The Albanese Government has released draft legislation for a Digital Duty of Care, requiring social media platforms to notify users and let them choose between algorithm-curated feeds or feeds based only on accounts they follow. The rules would also force games, apps and AI chatbots to shield under-18 users from addictive design features and harmful content such as material promoting eating disorders, misogyny, pornography, dangerous stunts or serious bullying, while giving eSafety power to order removal of nudify apps and sites.
pm.gov.au
· 2026-09-08
Three men had to be rescued after getting lost overnight while descending California's Mount Shasta, a hike they had planned using Google's Gemini chatbot. Local authorities said Gemini advised the group to pack far less food and water than needed, a problem that worsened when their planned eight-hour climb turned into a multiday ordeal.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-07
A DuckDuckGo survey found that a third of AI users have confided secrets to chatbots they wouldn't tell trusted people in their lives. Washington Post reporting shows these conversations aren't as private as users assume, having surfaced in at least a dozen court cases over the past two years and potentially being accessible to employers, law enforcement, or exposed through company data breaches like Anthropic's Claude leak in July.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-05
More than 200 employees at the Wikimedia Foundation voted 158-14 to join the Communications Workers of America, with results tallied by the National Labor Relations Board. The unionizing group spans software engineering, finance and communications roles across the roughly 700-person, largely remote nonprofit behind Wikipedia.
wired.com
· 2026-09-04
South Korea has launched a national program giving every citizen free access to AI chatbots developed domestically. The initiative is designed to widen public exposure to homegrown AI tools rather than relying on foreign systems.
wsj.com
· 2026-08-28
A DuckDuckGo Research survey found that about one-third of people disclose sensitive personal details to AI chatbots that they withhold from friends, family, and doctors, with the figure rising to 56% among self-identified AI enthusiasts. Nearly half of parents surveyed admitted to telling chatbots things they've never shared with their own children or closest confidants.
cnet.com
· 2026-08-27
A term coined by developer Niklas Guhn in an August 3 blog post has gone viral online: 'meat proxy,' describing someone who copies and pastes chatbot output like ChatGPT or Claude into conversations without adding their own understanding or value. Guhn's original complaint was about receiving verbatim AI replies on Slack, and the phrase quickly spread on social media with a broader definition covering anyone who forwards AI text or code without reading or validating it themselves.
cnet.com
· 2026-08-27
Marketing firm Vital Design saw organic blog traffic drop 60% as AI search tools rose, yet its sales-ready leads held steady or grew. The company credits a strategy called answer engine optimization (AEO), which aims to get AI chatbots to recommend a business during a customer's research phase before they ever visit a website.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-08-26
A website posing as the 'Hanover Institute for Public Policy' published over half a million words in nine days, presenting pro-Israel talking points on Gaza and Palestinian prisoners as neutral research. The New York firm Piro Inc registered the site with the US government as material distributed on behalf of Israel, though the institute itself has no verifiable legal existence, address, or staff. It forms part of a larger, multimillion-dollar Israeli government campaign, involving Havas Media and other firms, to shape how AI chatbots frame conversations about Israel.
theguardian.com
· 2026-08-26
Startup Keenable, founded by former Yandex search executive Andrey Styskin and AI scientist Matthias Petri, has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and angel investors. The company has built a search index spanning over 100 billion documents designed specifically for AI systems rather than human users, and its API is already being used by AI labs and inference providers for training and live retrieval, including a new partnership with voice AI company Gradium.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-08-25
DuckDuckGo's new survey of nearly 2,000 U.S. adults found that almost a third of respondents have confided something to an AI chatbot they wouldn't tell friends, family or doctors, with the figure jumping to 56% among self-identified AI enthusiasts. The survey also found that most respondents didn't know chatbot conversations are typically used for training by default, and only a quarter knew such chats could be subpoenaed by law enforcement.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-08-25
MIT Technology Review spoke with cognitive scientists comparing how babies and large language models acquire language, finding that infants learn to speak proficiently after hearing only 10 to 30 million words, while LLMs require vastly more data to approach similar fluency. Stanford's Michael C. Frank noted that training a model like GPT-2 on the same word count a toddler hears produces a 'nonsense generator,' not coherent speech.
futurism.com
· 2026-08-25
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