A fresh wave of anxiety about children and technology is cresting, with parents and pundits increasingly interrogating how kids use smartphones, social media, and screens. It hasn't stopped teenagers from embracing generative AI. New research reveals what AI tools teenagers in the United States are using, and how often--as well as how little their parents know about it. Seven in 10 teenagers in the United States have used generative AI tools, according to a report published today by Common Sense Media. The nonprofit analyzed survey answers from US parents and high schoolers between March and May 2024 to assess the scale and contours of AI adoption among teenagers.

The US government should create a new body to regulate artificial intelligence--and restrict work on language models like OpenAI's GPT-4 to companies granted licenses to do so. That's the recommendation of a bipartisan duo of senators, Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Josh Hawley, who launched a legislative framework yesterday to serve as a blueprint for future laws and influence other bills before Congress. Under the proposal, developing face recognition and other "high risk" applications of AI would also require a government license. To obtain one, companies would have to test AI models for potential harm before deployment, disclose instances when things go wrong after launch, and allow audits of AI models by an independent third party. The framework also proposes that companies should publicly disclose details of the training data used to create an AI model, and that people harmed by AI get a right to bring the company that created it to court.

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared before a US Senate committee to talk about the risks and potential of AI language models. Altman, along with many senators, called for international standards for artificial intelligence. He also urged the US to regulate the technology and set up a new agency, much like the Food and Drug Administration, to regulate AI. For an AI policy nerd like myself, the Senate hearing was both encouraging and frustrating. Encouraging because the conversation seems to have moved past promoting wishy-washy self-regulation and on to rules that could actually hold companies accountable.

New teachers, new backpacks, new crushes--and algorithms trawling students' social media posts. Blake Prewitt, superintendent of Lakeview school district in Battle Creek, Michigan, says he typically wakes up each morning to twenty new emails from a social media monitoring system the district activated earlier this year. It uses keywords and machine learning algorithms to flag public posts on Twitter and other networks that contain language or images that may suggest conflict or violence, and tag or mention district schools or communities. In recent months the alert emails have included an attempted abduction outside one school--Prewitt checked if the school's security cameras could aid police--and a comment about dress code from a student's relative--district staff contacted the family. Prewitt says the alerts help him keep his 4,000 students and 500 staff safe.

An early dive into the Internet of Things landscape yielded sweet rewards for The Hershey Company once the chocolate manufacturer began tracking the weight of Twizzlers during production. That was the story Luis Morinigo, IoT and advanced analytics practice lead for Washington, D.C.-based solution provider New Signature, shared with a audience of midmarket IT leaders Monday evening at the Midsize Enterprise Summit. He and George Lenhart, the former senior manager of IS disruptive solutions at Hershey, explained that while the journey involved several challenges, their ability to leverage machine-learning-fueled analytics ultimately paid meaningful financial dividends. Morinigo said the advent of scalable cloud-based analytics – Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, in this case – became a catalyst for the Twizzlers project because it reduced technical barriers involved in implementing data science capabilities. As other companies began applying IoT to maintenance and operations, Hershey and New Signature felt a clear need to move forward.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is good for business optimization, but could be bad for candy lovers. Twizzlers and eventually other Hershey's candies, such as Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, are going to get smaller now that Hershey is adding IoT sensors to its candy-making manufacturing facilities to make the process more efficient through machine learning. The process to start using machine learning and predictive analytics at Hershey, which makes Twizzlers and 79 other brands of candy, began on a single Twizzlers factory line. Hershey used Microsoft Azure to utilize algorithms to improve the manufacturing process. "We were able to utilize the precooked algorithms inside of Azure to wire up all of the machine learning. We literally were able to build this without a data scientist," said George Lenhart, senior manager, advanced productivity and collaboration, at Industry of Things World USA in San Diego, Calif.