Amazon has sent emails "to those it believes are not complying with its return-to-office policies," reports CNN: The message highlights Amazon's determination to enforce its rules amid an employee backlash to the policy, which requires workers to report to an office at least three days a week, and in the face of a broader push by companies to scale back on remote work.

Screenshots of the email circulating on social media show that Amazon told some employees they were "not currently meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week, even though your assigned building is ready... We expect you to start coming into the office three or more days a week now," the email continued.

It added that since the policy went into effect in May, many Amazon employees have complied, "and you can feel the surge in energy and collaboration happening among Amazonians and across teams."
Amazon told employees that the email "was sent to employees who have badged in fewer than 3 days a week for 5 or more of the past 8 weeks, have not badged in 3 days a week for 3 or more of the past 4 weeks, and their building has been ready for 8 weeks or more."

CNN adds that a followup email "acknowledged that some may have received the notice in error and urged those individuals to contact their managers to correct the mistake."

Long-time Slashdot reader newbie_fantod shares a report from The Guardian: A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes -- recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, "poison bread sandwiches" and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes. The app, created by supermarket chain Pak 'n' Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an "oreo vegetable stir-fry."

When customers began experimenting with entering a wider range of household shopping list items into the app, however, it began to make even less appealing recommendations. One recipe it dubbed "aromatic water mix" would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as "the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses." "Serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance," it says, but does not note that inhaling chlorine gas can cause lung damage or death. New Zealand political commentator Liam Hehir posted the "recipe" to Twitter, prompting other New Zealanders to experiment and share their results to social media. Recommendations included a bleach "fresh breath" mocktail, ant-poison and glue sandwiches, "bleach-infused rice surprise" and "methanol bliss" -- a kind of turpentine-flavoured french toast. In a statement, a spokesperson for the supermarket said they would "keep fine tuning our controls" of the bot to ensure it was safe and useful. They noted that the bot should only be used by people over the age of 18 and that the recipes "are not reviewed by a human being."

YouTube knows that it has a spam problem, particularly when it comes to its two-year-old Shorts feature. In an attempt to do something about it, the streamer has announced it's deactivating links in Shorts descriptions, comments and the vertical live feed. From a report: YouTube is also taking away the ability to click on social media icons on any desktop channel banners. The new changes will start to roll out on August 31st. Though YouTube claims it won't continue its "unclickable" crusade, but it adds, "Because abuse tactics evolve quickly, we have to take preventative measures to make it harder for scammers and spammers to mislead or scam users via links."

At the same time, YouTube is adding new links on creators' channels, with a big clickable link appearing by the Subscribe button starting August 23rd. The link can bring users to anything from merchandise sites to social media accounts. The platform also recently introduced more creator tools for Shorts, like voiceovers. However, it won't be until at least the end of September that the streamer introduces "safer" ways to guide people from their Shorts back to the rest of their content.

The White House on Tuesday held its first-ever cybersecurity "summit" on the ransomware attacks plaguing U.S. schools, in which criminal hackers have dumped online sensitive student data, including medical records, psychiatric evaluations and even sexual assault reports. PBS reports: At least 48 districts have been hit by ransomware attacks this year -- already three more than in all of 2022, according to the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. All but 10 had data stolen, the firm reported. Typically, Russian-speaking foreign-based gangs steal the data -- sometimes including the Social Security numbers and financial data of district staff -- before activating network-encrypting malware then threaten to dump it online unless paid in cryptocurrency. "Last school year, schools in Arizona, California, Washington, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Michigan were all victims of major cyber attacks," the deputy national security advisor for cyber, Anne Neuberger, told the summit.

An October 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, found that more than 1.2 million students were affected in 2020 alone -- with lost learning ranging from three days to three weeks. Nearly one in three U.S. districts had been breached by the end of 2021, according to a survey by the Center for Internet Security, a federally funded nonprofit. "Do not underestimate the ruthlessness of those who would do us harm," said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during the summit, noting that even reports on suicide attempts have been dumped online by criminal extortionists and urging educators to avail themselves of federal resources already available.

Among measures announced at the summit: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will step up tailored security assessments for the K-12 sector while technology providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google and Cloudflare, are offering grants and other support. A pilot proposed by Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel -- yet to be voted on by the agency -- would make $200 million available over three years to strengthen cyber defense in schools and libraries.

