If you provide “official” disinformation with a straight face it still will come back to haunt you.

https://thenextweb.com/news/criticism-uk-online-safety-bill-end-to-end-encryption

UK’s promise to protect encrypted messaging is ‘delusional,’ say critics

The British government’s promise to protect encryption has been pilloried by security experts and libertarians.

The dispute stems from a section of the Online Safety Bill. Under the legislation, messaging apps would be forced to provide access to private communications when requested by the regulator Ofcom.

Proponents say the measures will combat child abuse, but critics are aghast about the threat to privacy. They fear the plans will facilitate mass surveillance and damage the UK’s tech sector. Signal, Whatsapp, and five other messaging apps have all threatened to leave the country if the law is passed.

The British government has sought to allay their concerns. On Thursday, technology minister Michelle Donelan said the government is “not anti-encryption” and will protect user privacy.

“Technology is in development to enable you to have encryption as well as to be able to access this particular information, and the safety mechanism that we have is very explicit that this can only be used for child exploitation and abuse,” Donelan told the BBC.

Her remarks were quickly lambasted by critics. Matthew Hodgson, CEO of secure messaging app Element — which is used by the government’s own Ministry of Defense — described Donelan’s claims as “factually incorrect.”

“No technology exists which allows encryption AND access to ‘this particular information.’ Detecting illegal content means ALL content must be scanned in the first place,” he said.

Serious AI tools.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01907-z

Artificial-intelligence search engines wrangle academic literature

For a researcher so focused on the past, Mushtaq Bilal spends a lot of time immersed in the technology of tomorrow.

A postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Bilal studies the evolution of the novel in nineteenth-century literature. Yet he’s perhaps best known for his online tutorials, in which he serves as an informal ambassador between academics and the rapidly expanding universe of search tools that make use of artificial intelligence (AI).

… This new generation of search engines, powered by machine learning and large language models, is moving beyond keyword searches to pull connections from the tangled web of the scientific literature. Some programs, such as Consensus, give research-backed answers to yes-or-no questions; others, such as Semantic Scholar, Elicit and Iris, act as digital assistants — tidying up bibliographies, suggesting new papers and generating research summaries. Collectively, the platforms facilitate many of the early steps in the writing process. Critics note, however, that the programs remain relatively untested and run the risk of perpetuating existing biases in the academic publishing process.

Creative is in the eye of the creator. (and more tools)

https://time.com/6300950/ai-schools-chatgpt-teachers/

The Creative Ways Teachers Are Using ChatGPT in the Classroom

… “The majority of the teachers are panicked because they see [ChatGPT] as a cheating tool, a tool for kids to plagiarize,” says Rachael Rankin, a high school principal in Newton Falls, outside of Youngstown, Ohio.

But Paccone and a growing group of educators believe it’s too late to keep AI out of their classrooms. Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, a major teachers union, believes the panic about AI is not unlike the ones caused by the Internet and graphing calculators when they were first introduced, arguing ChatGPT “is to English and to writing like the calculator is to math.” In this view, there are two options facing teachers: show their students how to use ChatGPT in a responsible way, or expect the students to abuse it.

… At another Zoom teacher training workshop that TIME observed in July, hosted by Garnet Valley School District in Garnet Valley, Penn., education consultant A.J. Juliani ran through various AI apps that students are using to cut corners in class. Photomath lets students upload a picture of a math problem and get detailed instructions on how to solve it. Tome can turn notes into a narrative, perfect for essay writing and preparing for presentations. And Readwise can highlight key parts of PDFs so that students can get through readings faster.

Just because…

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-use-harry-potter-spells-with-siri-on-iphone/

How to Cast Harry Potter Spells on Your iPhone With Siri