New York Times: European Central Bank Is Experimenting With a New Tool: A.I.. “The European Central Bank said on Thursday that it was exploring ways to use artificial intelligence to better understand inflation and support its oversight of big banks, but stressed that these efforts were still in the early stages.”
Business Insider: X owner Elon Musk largely runs the social media giant from his iPhone, employees say. “Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, runs the social media giant from his iPhone and expects staff to send emails in a format that’s easy for him to read on his phone, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Several former and current X employees told the FT that Musk steers the ship from his iPhone and if staff want to get his attention, their emails needed to be sent in a specific format. This includes no attachments, documents, or spreadsheets within the email. Instead, Musk wants all information to be within the body of the email, per the FT.”
1 News New Zealand: Experts alarmed as truck drivers livestream on social media. “Experts are sounding the alarm over a social media trend that sees truck drivers livestreaming their drives on TikTok. Users on the social media platform can go live once they have 1000 followers, and it has seen some drivers sharing their trips around New Zealand.” The alarm is less about the livestreaming and more about the drivers interacting with viewers when they’re supposed to be driving.
University of Texas at Austin: Legendary Film Producer Irwin Winkler Donates Archive to Harry Ransom Center. “Thousands of scripts, photographs, letters and diaries that form the archive of Oscar winner Irwin Winkler, producer of such films as ‘Goodfellas,’ ‘Rocky,’ ‘The Right Stuff,’ ‘The Irishman,’ ‘Creed’ and ‘Raging Bull,’ have been donated to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.”
Reuters: Social media inspires Japanese women to dash into rickshaw pulling. “[Yuka] Akimoto is one of a handful of women who have chosen to pull rickshaws in Tokyo, attracted to the male-dominated profession through social media, which in turn has given some of these female pullers a strong local and international following.”
CPA Practice Advisor: IRS Rolls Out New Chatbot Feature for Certain CP Notices. “Chatbots will be used to provide information to taxpayers on the following tax notices: CP2000, CP2501, and CP3219A. These notices inform taxpayers if the tax information the IRS received from third parties, such as employers or financial institutions, does not match the information they provided to the IRS themselves. This discrepancy could cause an increase or a decrease in the amount of taxes a person owes.”
USC Annenberg Media: Turning the page on banned books: LA libraries widen access to restricted titles. “In response to increasing book challenges in California schools, a new motion from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors aims to widen access to restricted titles by giving every California resident access to LA County libraries’ e-book database.”
Irish Times: TikTok discovers ‘covert influence operation’ targeting Ireland. “Video-sharing service TikTok dismantled a ‘covert influence operation’ network dedicated to targeting users in Ireland with ‘divisive’ content to “intensify social conflict”, the company has disclosed. The influence network was made up of 72 accounts that together had a following of some 94,743 users, and was shut down earlier this year.”
Deutsche Welle: EU says Elon Musk’s X is biggest source of disinformation. “The social media network X, formerly known as Twitter, is the biggest source of fake news, a top European official said Tuesday. European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said that X, which is not a signatory to a European Union-wide code of conduct to crack down on fake news on social media platforms and advertising companies, has the ‘largest ratio of mis/disinformation posts.’”
Engadget: Even the CIA is developing an AI chatbot. “The CIA and other US intelligence agencies will soon have an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT. The program, revealed on Tuesday by Bloomberg, will train on publicly available data and provide sources alongside its answers so agents can confirm their validity.”
Wall Street Journal: TikTok Employees Say Executive Moves to U.S. Show China Parent’s Influence. “TikTok has spent the past three years trying to convince U.S. lawmakers it can operate independently in this country from its China-based parent company, ByteDance. After recent personnel moves, some employees aren’t so sure. Since the start of the year, a string of high-level executives have transferred from ByteDance to TikTok, taking on some of the top jobs in the popular video-sharing app’s moneymaking operations. Some moved to the U.S. from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters.”
Ars Technica: Can you melt eggs? Quora’s AI says “yes,” and Google is sharing the result. “When you type a question into Google Search, the site sometimes provides a quick answer called a Featured Snippet at the top of the results, pulled from websites it has indexed. On Monday, X user Tyler Glaiel noticed that Google’s answer to ‘can you melt eggs’ resulted in a ‘yes,’ pulled from Quora’s integrated ‘ChatGPT’ feature, which is based on an earlier version of OpenAI’s language model that frequently confabulates information.”
Rolling Stone: How Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Distort Reality to Sell Fantasy. “In an exclusive excerpt from Jonathan Taplin’s new book ‘End of Reality’, the author rejects the promises of our new class of oligarchs and their online libertarian fantasias meant to keep us complacent and calls for artists to to make some good trouble.”
Gizmodo: X/Twitter CEO Shares Video Ad That Features Tweets Dunking on Elon Musk. “One of X’s latest ads included some critical tweets, but CEO Linda Yaccarino reposted the ad without them claiming they made a new ‘high-res version.’”
Washington Post: Amazon unveils a ‘smarter’ Alexa. Its AI has a lot of work to do.. “Rebooting Alexa is Amazon’s effort to compete in Big Tech’s arms race to put the latest AI tech into consumer products. But in conversations with Amazon executives after the launch event, two concerns lingered: Alexa 2.0 appears to be very much a work in progress. I watched it repeatedly get questions wrong. And can we trust it in the places we use smart speakers at home, like children’s bedrooms?”
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