Seven years after updating Messenger to allow it to serve as your default Android text messaging app, the company formerly known as Facebook is quietly abandoning the feature. From a report: According to a support page, the feature will disappear after September 28th. I don't know anyone that uses it, but at least it'll be nice to have one fewer screens to tap through during setup.

When Spin ceased operations of its scooter rental service in Seattle, abandoned scooters were found throughout the city, each housing a Raspberry Pi 4B. Tom's Hardware reports: This discovery was recently shared to social media where Pi enthusiasts are simultaneously befuddled and ready to book their tickets to Seattle. Legally speaking, if the scooters are abandoned then snagging one for the Pi inside is fair game but it's currently not clear if Spin has plans to recover their remaining assets.

As of writing, it's not clear what the Raspberry Pi 4 Bs were actually used for inside the scooter. At first glance, it seems like an overpowered option for something like an electric scooter but without exact confirmation of its purpose, we can only speculate. No doubt it requires much more power than something smaller like a Raspberry Pi Zero. In the meantime, residents have taken to finding these scooters and exploring their insides for the hardware left behind. We can see the Pi 4 is attached to a HAT and has something resembling a NoIR connected to the camera module port. Again, the exact purpose of each component and how it was implemented is unclear.

"Three of Reddit's biggest communities are no longer focused entirely on John Oliver in a form of protest against Reddit," reports the Verge.

Gizmodo argues that this means "the Reddit protest is finally over. Reddit won." Despite the infinite blackout threats, most moderators relented as the weeks rolled by. Three major holdouts were r/aww, r/pics, and r/videos, some of Reddit's largest communities that account for more than 91 million subscribers. The three subreddits reopened weeks ago but adopted rules by popular vote that prohibited content that did not feature HBO's John Oliver, rendering the forums useless for their previous purposes.

For a while, the subreddits stood strong, but r/videos was the first to backpedal, dropping the John Oliver rule but requiring all posts to feature profanity. Soon that rule was abandoned as well. Last week, the moderators of r/aww announced the John Oliver rule was over, and over the weekend r/pics quietly gave up the protest as well, as reported by the Verge. "More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people's attention has shifted to other things," an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change.

According to Reddark, a site that tracks the subreddit protest, 1,843 of the original 8,829 protesting communities are still dark. But most of these are small communities, and today the only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.
The Verge: Two other big communities have switched back, too. r/pics (with more than 30 million subscribers) had perhaps been the most visibly tied to John Oliver: Oliver himself posted a series of silly photos specifically for the community to use, and at one point, the moderators of r/pics invited Oliver to join the mod team. But sometime recently, r/pics removed any obvious trace of its connections to John Oliver; the Wayback Machine shows that r/pics was all about John Oliver as of Friday but no longer on Saturday...

r/videos (with more than 26 million subscribers) actually dropped its John Oliver rule back in June; it was replaced by a new rule that all posts needed to contain profanity in the title after a community vote. Earlier this month, the r/videos moderators reverted the rules to what they were before the protests started...

In June, more than 8,000 communities went dark to protest the API pricing, but in the weeks since, many subreddits have opened back up (some after feeling pressure from Reddit) and are operating as they did before. Many users are still disgruntled, though, and made their feelings known in July's r/Place canvas.

More than 1,800 subreddits are still private in protest, according to the Reddark tracker.
Some key passages from the moderator's announcement at r/aww: What about the protest, though; did we win? The short answer is no. The long answer is also no, as Reddit's minimal attempts at positive outreach remain overshadowed by the plethora of depressing developments...

