pelespirit

PeakMetrics grabbed a sample of 52,000 posts made on X within the first 24 hours of Cracker Barrel’s announcement that it would be modernizing its logo to an admittedly very plain and generic design. In that timeframe, it found that 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel were flagged as likely or higher bot activity. Those numbers climb even higher when a boycott is mentioned. About 1,000 posts in that first 24-hour period called on people to stop eating at Cracker Barrel, and 49% of those posts got flagged as likely coming from bots. In its report, PeakMetrics states that the boycott was unlikely to be an organic grassroots response but a “bot-assisted amplification seeded by meme/activist accounts.”

Students at West Florence High School, around 80 miles east of the state capital, Columbia, had been complaining about a bizarre odor since August 25, with many reporting that it was making them feel unwell.

The school launched an urgent investigation into the smell, spending $55,000 on inspections and air conditioning repairs. Even the high school's gas lines, propane systems, and air quality had been inspected.

However, the source of the odor remained a mystery.

Eventually, students began experiencing nausea, dizziness, and migraines with some seeking medical attention for respiratory issues connected to the smell.

The makers of ChatGPT are changing the way it responds to users who show mental and emotional distress after legal action from the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who killed himself after months of conversations with the chatbot.

Open AI admitted its systems could “fall short” and said it would install “stronger guardrails around sensitive content and risky behaviors” for users under 18.

The $500bn (£372bn) San Francisco AI company said it would also introduce parental controls to allow parents “options to gain more insight into, and shape, how their teens use ChatGPT”, but has yet to provide details about how these would work.

Adam, from California, killed himself in April after what his family’s lawyer called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”. The teenager’s family is suing Open AI and its chief executive and co-founder, Sam Altman, alleging that the version of ChatGPT at that time, known as 4o, was “rushed to market … despite clear safety issues”.

Forget chatbots. Zuckerberg’s vision is much grander. He is betting that within a few years, AI will not just be answering your questions or writing your emails. It will be managing your schedule, anticipating your needs, running your home, helping you make decisions, and maybe even guiding your career. Call it Life-as-a-Service, powered by Meta.

The move is seen as a direct challenge to competitors. “The launch of Meta Superintelligence labs isn’t just an announcement; it’s a statement: Meta won’t settle for second place in AI,” commented Alon Yamin, cofounder and CEO of the AI detection platform Copyleaks. He added, “Meta and Mark clearly see this as a make or break moment for AI leadership.”

But Huffman said Reddit was now battling to ensure its users stay at the center of the social network. “Where the rest of the internet seems to be powered by or written by or summarized by AI, Reddit is distinctly human,” he said. “It’s the place you go when you want to hear from people, their lived experiences, their perspectives, their recommendations. Reddit is communities and human curation and conversation and authenticity.”

As Reddit becomes an increasingly important source for LLMs, advertisers are responding with what one agency chief described as a “massive migration” to the platform.

Multiple advertising and agency executives speaking during this month’s Cannes advertising festival told the FT that brands were increasingly exploring hosting a business account and posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots.

A pair of hikers in New York called emergency services to report that a third member of their group had died, but when a park ranger responded to rescue them it turned out they were just high on hallucinogenic mushrooms, officials say.

The third hiker was uninjured - and not dead - and the hikers were "in an altered mental state", according to a report issued by parks officials.

The incident took place on 24 May on Cascade Mountain in the Adirondacks High Peaks of upstate New York.

The third person also called 911 during the hike, "and was not injured", the report states. They were allowed to continue their camping trip, while the pair were taken to police.

Microsoft is starting to integrate AI shortcuts, or what it calls AI actions, into the File Explorer in Windows 11. These shortcuts let you right-click on a file and quickly get to Windows AI features like blurring the background of a photo, erasing objects, or even summarizing content from Office files.

Four image actions are currently being tested in the latest Dev Channel builds of Windows 11, including Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, the blur background and erase objects features found in the Photos app, and the remove background option in Paint.

A new device renders 3-D graphics that users can grab, drag and rotate. Such interactive visuals — which can be seen without a VR headset — could help create new hands-on educational tools or museum exhibits. They might also be used to make 3-D artwork or video games.

Bouzbib and colleagues at the Public University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain, replaced the flat screen with a row of elastic strips like the ones used in the waistbands of stretchy pants. Users could then reach down into the display, fingers slipping through the oscillating strips, to touch virtual objects. Cameras tracking the user’s hand allowed them to pinch, swipe, spin and otherwise manipulate the graphics.

MAGA fans are rejoicing on social media in favor of President Donald Trump's plan to sign an executive order requiring commercial truck drivers to speak English.

Breitbart News reported that Trump would sign the order Monday evening because "President Trump believes that English is a non-negotiable safety requirement for professional drivers." Last month, Trump designated English as "the official language of the United States."

"This is such a big deal! So grateful for this, the roads will be much safer. Like many, I have seen many accidents or near accidents from unqualified drivers," posted @coffeegirlvegas.

This video inspired my posting here, it is really dystopian looking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr107NgoKaE

The information revealed in the slides isn’t necessarily the most earth-shattering disclosures. As reported by The Verge, one slide showed data, seemingly from Apple, that shows the frequency of use of several different apps that have messaging features—including Apple’s Messages, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Snapchat—that suggested Messages dominated iOS when it comes to communications, not Meta’s offerings. Another slide, per The Verge, was titled “Snapchat in 2020: Competitors Are Succeeding and Not Just Meta Apps” and said apps other than Meta’s own are “thriving.”

But the fact that information made its way to public consumption was a pretty big “oops” on Meta’s part. The information was visible because of how the company redacted the documents, which it turned out was pretty easy to remove…which, of course, people did. That did not inspire confidence among the legal representation for companies, including Apple, Google, and Snapchat, that Meta was doing all it could to keep proprietary information protected. (Why they would want that information redacted is a different matter.)