‘It’s terrifying’: WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user’s number

The Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, called it “the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use”. But Barry Smethurst, 41, a record shop worker trying to travel by rail from Saddleworth to Manchester Piccadilly, did not agree.Waiting on the platform for a morning train that was nowhere to be seen, he asked Meta’s WhatsApp AI assistant for a contact number for TransPennine Express. The chatbot confidently sent him a mobile phone number for customer services, but it turned out to be the private number of a completely unconnected WhatsApp user 170 miles away in Oxfordshire.It was the beginning of a bizarre exchange of the kind more and more people are having with AI systems, in which chatbots try to negotiate their way out of trouble, deflect attention from their mistakes and contradict themselves, all in an attempt to continue to appear useful

Amazon boss tells staff AI means their jobs are at risk in coming years

The boss of Amazon has told white collar staff at the e-commerce company their jobs could be taken by artificial intelligence in the next few years.Andrew Jassy told employees that AI agents – tools that carry out tasks autonomously – and generative AI systems such as chatbots would require fewer employees in certain areas.“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” he said in a memo to staff. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce

Up to 70% of streams of AI-generated music on Deezer are fraudulent, says report

Up to seven out of 10 streams of artificial intelligence-generated music on the Deezer platform are fraudulent, according to the French streaming platform.The company said AI-made music accounts for just 0.5% of streams on the music streaming platform but its analysis shows that fraudsters are behind up to 70% of those streams.AI-generated music is a growing problem on streaming platforms. Fraudsters typically generate revenue on platforms such as Deezer by using bots to “listen” to AI-generated songs – and take the subsequent royalty payments, which become sizeable once spread across multiple tracks

Elon Musk’s X sues New York over hate speech and disinformation law

Elon Musk’s X Corp filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the state of New York, arguing a recently passed law compelling large social media companies to divulge how they address hate speech is unconstitutional.The complaint alleges that bill S895B, known as the Stop Hiding Hate Act, violates free speech rights under the first amendment. The act, which the governor, Kathy Hochul, signed into law last December, requires companies to publish their terms of service and submit reports detailing the steps they take to moderate extremism, foreign influence, disinformation, hate speech and other forms of harmful content.Musk’s lawyers argue that the law, which goes into effect this week, would require X to submit “highly sensitive information” and compel non-commercial speech, which is subject to greater first amendment protections. The complaint also opposes the possible penalty of $15,000 per violation per day for failing to comply with the law

How AI pales in the face of human intelligence and ingenuity | Letters

Gary Marcus is right to point out – as many of us have for years – that just scaling up compute size is not going to solve the problems of generative artificial intelligence (When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it’s time to rethink the hype, 10 June). But he doesn’t address the real reason why a child of seven can solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle that broke the computers: we’re embodied animals and we live in the world.All living things are born to explore, and we do so with all our senses, from birth. That gives us a model of the world and everything in it. We can infer general truths from a few instances, which no computer can do

Universities face a reckoning on ChatGPT cheats | Letters

I commend your reporting of the AI scandal in UK universities (Revealed: Thousands of UK university students caught cheating using AI, 15 June), but “tip of the iceberg” is an understatement. While freedom of information requests inform about the universities that are catching AI cheating, the universities that are not doing so are the real problem.In 2023, a widely used assessment platform, Turnitin, released an AI indicator, reporting high reliability from huge-sample tests. However, many universities opted out of this indicator, without testing it. Noise about high “false positives” circulated, but independent research has debunked these concerns (Weber-Wulff et al 2023; Walters 2023; Perkins et al, 2024)