At the end of the day, Reddit's API changes have gone into effect. They did not extend the transition period or reduce the exorbitant prices. They granted exemptions to a few apps and moderation tools, but that's about it. The best thing I can say is that they did honor their commitment to ensuring the continued functionality of some mod tools... Despite some reassurances and promises from Reddit, their conduct and these changes have driven away many developers, leading to the shutdown of some tools and an uncertain future for others.
The announcement with a link labeled "and more importantly," which leads to a picture with a message for Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (who uses the name "Spez" when posting on Reddit.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Jordi Van DenBussche used to devote every waking hour to building his presence on social media. The gaming creator, better known as Kwebbelkop, would labor 24/7 onhis YouTube channelcoming up with video ideas, shooting them, distributing them. He did this while courting brand deals and doing the other work integral to his survival on the platform. Five years ago, he ran into a problem. "Every time I wanted to take a holiday or I needed some time for myself, I couldn't really do that, because my entire business would stop," he says. It's an issue known as the "key person problem." Without Van Den Bussche on camera, the entire Kwebbelkop enterprise didn't work. He was too busy making videos to think about how to scale his business, and too tired to create videos. He needed a break: Around 2018, like many other YouTubers, he experienced significant burnout.

The burnout sparked a change in mindset. He began thinking about what would benefit him and what would benefit the creator industry -- which often relies on milking the on-camera presence of an individual until they reach a breaking point, then finding another person seeking fame and fortune. He came up with a solution: a series of AI tools designed to create and upload videos, practically without his involvement. "I'm retired from being an influencer," he says. "I've had a lovely career. I had a lot of fun. I want to take things to the next level. And that means making this brand live on forever."

Van Den Bussche's AI influencer platform, which launched this week after a suitably excitable level of hype on Twitter from its creator, is his attempt to make that happen. It comprises two versions of an AI tool. The first is trained on a creator's likeness -- their on-camera performances and what they say in videos -- and is used to create new content. It appears to be similar to Forever Voices,the controversial AI tool behind the CarynAI virtual influencer, which outsourced maintaining connections with fans on behalf of creators. The other involves simplifying the act of creation as much as possible by taking simple prompts -- such as "turn this article into a video formatted like an interview involving two people" -- and producing the end result. (The latter is similar toa tool called QuickVid, which has seen some early adoption.) Van Den Bussche won't reveal much about how the tools were built, but regardless of their origins they're coming at a critical time for generative AI and its impacts on how people work. And Van Den Bussche's way of doing things could have lasting impacts on creators on YouTube and beyond.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: The New York Police Department took social media influencer Kai Cenat into custody Friday and is considering charges such as "inciting a riot" after thousands-strong crowds gathered in Union Square for a giveaway, leaving multiple people arrested and several police officers injured.

Cenat, who has over 4 million followers on YouTube, over 5 million on Instagram, and 6.5 million on Twitch, said during a Wednesday Twitch stream that he would be hosting a "huge giveaway" Friday at 4 p.m. in Union Square Park. In the stream, he said they would be giving away computers, Play Station 5s, microphones, keyboards, webcams, gaming chairs, headphones and giftcards from a truck in Union Square. "I feel like New York really deserves it," he said.

Thousands of people began gathering at the park around 3 p.m., NYPD chief Jeffrey Maddrey said at a Friday news conference. "Soon the park and the surrounding streets were overrun with people, obstructing vehicular and pedestrian traffic," he said. The crowds spurred the NYPD to activate a "Level 4" response, its highest level of disaster response... "You had people walking around with shovels, axes, and other tools from the construction site," he said. "Individuals were also lighting fireworks, throwing them towards the police, they were throwing them towards each other...."

Several police officers were injured in the frenzy and "quite a few" people were arrested as police worked to clear the crowd, Maddery said... Cenat could be arrested and face charges for inciting a riot, the chief said. He said NYPD Police Commissioner Edward Caban and the city's legal team were discussing possible charges.
Police complained to CNN that the Twitch streamer "had not alerted the police to the gathering or obtained a permit, and it was declared an unlawful assembly."

Cenat streamed live on Twitch on Friday for some portion of the event, posting video from the crowd. In one video seemingly posted from inside a truck, he described the chaotic gathering, saying, "It's everybody for themselves. It's a war out there."

TikTok users in Europe will be able to switch off the personalized algorithm behind its For You and Live feeds as the company makes changes to comply with the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). The Verge reports: According to TikTok, disabling this function will show users "popular videos from both the places where they live and around the world" instead of content based on their personal interests. These changes relate to DSA rules that require very large online platforms to allow their users to opt out of receiving personalized content -- which typically relies on tracking and profiling user activity -- when viewing content recommendations. To comply, TikTok's search feature will also show content that's popular in the user's region, and videos under the "Following" and "Friends" feeds will be displayed in chronological order when a non-personalized view is selected.

