The Signal Foundation president recalls where she was when she heard Trump cabinet officials had added a journalist to a highly sensitive group chat. In March of this year, Meredith Whittaker was at her kitchen table in Paris when Signal, the encrypted messaging service she runs, suddenly became an international headline . A colleague sent their group chat the story ricocheting across the globe: "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans." Of course, you know the rest: In the piece, The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, detailed how he'd been added to a Signal chat about an upcoming military operation in Yemen. Over the following days and weeks, the incident would become known as " SignalGate "--and created a legitimate risk that the fallout would cause people to question Signal's security, instead of pointing their fingers at the profoundly dubious op-sec of senior-level Trump officials. In fact, Signal's user numbers grew by leaps and bounds, both in the US and around the world. It's growth that, Whittaker thinks, is coming at a time when "people are feeling in a much deeper, much more personal way why privacy might be important." On this week's episode of, I talked to Whittaker, who also cofounded the AI Now Institute, about the aftermath of SignalGate, the trajectory of artificial intelligence, and the tech industry's current relationship with politics. Nice to see you, Katie. Nice to see you, too. Brace yourself, we always start these conversations with a little warmup, so I'm going to ask you some very fast questions. I knew you were gonna say that. What's the weirdest AI application you've ever seen? A chatbot that pretends to be your friend.

A popular smartwatch for children that tracks users' locations and discreetly listens into their conversations has been labelled one of the'creepiest' tech gadgets ever. The £170 Angel Watch was launched in the UK late last year as a'child-safe wearable mobile phone' that lets parents'find and track' their youngsters. But the Mozilla Foundation has warned against buying the device'at all costs' because, despite collecting huge amounts of sensitive data, it does not even have a privacy policy. The privacy campaigner's annual report found children's smart toys and apps were the'worst in class' when it came to hoovering up user data. Another product highlighted was an AI robot called Moxie, which is designed to talk to children using an in-built chatbot to help them learn social skills.

Just about everything you do on the internet is filtered through a handful of tech companies. Google is synonymous with search, Amazon with shopping; much of that happens on phones made by Apple. You might not always know when you're interacting with the tech giants. Google and Meta alone capture something like half of online ad revenue in the United States. Movies, music, workplace software, and government benefits are all hosted on Big Tech's data servers.

From where you go to what you say to Siri and Google Assistant, most smartphone apps collect your data continuously. Companies then sell this data to advertising companies, hence why it can sometimes feel like you are recommended ads about products you mentioned in passing once. Data privacy advocate Gaël Duval said that, thankfully, it's possible to change settings so this doesn't happen. Murena believes this has measurable benefits: he says that poor data privacy and personalised adverts directly contribute to increased time spent online, impulse buying and even worsening mental health problems – as tech companies understand more about you, they will target adverts at you more precisely. Research by TASO in 2022 found that 79 percent of people were worried about online technology companies using their data, and 65 percent felt uncomfortable sharing their data to use services for free.

Holidaymakers typically rely on experienced tour guides and local companies to recommend excursions to medieval castles and spectacular waterfalls, but the world's biggest tour operator has said it will entrust the service to artificial intelligence instead. The German travel company Tui has started using ChatGPT in its app to provide holiday recommendations, in the latest sign of traditional businesses racing to harness AI. ChatGPT was released in November by the startup OpenAI, and became the fastest-growing consumer app ever as users flocked to try it out. The rapidly improving technology can produce comprehensible language and even photos and videos by crunching through and synthesising huge amounts of data. Tui's feature has been released to half of UK app users, with the aim of introducing it to all "in the next weeks", a spokesperson said.

A new wave of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard may or may not change the way humans interact with technology forever. But before it does that, it's going to make the internet even more annoying. According to a new report, AI is being used to generate a huge amount of websites filled with random, garbage strings of text targeted at search engines, then plastered with advertising to generate revenue. NewsGuard reports that AI text generation tools are being combined with software that auto-generates new sites, creating masses of domains filled with a huge amount of text. The sites are then filled with programmatic advertising slots, which serve up real ads over the fake content.

Your smartphone is not listening to you around the clock -- but it's collecting so much information that it does not even need to. It has long been speculated that Apple, Google, Samsung and other popular phone makers are recording users 24/7 to collect information for advertising purposes. Most of us have seemingly randomly been promoted an advert for a product that we could have sworn was only talked about in private. To test this, we set up a freshly-factory-reset Samsung phone, using a new Google account on the Android device. We created a fictitious person named Robin, 22, and made a fake a Facebook account for him to use.

The US Federal Trade Commission is paying close attention to developments in artificial intelligence to ensure the field isn't dominated by the major tech platforms, Chair Lina Khan said Monday. "As you have machine learning that depends on huge amounts of data and also a huge amount of storage, we need to be very vigilant to make sure that this is not just another site for big companies to become bigger," Khan said at an event hosted by the Justice Department in Washington.

Before we look into benefits AI offers to business, let's look at what AI really is. Despite the rumours spread mainly by sci-fi films, AI cannot completely replace humans, but can make our lives and the ways we do business much easier, allowing us to find better solutions and supporting us in our discoveries. Currently, the global AI market is valued at over $136 billion and is expected to increase by over 13x in the next eight years, reaching an incredible number of $1.81 trillion by 2030. That alone speaks of the importance of Artificial Intelligence and its incredible potential. The statistics are impressive, but how do businesses actually use Artificial Intelligence?

GFPGAN is deep learning software for real-world face restoration. This software can radically improve the quality of images.