Roblox is a popular digital space for kids and teens to congregate while playing their favorite video game, or in the platform's parlance, experience. Now teens ages 13 to 17 who want to access a special feature designed to make those hangouts even more fun will have to verify their age via a video selfie. Roblox announced the new requirement Thursday as part of a slate of safety and privacy measures. Once Roblox estimates the user's age -- via the AI-powered age verification product Persona -- and assigns a qualifying age group to their account, it allows them to take advantage of the new feature, called "Trusted Connections." Teen users can add each other as Trusted Connections, which allows them to communicate via voice and chat without filters.

As young adults become more jaded by online dating, dating apps are trying to save themselves with AI features. Over the last few years, all the big players like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble have added AI-powered tools. Users can now pick profile photos, break the ice, and get prompt help with AI. But has it paid off? Gen Z reported higher levels of discomfort than millennials when it came to using AI for tasks like modifying photos, messaging matches, and crafting profile prompts.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Feedback has been dimly aware for a while that there is a slew of AI-generated music swamping platforms like Spotify. Our awareness was limited, we confess, because we are so old that we still prefer to listen to CDs. Still, we weren't too surprised when New Scientist's Timothy Revell told us about an indie rock band called The Velvet Sundown that appears to be entirely AI-generated, from their songs, which sound like the beige love-children of Coldplay and the Eagles, to their uncanny-valley Instagram photos, which look like rejected concept art from Daisy Jones & the Six.

Amazon today published a blog post by Michelle Vaz, managing director, AWS Training and Certification, that contains some fascinating insights about how AI is changing the landscape for people early in their careers. To understand this dynamic, Amazon partnered with Draup, a "data intelligence firm specializing in workforce planning and talent analytics." Together, the two companies conducted a study entitled, "The Evolution of Early-Career Technical Roles in the AI Era." Amazon hasn't yet provided us with all the data from the study, so I'll make some inferences. Amazon uses the term "early-career professionals," so the AI-related observations are likely about knowledge workers, not all new entrants into the workforce. Also: Amazon's Andy Jassy says AI will take some jobs but make others more'interesting' The analysis raises the same concerns we've been discussing here on ZDNET about AI potentially replacing entry-level jobs.

The 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2025) is currently taking place in Vancouver, Canada, running from 13-19 July. As well as five invited talks, the programme boasts oral and poster presentations, affinity events, tutorials, and workshops. Find out what participants have been getting up to during the first couple of days. On my way to #ICML2025 to present our algorithm that strongly scales with inference compute, in both performance and sample diversity! Reach out if you'd like to chat more!

Today's youngsters will never know the painstaking task of going to a library and searching for an article or a particular book. This tedious undertaking involved hours upon hours of trawling through drawers filled with index cards – typically sorted by author, title or subject. An explosion in research publications during the 1940s made it especially time-consuming to locate what you wanted, especially as this was before the invention of the internet. Now, an expert has lifted the lid on the man and the device that changed everything – and it could also be the key to surviving AI. Dr Martin Rudorfer, a lecturer in Computer Science at Aston University, said an American engineer called Vannevar Bush first came up with a solution, dubbed the'memex'.

Manila, Philippines – When former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March, Sheerah Escuerdo spoke to a local television station, welcoming the politician's detention on charges of murder linked to his war on drugs. Escuerdo, who lost her 18-year-old brother, Ephraim, to Duterte's war, clutched a portrait of her sibling during the interview with News 5 Everywhere as she demanded justice for his killing. Days later, she was shocked to find an AI-generated video of her slain brother circulating on Facebook, in which he said he was alive and accused his sister of lying. Are they paying you to do this?" the computer-generated image of Ephraim said. The video, posted online by a pro-Duterte influencer with 11,000 followers, immediately drew thousands of views on Facebook. One of the comments read, "Fake drug war victims". It was Escudero and her brother's image from her News 5 Everywhere interview that the influencer had used to ...

For years, some daters have used chatbots to flirt for them. Now, one of these "wingman" apps has leaked hundreds of thousands of messages. The makers of FlirtAI, which promotes itself as the "#1 AI Flirt Assistant Keyboard" on the App Store, have leaked 160,000 screenshots that users have shared with the app, according to an investigation by Cybernews. FlirtAI promises to help craft "charming, personalized, and instant" messages to dating app matches, its App Store description says. On the App Store, FlirtAI says it "works with every dating and chat app," and lists many of the most popular of each, including Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

This week, Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, saw its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok go Nazi. In the past three years of Musk's ownership of the social network, it feels like X has weathered at least one public crisis per week, more often multiple. Last week, Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, saw its flagship chatbot Grok declare itself a super-Nazi, referring to itself as "MechaHitler". It made racist, sexist and antisemitic posts, which the company deleted. One example, via my colleague Josh Taylor: Grok referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was "celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids" in the Texas floods as "future fascists".

Finding potential partners on dating apps who want the same things as you can be a grueling task -- especially if you're out for a relationship. It can feel deeply disappointing when someone you've spent hours talking to keeps making excuses for not meeting up. Why do they bother crafting sparkling text conversation over a series of weeks if they won't actually take you on a date? A new study published in Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace may have the answer. Researchers from Miguel Hernández University of Elche in Spain studied the motives of Tinder users and how this lined up with the'dark tetrad' set of personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.