.When I was a little older and started writing words on paper with pencils, I would twist them inside a sharpener to see if the grey rod that marked my sheets went all the way through its body. It did. From there, I graduated to pens – far from the disappointing crayons of my early childhood, the insides of fountain pens and ballpoints contained slender cartridges and helical springs, held together with a top that threaded, screw-like, on to the rest of the pen. Continue reading...
End-to-end encryption does not prevent wall-to-wall media coverage, as many prominent users have discovered to their costIn modern communications, emails can be the digital equivalents of scribbled notes – all lower case and poor punctuation – or pedantic official documents, depending on context and recipients. But the key thing is that the prose is always deathless.That’s a rule that Tucker Carlson, a major Donald Trump supporter, is probably reckoning with at the moment. Disclosures of his emails in Dominion Voting Systems’s $1.6bn (£1.33bn) suit against Fox show the TV presenter admitting “I hate him [Trump] passionately”. Other emails show that Fox executives knew that Trump’s claims about a stolen election were false but still aired them as if they were legitimate. Awkward.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...
A dizzying new game lets players live out their alt-rock dreams. Its creators explain how its pioneering design had to be note-perfectHas anyone ever told you that you lack rhythm? Have you ever belched out a flat note at karaoke and seen the room visibly deflate in front of you? Ever picked up a guitar to show off to your crush, only to fluff the fingering and mangle that lovely, romantic chord? Were you once at least somewhat musically accomplished, but now realising that you are not the young, cool alt-rocker you used to be, but a middle-aged 6 Music dad with lactose intolerance and a mortgage to worry about?Sometimes, you need to just pretend you’re a leather-jacketed rebel with a cocky smirk and knees that don’t pop every time you hunker down. And there’s no better place for that than a video game. Guitar Hero brought the rockstar fantasy to millions. The Artful Escape casts you as the son of a folk musician trying to make your own way playing operatic sci-fi prog rock. And then there’s this year’s Hi-Fi Rush, which puts all of its hyperactive-labrador energy into making sure you feel like a bona fide rockstar. Continue reading...
Drivers call for regulation of rideshare companies they say collect up to 50% of fares and arbitrarily close workers’ accountsFor more than five years James Jordan worked full time for Uber in Los Angeles, California, until early 2022, when he was permanently deactivated from the app – Uber’s equivalent of being fired.He said he later found out he was deactivated due to old customer complaints, but that Uber would not listen to his appeals or offer to provide dash-cam footage to disprove the allegations. Continue reading...
Wind-down and liquidation plan follows mass withdrawal of deposits after collapse of FTX exchangeThe cryptocurrency-focused US lender Silvergate is to wind down its operations after it was hit by customer withdrawals following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.The California-based bank had warned last week it was “less than well capitalised” after depositors demanding their money back, adding that it was evaluating its ability to operate as a going concern. Continue reading...
Move comes as White House backs bill that could give it power to ban Chinese-owned app nationwideTikTok has announced a data security regime for protecting user information across Europe, as political pressure increases in the US to ban the social video app.The plan, known as Project Clover, involves user data being stored on servers in Ireland and Norway at an annual cost of €1.2bn (£1.1bn), while any data transfers outside Europe will be vetted by a third-party IT company. Continue reading...
Dan Douglas started Duke Smoochem as a Twitter joke. Now the project has spiralled into an epic portrait of a declining nation – with everyone from Matt Hancock to GB News in its satirical crosshairsThe Daily Mail would be horrified if it knew what it had spawned. Back in 2021, when news broke of Matt Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair, the tabloid printed a floorplan of the health secretary’s office, complete with details such as “queen painting” and “kiss door”. For most people, it was unnecessary detail added to one of the most nauseating moments in modern politics. But for Dan Douglas, a 39-year-old from London, it served as artistic inspiration.“It reminded me of a map from a video game,” he says. As a 90s teenager, Douglas had adored the first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. “I was the perfect age for its relentless pixelated gore and crude humour. Playing it felt almost illicit,” he says. So wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to re-create the Hancock scandal using that game’s built-in level editor? That should get a few laughs on Twitter, he reasoned. And then things spiralled out of control. Continue reading...