Another change is that European users between the ages of 13 and 17 automatically won't be targeted with personalized ads based on their online activities, rather than having to opt out with a toggle.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Austria's leader is proposing to enshrine in the country's constitution a right to use cash, which remains more popular in the Alpine nation than in many other places. Chancellor Karl Nehammer said in a statement on Friday that "more and more people are concerned that cash could be restricted as a means of payment in Austria." His office said that the "uncertainty" is fueled by contradictory information and reports. "People in Austria have a right to cash," Nehammer said. [...]

The chancellor's proposal, according to his office, involves a "constitutional protection of cash as a means of payment," ensuring that people can still pay with cash, and securing a "basic supply" of cash in cooperation with Austria's central bank. Austria is one of 20 countries that are part of the euro area. Nehammer said he has instructed Finance Minister Magnus Brunner to work on the proposal and plans to hold a round table with the ministries concerned, finance industry representatives and the central bank in September. "Everyone should have the opportunity to decide freely how and with what he wants to pay," he said. "That can be by card, by transfer, perhaps in future also with the digital euro, but also with cash. This freedom to choose must and will remain."

Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl accused Nehammer of stealing his party's ideas and argued that the chancellor's "suddenly discovered love of cash" was meant only "to secure his political survival." The biggest opposition party in the current parliament, the center-left Social Democrats, has called for at least one ATM in every municipality and accused Nehammer of "pure populism." "Even if we write the word 'cash' into the constitution 100 times, there won't be a single ATM more in Austria," said the head of its parliamentary group, Philip Kucher.

SoftBank sued former IRL CEO Abraham Shafi and five siblings and cousins for allegedly misleading the investor about the messaging app's growth, prompting the Japanese conglomerate to buy $150 million worth of shares in the company in 2021 at the height of a pandemic-fueled consumer internet boom. The Information: SoftBank said Shafi and his family members defrauded investors by lying about the company's millions of users, which were actually bots. The lawsuit said the defendants deleted data and communications about the fraud after U.S. securities regulators began investigating the company following a report in The Information questioning the user figures. Last month, The Information reported the company was being shut down following an external investigation initiated by its board of directors that found 95% of its users were fake. The conduct described in the lawsuit, including allegedly deleting evidence during a federal investigation, could put Shafi in further legal trouble.

Threads, Meta's Twitter rival, is struggling to retain users roughly a month after its highly publicized launch, according to fresh industry estimates showing that app engagement has fallen to new lows. From a report: The data from market research firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower highlight the challenges facing Meta as it seeks to exploit the opening created by the chaos surrounding Twitter's management. Threads' daily active user count is down 82% from launch as of July 31, according to Sensor Tower, with just eight million users accessing the app each day.

That is the lowest it has been since the day after the app's release when daily active users peaked at roughly 44 million, Sensor Tower said. People are also opening the app less frequently and spending less time there, Sensor Tower added. On its launch day, Threads users opened the app an average of 14 times and spent an average of 19 minutes scrolling through it, the company reported. By the end of the month, however, those figures had fallen sharply.

An Australian Senate committee has recommended a ban on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from federal government devices be extended to China's most popular social media platform, WeChat. From a report: The Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media also recommended in a report late Tuesday that social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter should become more transparent or be fined. Committee chair James Paterson said on Wednesday the report's recommendations would make Australia a more difficult target for the serious foreign interference risks that the nation faced. "It tackles both the problems posed by authoritarian-headquartered social media platforms like TikTok and WeChat and Western-headquartered social media platforms being weaponized by the actions of authoritarian governments including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter," Paterson told reporters.

Once known for distributing hacking tools and shaming software companies into improving their security, a famed group of technology activists is now working to develop a system that will allow the creation of messaging and social networking apps that won't keep hold of users' personal data. From a report: The group, Cult of the Dead Cow, has developed a coding framework that can be used by app developers who are willing to embrace strong encryption and forsake revenue from advertising that is targeted to individuals based on detailed profiles gleaned from the data most apps now routinely collect. The team is building on the work of such free products as Signal, which offers strong encryption for text messages and voice calls, and Tor, which offers anonymous web surfing by routing traffic through a series of servers to disguise the location of the person conducting the search.

