"For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland have cast AI as a villain that can turn into a killing machine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Even Steven Spielberg's relatively hopeful A.I.: Artificial Intelligence had a pessimistic edge to its vision of the future."

But now "Google — a leading developer in AI technology — wants to move the cultural conversations away from the technology as seen in The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina.". So they're funding short films "that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light," produced by Range Media Partners (which represents many writers and actors) So far, two short films have been greenlit through the project: One, titled "Sweetwater," tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear in the film, which was written by his son, Sean Douglas. It is the first project they are working on together. The other, "Lucid," examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same dream....

Google has much riding on convincing consumers that AI can be a force for good, or at least not evil. The hot space is increasingly crowded with startups and established players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Facebook parent company Meta. The Google-funded shorts, which are 15 to 20 minutes long, aren't commercials for AI, per se. Rather, Google is looking to fund films that explore the intersection of humanity and technology, said Mira Lane, vice president of technology and society at Google. Google is not pushing their products in the movies, and the films are not made with AI, she added... The company said it wants to fund many more movies, but it does not have a target number. Some of the shorts could eventually become full-length features, Google said....

Negative public perceptions about AI could put tech companies at a disadvantage when such cases go before juries of laypeople. That's one reason why firms are motivated to makeover AI's reputation. "There's an incredible amount of skepticism in the public world about what AI is and what AI will do in the future," said Sean Pak, an intellectual property lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, on a conference panel. "We, as an industry, have to do a better job of communicating the public benefits and explaining in simple, clear language what it is that we're doing and what it is that we're not doing."

"Do we need publicly-owned social networks to escape Silicon Valley?" asks an opinion piece in Spain's El Pais newspaper.

It argues it's necessary because social media platforms "have consolidated themselves as quasi-monopolies, with a business model that consists of violating our privacy in search of data to sell ads..." Among the proposals and alternatives to these platforms, the idea of public social media networks has often been mentioned. Imagine, for example, a Twitter for the European Union, or a Facebook managed by media outlets like the BBC. In February, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called for "the development of our own browsers, European public and private social networks and messaging services that use transparent protocols." Former Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — who governed from 2004 until 2011 — and the left-wing Sumar bloc in the Spanish Parliament have also proposed this. And, back in 2021, former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn made a similar suggestion.

At first glance, this may seem like a good idea: a public platform wouldn't require algorithms — which are designed to stimulate addiction and confrontation — nor would it have to collect private information to sell ads. Such a platform could even facilitate public conversations, as pointed out by James Muldoon, a professor at Essex Business School and author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech (2022)... This could be an alternative that would contribute to platform pluralism and ensure we're not dependent on a handful of billionaires. This is especially important at a time when we're increasingly aware that technology isn't neutral and that private platforms respond to both economic and political interests.
There's other possibilities. Further down they write that "it makes much more sense for the state to invest in, or collaborate with, decentralized social media networks based on free and interoperable software" that "allow for the portability of information and content." They even spoke to Cory Doctorow, who they say "proposes that the state cooperate with the software systems, developers, or servers for existing open-source platforms, such as the U.S. network Bluesky or the German firm Mastodon." (Doctorow adds that reclaiming digital independence "is incredibly important, it's incredibly difficult, and it's incredibly urgent."

The article also acknowledges the option of "legislative initiatives — such as antitrust laws, or even stricter regulations than those imposed in Europe — that limit or prevent surveillance capitalism." (Though they also figures showing U.S. tech giants have one of the largest lobbying groups in the EU, with Meta being the top spender...)

The U.S. unsealed charges against 16 individuals behind DanaBot, a malware-as-a-service platform responsible for over $50 million in global losses. "The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware," reports KrebsOnSecurity. From the report: Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud. Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform. The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. "JimmBee," and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. "Onix," both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is "Maffiozi."

According to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and June 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that the second version of DanaBot -- emerging in January 2021 -- was provided to co-conspirators for use in targeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia. The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds.

