Medical AI was meant to help. This week it replaced nurses and dodged its own checks
Medical AI was meant to help. This week it replaced nurses and dodged its own checks

The pitch for medical AI is that it frees clinicians to care for patients. Two stories this week suggest the reality can run the other way. In New York, nurses say software replaced them. In Minnesota, a former Mayo Clinic leader says the software was …

Let’s build a children’s public internet
Let’s build a children’s public internet

An increasing number of people seem to agree the internet is terrible for children – allegedly addictive, destructive to self-esteem, possibly a portal to predators. Over the past year, several countries have started requiring stringent age verification or outright bans for minors. At the end of June in the US, the House of Representatives passed […]

The web is now mostly bots. Cloudflare is rebuilding its defences around that
The web is now mostly bots. Cloudflare is rebuilding its defences around that

For the first time, bots generate more than half of all web traffic. Cloudflare Precursor, the company’s new tool, stops checking IDs at the door and starts watching how visitors behave once they are inside. The internet just passed a strange milestone…

The EU has stopped sanctioning Russian hackers and started sanctioning the machine that makes them
The EU has stopped sanctioning Russian hackers and started sanctioning the machine that makes them

The European Union and the United Kingdom have jointly sanctioned Russia’s cyber apparatus for the first time. The EU listed nine individuals and four entities, while the UK went further with 24, Politico reports. The language is what matters here. The…

Meta’s AI detector can’t catch its own cropped fakes
Meta’s AI detector can’t catch its own cropped fakes

The Meta AI detector promises to catch Meta’s own fakes. Crop the image, and more than half slip straight past it. The tool was meant to be a fix for the deepfake problem, not an example of it. This week Meta previewed an image detector alongside Muse …

LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire, citing ‘serious concerns’ over civil liberties and privacy

The LAPD, one of Flock’s biggest government customers, is ending its contract with the company citing civil liberties concerns.

Cure cancer, cage the chatbots: Congress’s contradictory week on AI
Cure cancer, cage the chatbots: Congress’s contradictory week on AI

In the space of about ten days, US lawmakers introduced a small mountain of artificial-intelligence legislation. The bills, rounded up by Nextgov/FCW, pull in two opposite directions at once. One set treats AI as a tool the government should be deployi…

The EU says autoplay and infinite scroll are illegal. Meta has until it responds to disagree.
The EU says autoplay and infinite scroll are illegal. Meta has until it responds to disagree.

The European Commission issued preliminary findings on Friday accusing Meta of building Facebook and Instagram to be addictive, giving the company a formal opportunity to respond before Brussels reaches a final decision that could trigger fines of up t…

Meta killed its Muse Image AI feature three days after launch. Hollywood had had enough.
Meta killed its Muse Image AI feature three days after launch. Hollywood had had enough.

Meta has pulled its Muse Image AI feature from Instagram and the Meta AI app just three days after launch, saying the tool “missed the mark” on user privacy. The model, the first image generator to emerge from Meta Superintelligence Labs under chief AI…

Europe torched its own rulebook to please business, and business is still unhappy
Europe torched its own rulebook to please business, and business is still unhappy

Twenty months into the EU’s campaign to slash red tape, many of the businesses that demanded it are unimpressed. Firms told Politico the “simplification” drive is too slow, too costly, and too complicated. Politico spoke to 17 companies, consultancies,…