The latest effort, to be detailed at the massive annual Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas next week, seeks to provide a foundation for messaging, file sharing and even social networking apps without harvesting any data, all secured by the kind of end-to-end encryption that makes interception hard even for governments. Called Veilid, and pronounced vay-lid, the code can be used by developers to build applications for mobile devices or the web. Those apps will pass fully encrypted content to one another using the Veilid protocol, its developers say. As with the file-sharing software BitTorrent, which distributes different pieces of the same content simultaneously, the network will get faster as more devices join and share the load, the developers say. In such decentralized "peer-to-peer" networks, users download data from each other instead of from a central machine.

According to the Financial Times, Meta is preparing to launch AI-enabled chatbots with unique personalities, such as a surfer personality and a chatbot based on Abraham Lincoln. Engadget reports: This is an attempt to boost engagement across Meta's social media platforms, as human-like discussions tend to be more interesting than droll robotic responses. The company hasn't announced which of these platforms would host Abe Lincoln and his pals, though previous reports indicated Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp would be recipients of this new technology. Meta staffers are calling these chatbots "personas" and they could launch as soon as September. These personas will provide a new way to search and they'll even offer recommendations, similar to how current chatbots work, though ChatGPT and the rest don't have Abraham Lincoln on the payroll (just don't ask him about the best local opera houses.)

FT notes that the chatbots could also collect vast amounts of personal data, something Meta has never shied away from. After all, you'll likely share more personal details with a human-like companion than one devoid of personality. The vast majority of Meta's yearly revenue comes from advertising, so go ahead and tell your good friend Abe all about your likes and dislikes. What's the worst that could happen?

Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist and freelance writer on science and pharmaceutical topics, comments on the latest developments around last week's remarkable claim of a well-above-room-temperature superconducting material at ambient pressure, dubbed LK-99. Here's an excerpt from his post: As of this morning, there are (as yet not really verified) reports of replication from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. At least, a video has been posted showed what could be a sample of LK-99 levitating over a magnet due to the Meissner effect, and in different orientations relative to the magnet itself. That's important, because a (merely!) paramagnetic material can levitate in a sufficiently strong field (as can diamagnetic materials like water droplets and frogs), but these can come back to a particular orientation like a compass needle. Superconductors are "perfect diamagnets," excluding all magnetic fields, and that's a big difference. The "Meissner effect" that everyone has been hearing about so much is observed when a material first becomes superconductive at the right temperature and expels whatever magnetic fields were penetrating it at the time. All this said, we're having to take the video on the statements of whoever made/released it, and there are other possible explanations for the it that do not involve room-temperature superconductivity. I will be very happy if this is a real replication, but I'm not taking the day off yet to celebrate just based on this.

And even though I'm usually more of an experimental-results guy than a theory guy, two other new preprints interest me greatly. One is from a team (PDF) at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, and the other (PDF) is from Sinead Griffin at Lawrence Berkeley. Both start from the reported X-ray structural data of LK-99 and look at its predicted behavior via density functional theory (DFT) calculations. And they come to very similar conclusions: it could work. This is quite important, because this could mean that we don't need to postulate completely new physics to explain something like LK-99 - if you'd given the starting data to someone as a blind test, they would have come back after the DFT runs saying "You know, this looks like it could be a really good superconductor..." [...]

I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory. Not that there's anything wrong with new physics (!), but it sets a much, much higher bar if you have to invoke something in that range. I await more replication data, and with more than just social media videos backing them up. This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

Meta intends to ask users in the European Union for their consent before allowing businesses to target advertising based on what they view on its services such as Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant said on Tuesday. From a report: Meta said the change is to address a number of evolving regulatory requirements in the region and stems from an order in January by Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner, Meta's lead EU regulator, to reassess the legal basis on how it targets ads.