"In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware," the criminal complaint reads. "In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent -- one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake." A statement from the DOJ says that as part of today's operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help remediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the government, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYRMU, and ZScaler.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta is expanding the ranks of its lowest-rated employees in mid-year performance reviews, a move that could lead to more performance-based cuts. Meta is telling managers to put more employees in "Below Expectations", the lowest performance bucket during this year's mid-year performance reviews, according to a memo shared on Meta's internal forum on May 14, which was viewed by Business Insider. For teams of 150 or more, Meta wants managers to put 15-20% of employees in the bottom bucket compared to 12-15% last year.

The expanded range includes employees who have already left the company as part of "non-regrettable attrition", Meta's term for staff considered non-critical to operations, including those who resigned or were dismissed for underperformance. The mid-year performance review process is "an opportunity to make exit decisions", according to the memo. It added that "there will be no company-wide performance terminations, unlike earlier this year," and leaders are expected to manage the performance of their reports.

Thursday was Rust's 10-year anniversary for its first stable release. "To say I'm surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement," writes Rust's original creator Graydon Hoare. "I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved... In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure." It's a story with many actors:

- The population of developers the language serves who express their needs and constraints through discussion, debate, testing, and bug reports arising from their experience writing libraries and applications.

- The language designers and implementers who work to satisfy those needs and constraints while wrestling with the unexpected consequences of each decision.

- The authors, educators, speakers, translators, illustrators, and others who work to expand the set of people able to use the infrastructure and work on the infrastructure.

- The institutions investing in the project who provide the long-term funding and support necessary to sustain all this work over decades.

All these actors have a common interest in infrastructure.
Rather than just "systems programming", Hoare sees Rust as a tool for building infrastructure itself, "the robust and reliable necessities that enable us to get our work done" — a wide range that includes everything from embedded and IoT systems to multi-core systems. So the story of "Rust's initial implementation, its sustained investment, and its remarkable resonance and uptake all happened because the world needs robust and reliable infrastructure, and the infrastructure we had was not up to the task." Put simply: it failed too often, in spectacular and expensive ways. Crashes and downtime in the best cases, and security vulnerabilities in the worst. Efficient "infrastructure-building" languages existed but they were very hard to use, and nearly impossible to use safely, especially when writing concurrent code. This produced an infrastructure deficit many people felt, if not everyone could name, and it was growing worse by the year as we placed ever-greater demands on computers to work in ever more challenging environments...

We were stuck with the tools we had because building better tools like Rust was going to require an extraordinary investment of time, effort, and money. The bootstrap Rust compiler I initially wrote was just a few tens of thousands of lines of code; that was nearing the limits of what an unfunded solo hobby project can typically accomplish. Mozilla's decision to invest in Rust in 2009 immediately quadrupled the size of the team — it created a team in the first place — and then doubled it again, and again in subsequent years. Mozilla sustained this very unusual, very improbable investment in Rust from 2009-2020, as well as funding an entire browser engine written in Rust — Servo — from 2012 onwards, which served as a crucial testbed for Rust language features.
Rust and Servo had multiple contributors at Samsung, Hoare acknowledges, and Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and others "hired key developers and contributed hardware and management resources to its ongoing development." Rust itself "sits atop LLVM" (developed by researchers at UIUC and later funded by Apple, Qualcomm, Google, ARM, Huawei, and many other organizations), while Rust's safe memory model "derives directly from decades of research in academia, as well as academic-industrial projects like Cyclone, built by AT&T Bell Labs and Cornell."

And there were contributions from "interns, researchers, and professors at top academic research programming-language departments, including CMU, NEU, IU, MPI-SWS, and many others." JetBrains and the Rust-Analyzer OpenCollective essentially paid for two additional interactive-incremental reimplementations of the Rust frontend to provide language services to IDEs — critical tools for productive, day-to-day programming. Hundreds of companies and other institutions contributed time and money to evaluate Rust for production, write Rust programs, test them, file bugs related to them, and pay their staff to fix or improve any shortcomings they found. Last but very much not least: Rust has had thousands and thousands of volunteers donating years of their labor to the project. While it might seem tempting to think this is all "free", it's being paid for! Just less visibly than if it were part of a corporate budget.

All this investment, despite the long time horizon, paid off. We're all better for it.
He looks ahead with hope for a future with new contributors, "steady and diversified streams of support," and continued reliability and compatability (including "investment in ever-greater reliability technology, including the many emerging formal methods projects built on Rust.")

