Hitting the Books: In England’s industrial mills, even the clocks worked against you
America didn’t get around to really addressing child labor until the late ’30s when Roosevelts New Deal took hold and the Public Contracts Act raised the minimum age to 16. Before then, kids could often look forward to spending the majorities of their days doing some of the most dangerous…
Hitting the Books: The dangerous real-world consequences of our online attention economy
If reality television has taught us anything, it’s there’s not much people won’t do if offered enough money and attention. Sometimes, even just the latter. Unfortunately for the future prospects of our civilization, modern social media has focused upon those same character foibles and optimized them at a global scale,…
MIT’s ‘PhotoGuard’ protects your images from malicious AI edits
Dall-E and Stable Diffusion were only the beginning. As generative AI systems proliferate and companies work to differentiate their offerings from those of their competitors, chatbots across the internet are gaining the power to edit images — as well as create them — with the likes of Shutterstock and Adobe…
Hitting the Books: ‘Vision Zero’ could help reclaim roads from American car culture
Despite decades of focusing our national infrastructure on personal vehicles (often at the direct exclusion and expense of other modes of transport), modern folks gets around on far more than planes, trains and automobiles these days. With our city streets and suburban neighborhoods increasingly populated by an ever-widening variety of…
Google’s Bard AI chatbot has learned to talk
Google’s Bard gained a handful of new features and functions Thursday in the chatbot AI’s latest round of updates, including expanded linguistic knowledge, more nuanced response controls and the ability to respond with spoken word in addition to text. In all the AI can now converse in nearly four dozen…
Meta pulls news content from Canadian Facebook and Instagram
At the start of the month, Facebook’s parent company Meta announced via blog post its intent to remove availability of all news content from FB and Instagram in Canada, should the government pass its proposed Online News Act. On Thursday, Canadian Parliament did just that and, within hours, Meta confirmed…