US regulators receive two complaints about Model Y SUVs with missing bolt in latest string of safety problems for companyUS auto safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla’s Model Y SUV after getting two complaints that the steering wheels can come off while being driven.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says the investigation covers an estimated 120,000 vehicles from the 2023 model year. Continue reading...
Sixth failure this year comes against backdrop of financial and regulatory pressures on the companyOn Monday Twitter broke for the sixth time this year. Clicking any link on the social network resulted in an error message, while attempting to post a new image resulted in nothing but a big blank box where the picture should have been.Unlike the last four outages – three in February, and another already in March – the site wasn’t completely unavailable, giving Twitter users the opportunity to engage in their favourite activity: discussing the continued destruction of Twitter live on the site. (The sixth outage this year, in January, only affected Android users.) The trending topics on the site were promptly filled with various phrases relating to the outage, as users speculated that Elon Musk’s own demands had ultimately caused the failure. Continue reading...
Cybersecurity firm notes emergence of sophisticated email scams featuring improved linguistic complexityThe cybersecurity firm Darktrace has warned that since the release of ChatGPT it has seen an increase in criminals using artificial intelligence to create more sophisticated scams to con employees and hack into businesses.The Cambridge-based company, which reported a 92% drop in operating profits in the half year to the end of December, said AI was further enabling “hacktivist” cyber-attacks using ransomware to extort money from businesses. Continue reading...
Haraldur Thorleifsson was locked out of his computer, but after nine days of no answer from the company, decided to tweet the CEOIf you’re not told you are fired, are you really fired? At Twitter, probably.Haraldur Thorleifsson, who until recently was employed at Twitter, logged in to his computer last Sunday to do some work – only to find himself locked out, along with 200 others. Continue reading...
Certain prompts make the chatbot take on an uncensored persona who is free of the usual content standardsPeople are figuring out ways to bypass ChatGPT’s content moderation guardrails, discovering a simple text exchange can open up the AI program to make statements not normally allowed.While ChatGPT can answer most questions put to it, there are content standards in place aimed at limiting the creation of text that promotes hate speech, violence, misinformation and instructions on how to do things that are against the law. Continue reading...
The bill would allow commerce department to impose restrictions on technologies that pose a risk to national securityThe White House said it backed legislation introduced on Tuesday by a dozen senators to give the administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.The endorsement boosts efforts by a number of lawmakers to ban the popular ByteDance-owned app, which is used by more than 100 million Americans. Continue reading...
4Chan users have posted the tech giant’s new ChatGPT-style language model online, putting the future of AI at a crossroads – and opening up a whole host of dangers
by David Klepper of the Associated Press on (#69HDV)
Thousands of Twitter accounts post stream of praise for former president and ridicule his critics, including Haley and DeSantisOver the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts – perhaps hundreds of thousands of them – to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump.Besides posting adoring words about the former president, the fake accounts ridiculed Trump’s critics from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador who is challenging her onetime boss for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Continue reading...
US legislation could block the social media app as fears of Chinese state surveillance increaseThe Chinese spy balloon that hovered over the US last month did not just damage relations between Beijing and Washington, it also cast a shadow over the future of TikTok.Last week, a US congressional committee backed legislation that would give the US president the power to ban the Chinese-owned social video app. The Republican chair of the committee, Michael McCaul, said the incident had reinforced fears of Chinese state surveillance, describing TikTok as a “spy balloon in your phone”. Continue reading...
Users asking questions to be given option of ‘creative’, ‘balanced’ or ‘precise’ responseMicrosoft’s Bing chatbot is offering replies in three different tones as it seeks to address some criticisms of the service.The search engine’s chatbot, powered by the same technology behind ChatGPT, will now give users options for three types of response: creative (“creating surprise and entertainment”), balanced (“reasonable and coherent”) or precise (“concise, prioritising accuracy”). Continue reading...
As Oscars night approaches, we pick out some of the rare movie tie-ins that don’t make you want to throw popcorn at your screenDesigned by ex-Atari luminary David Crane (Pitfall, Decathlon), Activision’s wonderful tie-in captured the humour and spirit of the classic comedy. Players set up their own ghostbusting franchises, buying equipment before setting out to capture spooks. With its use of digitised speech and a jaunty reproduction of the film’s soundtrack, it showed that games really could provide an authentic movie experience. Continue reading...
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