And he closes by saying Rust's "sustained, controlled, and frankly astonishing throughput of work" has "set a new standard for what good tools, good processes, and reliable infrastructure software should be like.

"Everyone involved should be proud of what they've built."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case. "The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment (PDF) filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta." According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta's apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.

"Meta knows of no case finding monopoly power based solely on a claimed degradation in product quality, and the FTC has cited none," Meta argued. Meta has maintained throughout the trial that its users actually like seeing ads. In the company's recent motion, Meta argued that the FTC provided no insights into what "the right number of ads" should be, "let alone" provide proof that "Meta showed more ads" than it would in a competitive market where users could easily switch services if ad load became overwhelming. Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it "does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them," so it only shows more ads to users who click ads.

Meta also insisted that there's "nothing but speculation" showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them. The company claimed that without Meta's resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was "pretty broken and duct-taped" together, making it "vulnerable to spam" before Meta bought it. Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered "a consumer-welfare bonanza," Meta argued, while dismissing "smoking gun" emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as "legally irrelevant." Dismissing these as "a few dated emails," Meta argued that "efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg's state of mind before the acquisition in 2012 are pointless."

"What matters is what Meta did," Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with resources that allowed it "to 'thrive' -- adding many new features, attracting hundreds of millions and then billions of users, and monetizing with great success." In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app. And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that "the sole Meta witness to (supposedly) learn of Google's acquisition efforts testified that he did not have that worry." In sum: A ruling in Meta's favor could prevent a breakup of its apps, while a denial would push the trial toward a possible order to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.

According to Rest of the World, a major confrontation between Meta and the local authorities in Nigeria is currently taking place: "Local authorities have fined Meta $290 million for regulatory breaches, prompting the social media giant to threaten pulling Facebook and Instagram from the country." Techdirt reports: As with earlier EU fines imposed on the company, the sticking point is Meta's refusal to comply with local privacy laws [...]. The fine itself is small change for Meta, which had a net income of $62 billion on a turnover of $165 billion in 2024, and a market capitalization of $1.5 trillion. Meta's current revenues in Nigeria are relatively small, but its market shares are high: "According to social media performance tracker Napoleoncat, Meta has a massive presence in the country, with Facebook alone reaching about 51.2 million users as of May 2024, more than a fifth of the population. Instagram had 12.6 million Nigerian users as of November 2023, while WhatsApp had about 51 million users, making Nigeria the 10th largest market globally for the messaging app."

Since many Nigerians depend on Meta's platforms, the company might be hoping that there will be public pressure on the government not to impose the fine in order to avoid a shutdown of its services there. But it is hard to see Meta carrying out its threat to walk away from a country expected to be the third most populous nation in the world by 2050. In 2100, the population of Nigeria could reach 541 million according to current projections.

Researchers are sounding alarms about the proliferation of AI-generated content -- dubbed "slop" -- that may be overwhelming the internet's human-created material. Fil Menczer, distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University, who has studied social bots since the early 2010s, is now expressing serious concern about generative AI's impact. "Am I worried? Yes, I'm very worried," he told Bloomberg.

Another research from Georgetown University found over 100 Facebook pages with millions of followers using AI-generated images for scams. According to Tollbit, a company that helps publishers get compensated when their sites are scraped, web scraping volume doubled from Q3 to Q4 2024, causing significant strain on sites like Wikipedia during high-traffic events.

The situation creates a dangerous feedback loop where AI content is generated to please AI recommendation systems, potentially marginalizing human creators. Jeff Allen of the Integrity Institute told Bloomberg this resembles "the algae bloom that can blow up and suffocate the life you would want to have in a healthy ecosystem."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is aggressively promoting a future where AI becomes the dominant form of social interaction, claiming that AI friends, therapists, and business agents will soon outnumber human relationships. During a recent media blitz across multiple podcasts and a Stripe conference appearance, Zuckerberg cited statistics suggesting "the average American has fewer than three friends" while claiming people desire "meaningfully more, like 15 friends" -- positioning AI companions as the solution to this gap.