Facebook and Instagram users had effectively agreed to allow their data to be used in targeted advertising when they signed up to the services' terms and conditions, until the regulator ruled it could not process personal information in that way. "Today, we are announcing our intention to change the legal basis that we use to process certain data for behavioural advertising for people in the EU, EEA (European Economic Area) and Switzerland from 'Legitimate Interests' to 'Consent'," Meta said in a blog post.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting today, Facebook users may feel a little less safe posting anonymously. The Court of the Hague in The Netherlands ruled that Meta Ireland must unmask an anonymous user accused of defaming the claimant, a male Facebook user who allegedly manipulated and made secret recordings of women he dated. The anonymous Facebook user posted the allegedly defamatory statements in at least two private Facebook groups dedicated to discussing dating experiences. The claimant could not gain access but was shown screenshots from the groups, one with about 2,600 members and one with around 61,000 members. The claimant argued that his reputation had suffered from the repeated postings that included photos of the man and alleged screenshots of his texts.

The claimant tried to get Meta to remove the posts, but Meta responded with an email saying that it would not do so because "it is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation." At that point, Meta suggested that the man contact the anonymous user directly to resolve the matter, triggering the lawsuit against Meta. Initially, the claimant asked the court to order Meta to delete the posts, identify the anonymous user, and flag any posts in other private Facebook groups that could defame the claimant. While arguing the case, Meta had defended the anonymous user's right to freedom of expression, but the court decided that the claimant -- whose name is redacted in court documents -- deserved an opportunity to challenge the allegedly defamatory statements. Partly for that reason, the court ordered Meta to provide "basic subscriber information" on the anonymous user, including their username, as well as any names, email addresses, or phone numbers associated with their Facebook account. The court did not order Meta to remove the posts or flag any others that may have been shared in private groups, though.

Meta has already agreed to comply with the order, the court's ruling said. However, if Meta fails to provide the Facebook user's identifying information, the social media company risks a penalty of approximately $1,200 daily. The maximum fine that Meta could face is less than $130,000. [...] Meta's defense of the anonymous user's right to free speech failed, the court said, because freedom of speech is not unlimited. "Someone who, without evidence, repeatedly makes serious and clearly traceable accusations, must take into account, partly in the light of the conditions applied by Facebook, that he or she may be confronted with a measure whereby his or her anonymity is lifted," the court order said. Although the key concern for The Court in the Hague appeared to be that the statements posted anonymously were plausibly defamatory, the order also noted that the content would not have to necessarily be unlawful for Facebook to be ordered to identify the user posting it. "According to settled case law, under certain circumstances Meta has an obligation to provide identifying data, even if the content of the relevant messages is not unmistakably unlawful," the court order said.

tedlistens writes: All large language models are liable to produce toxic and other unwanted outputs, either by themselves or at the encouragement of users. To evaluate and "detoxify" their LLMs, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and others are using Perspective API -- a free tool from Google's Jigsaw unit designed to flag toxic human speech on social media platforms and comment sections. But, as Alex Pasternack reports at Fast Company, researchers and Jigsaw itself acknowledge problems with Perspective and other AI classifiers, and worry that AI developers using them to build LLMs could be inheriting their failures, false positives, and biases. That could, in turn, make the language models more biased or less knowledgeable about minority groups, harming some of the same people the classifiers are meant to help. "Our goal is really around humans talking to humans," says Jigsaw's Lucy Vasserman, "so [using Perspective to police AI] is something we kind of have to be a little bit careful about." "Think of all the problems social media is causing today, especially for political polarization, social fragmentation, disinformation, and mental health," Eric Schmidt wrote in a recent essay with Jonathan Haidt about the coming harms of generative AI. "Now imagine that within the next 18 months -- in time for the next presidential election -- some malevolent deity is going to crank up the dials on all of those effects, and then just keep cranking."

While Jigsaw says the unit is focused on tackling toxicity and hate, misinformation, violent extremism, and repressive censorship, a former Jigsaw employee says they're concerned that Perspective could only be a stopgap measure for AI safety. "I'm concerned that the safeguards for models are becoming just lip service -- that what's being done is only for the positive publicity that can be generated, rather than trying to make meaningful safeguards," the ex-employee says.

In closing, the article leaves us with a quote from Vasserman. She says: "I think we are slowly but surely generally coming to a consensus around, these are the different types of problems that you want to be thinking about, and here are some techniques. But I think we're still -- and we'll always be -- far from having it fully solved."