The Meta founder's vision extends beyond casual interaction to therapeutic and commercial relationships, with personalized AI that "has a deep understanding of what's going on in this person's life." Meta has already deployed its AI across Instagram, Facebook, and Ray-Ban smart glasses, reaching nearly a billion monthly users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Spyware maker NSO Group will have to pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for a 2019 hacking campaign against more than 1,400 users. On Tuesday, after a five-year legal battle, a jury ruled that NSO Group must pay $167,256,000 in punitive damages and around $444,719 in compensatory damages. This is a huge legal win for WhatsApp, which had asked for more than $400,000 in compensatory damages, based on the time its employees had to dedicate to remediate the attacks, investigate them, and push fixes to patch the vulnerability abused by NSO Group, as well as unspecified punitive damages.

The trial, as well as the whole lawsuit, prompted a series of revelations, such as the location of the victims of the 2019 spyware campaign, as well as the names of some of NSO Group's customers. The ruling marks the end -- pending a potential appeal -- of a legal battle that started in more than five years ago, when WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against the spyware maker. The Meta-owned company accused NSO Group of accessing WhatsApp servers and exploiting an audio-calling vulnerability in the chat app to target around 1,400 people, including dissidents, human rights activists, and journalists. NSO Group's spokesperson Gil Lainer left the door open for an appeal. "We will carefully examine the verdict's details and pursue appropriate legal remedies, including further proceedings and an appeal," Lainer said in a statement.

"When Disneyland turns 70 this July, Main Street's Opera House will play host to the return of Walt Disney, who will sit down with audiences to tell his story in robot form," writes Gizmodo.

But they point out Walt's granddaughter Johanna Miller wrote a Facebook post opposing the idea in November. ("They are Dehumanizing him. People are not replaceable...") The idea of a Robotic Grampa to give the public a feeling of who the living man was just makes no sense. It would be an imposter... You could never get the casual ness of his talking interacting with the camera his excitement to show and tell people about what is new at the park.

You can not add life to one. Empty of a soul or essence of the man. Knowing that he did not want this. Having your predecessors tell you that this was out of bounds.... So so Sad and disappointed.
The Facebook post claims that the son of a Disney engineer even remembers Walt saying that he never wanted to be an animatronic himself. And "Members of the Walt Disney family are said to be divided," reports the Los Angeles Times, "with many supporting the animatronic and some others against it, say those in the know who have declined to speak on the record for fear of ruining their relationships."

So that Facebook post "raised anew ethical questions that often surround any project attempting to capture the dead via technology," their article adds, "be it holographic representations of performers or digitally re-created cinematic animations. And then some media outlets got a partial preview Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reports: An early sculpt of what would become the animatronic was revealed, one complete with age spots on Disney's hands and weariness around his eyes — Imagineers stressed their intent is faithful accuracy — but much of the attraction remains secretive. The animatronic wasn't shown, nor did Imagineering provide any images of the figure, which it promises will be one of its most technically advanced. Instead, Imagineering sought to show the care in which it was bringing Disney back to life while also attempting to assuage any fears regarding what has become a much-debated project among the Disney community...

Longtime Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald, known for his work on beloved Disney projects such as Star Tours and the Guardians of the Galaxy coaster in Florida, said Wednesday that "A Magical Life" has been in the works for about seven years. Asked directly about ethical concerns in representing the deceased via a robotic figurine, Fitzgerald noted the importance of the Walt Disney story, not only to the company but to culture at large... "What could we do at Disneyland for our audience that would be part of our tool kit vernacular but that would bring Walt to life in a way that you could only experience at the park? We felt the technology had gotten there. We felt there was a need to tell that story in a fresh way...."

"Walt Disney — A Magical Life" will walk a fine line when it opens, attempting to inspire a new generation to look into Disney's life while also portraying him as more than just a character in the park's arsenal. "Why are we doing this now?" Fitzgerald says. "For two reasons. One is Disneyland's 70th anniversary is an ideal time we thought to create a permanent tribute to Walt Disney in the Opera House. The other: I grew up watching Walt Disney on television. I guess I'm the old man. He came into our living room every week and chatted and it was very casual and you felt like you knew the man. But a lot of people today don't know Walt Disney was an individual. They think Walt Disney is a company."

And now nearly 60 years after his death, Disney will once again grace Main Street, whether or not audiences — or even some members of his family — are ready to greet him.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Facebook's loosening of its content moderation standards early this year got lots of attention and criticism. But a new study suggests that it might matter less what is taken down than when. The research finds that Facebook posts removed for violating standards or other reasons have already been seen by at least three-quarters of the people who would be predicted to ever see them.

"Content takedowns on Facebook just don't matter all that much, because of how long they take to happen," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the lead author of the paper in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. Social media platforms generally measure how many bad posts they have taken down as an indication of their efforts to suppress harmful or illegal material. The researchers advocate a new metric: How many people were prevented from seeing a bad post by Facebook taking it down...?

"Removed content we saw was mostly garden-variety spam — ads for financial scams, [multilevel marketing] schemes, that kind of thing," Edelson said... The new research is a reminder that platforms inadvertently host lots of posts that everyone agrees are bad.

Apple was fined 500 million euros ($570 million) on Wednesday and Meta 200 million euros, as European Union antitrust regulators handed out the first sanctions under landmark legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech. From a report: The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump who has threatened to levy tariffs against countries that penalise U.S. companies. WSJ adds more details: The commission also issued cease-and-desist orders that could have a bigger impact than the fines. One order targets Apple's App Store and the other takes aim at Meta's use of personalized ads -- important revenue streams for each company.

[...] The EU's action against Meta focuses on the company's effort to get users to agree to seeing personalized ads on Instagram and Facebook -- its main source of revenue. The commission ordered Meta to stop requiring users to either agree to those ads or pay for a subscription. It said it was still evaluating whether a "less-personalized ads" option that Meta introduced last fall complies with that order, raising the specter of further changes.

The Apple case deals with the company's App Store rules. The commission said Apple had failed to comply with an obligation to allow app developers to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative ways to purchase digital products.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, testified on Tuesday in a landmark federal antitrust trial that he left Meta in 2018 because his company was denied resources. The government has argued that Meta purchased Instagram in 2012 as part of a "buy-or-bury strategy" to illegally cement its social media monopoly by killing off its rivals. Last week, current and former Meta executives testified that the social media giant, formerly known as Facebook, used its deep pockets to invest in Instagram after its purchase.

In testimony at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, Mr. Systrom painted a different picture, saying he left Meta because Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, wasn't investing enough. At that time, Instagram had grown to 1 billion users, about 40 percent of Facebook's size, yet the photo-sharing app had only 1,000 employees compared to 35,000 employees at Facebook, he said. "We were by far the fastest growing team. We produced the most revenue and relative to what we should have been at the time, I felt like we should have been much larger," said Mr. Systrom, who is expected to testify for six hours.

Mr. Systrom said he found the decisions baffling. When asked by an F.T.C. lawyer why Mr. Zuckerberg might have decided to give Instagram fewer resources, Mr. Systrom said it was a consistent pattern during his tenure at Meta. "Mark was not investing in Instagram because he believed we were a threat to their growth," he said, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg's prioritization of Facebook.

Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users' emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.

"Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool AI chatbots," reports the Washington Post. (When researchers checked 10 chatbots, a third of the responses repeated false pro-Russia messaging.)

The Post argues that this tactic offers "a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform," and calls it "a fundamental weakness of the AI industry." Chatbot answers depend on the data fed into them. A guiding principle is that the more the chatbots read, the more informed their answers will be, which is why the industry is ravenous for content. But mass quantities of well-aimed chaff can skew the answers on specific topics. For Russia, that is the war in Ukraine. But for a politician, it could be an opponent; for a commercial firm, it could be a competitor. "Most chatbots struggle with disinformation," said Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at open-source AI platform Hugging Face. "They have basic safeguards against harmful content but can't reliably spot sophisticated propaganda, [and] the problem gets worse with search-augmented systems that prioritize recent information."

Early commercial attempts to manipulate chat results also are gathering steam, with some of the same digital marketers who once offered search engine optimization — or SEO — for higher Google rankings now trying to pump up mentions by AI chatbots through "generative engine optimization" — or GEO.
Our current situation "plays into the hands of those with the most means and the most to gain: for now, experts say, that is national governments with expertise in spreading propaganda." Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have been exploiting that advantage by flooding the zone with fables. But anyone could do the same, burning up far fewer resources than previous troll farm operations... In a twist that befuddled researchers for a year, almost no human beings visit the sites, which are hard to browse or search. Instead, their content is aimed at crawlers, the software programs that scour the web and bring back content for search engines and large language models. While those AI ventures are trained on a variety of datasets, an increasing number are offering chatbots that search the current web. Those are more likely to pick up something false if it is recent, and even more so if hundreds of pages on the web are saying much the same thing...

The gambit is even more effective because the Russian operation managed to get links to the Pravda network stories edited into Wikipedia pages and public Facebook group postings, probably with the help of human contractors. Many AI companies give special weight to Facebook and especially Wikipedia as accurate sources. (Wikipedia said this month that its bandwidth costs have soared 50 percent in just over a year, mostly because of AI crawlers....) Last month, other researchers set out to see whether the gambit was working. Finnish company Check First scoured Wikipedia and turned up nearly 2,000 hyperlinks on pages in 44 languages that pointed to 162 Pravda websites. It also found that some false information promoted by Pravda showed up in chatbot answers.
"They do even better in such places as China," the article points out, "where traditional media is more tightly controlled and there are fewer sources for the bots." (The nonprofit American Sunlight Project calls the process "LLM grooming".)

The article quotes a top Kremlin propagandist as bragging in January that "we can actually change worldwide AI."

Meta has disabled Apple Intelligence features across its iOS applications, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads, according to Brazilian tech blog Sorcererhat Tech. The block affects Writing Tools, which enable text creation and editing via Apple's AI, as well as Genmoji generation. Users cannot access these features via the standard text field interface in Meta apps. Instagram Stories have also lost previously available keyboard stickers and Memoji functionality.

While Meta hasn't explained the decision, it likely aims to drive users toward Meta AI, its own artificial intelligence service that offers similar text and image generation capabilities. The move follows failed negotiations between Apple and Meta regarding Llama integration into Apple Intelligence, which reportedly collapsed over privacy disagreements. The companies also maintain ongoing disputes regarding App Store policies.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered resetting all Facebook users' friend connections to boost the platform's declining relevance, according to internal emails revealed Monday in a landmark FTC antitrust trial. In a 2022 message to executives, Zuckerberg proposed "wiping everyone's graphs and having them start again," referring to users' friend networks. Facebook head Tom Alison questioned the idea's viability, citing Instagram's reliance on friend connections. Zuckerberg later testified that the plan was never implemented and that Facebook has "evolved" from its original purpose.

The FTC argues Meta violated competition laws by acquiring Instagram ($1B) and WhatsApp ($19B) as part of a "buy or bury" strategy outlined in Zuckerberg's 2008 email stating, "It is better to buy than compete."

An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney for the Federal Trade Commission told a judge that Facebook, fearing the competitive threat of Instagram posted to their social media network, acquired both as a way to "neutralize" the rival. "They decided that competition was too hard," the FTC's attorney, Daniel Matheson, said in his opening statement in the government's antitrust case against the Meta Platforms social media empire.

He argued that with Meta's monopoly in social media, "consumers do not have reasonable alternatives they can turn to," even as satisfaction has declined. At stake is the potential breakup of Facebook-parent Meta, as the government has zeroed in on the 2012 acquisition of Instagram and 2014 purchase of WhatsApp.

Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not stick around college." (College students must drop out in order to accept the fellowship.)

And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," reports financial news site The Street: The company has launched what it refers to as the "Meritocracy Fellowship," a four-month internship program for recent high school graduates who have not enrolled in college. The position pays roughly $5,400 per month, more than plenty of post-college internship programs. Palantir's job posting suggests that the company is especially interested in candidates with experience in programming and statistical analysis.
Palantir's job listing specifically says they launched their four-month fellowship "in response to the shortcomings of university admissions," promising it would be based "solely on merit and academic excellence" (requiring an SAT score over 1459 or an ACT score above 32.) "Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence..." As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos... Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree...

Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.