Social media content and AI training data are processed in outsource centres in the global south, where long hours, low pay and exposure to disturbing material are the norm

• James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant: ‘AI feeds off the work of human beings’

Mercy craned forward, took a deep breath and loaded another task on her computer. One after another, disturbing images and videos appeared on her screen. As a Meta content moderator working at an outsourced office in Nairobi, Mercy was expected to action one “ticket” every 55 seconds during her 10-hour shift. This particular video was of a fatal car crash. Someone had filmed the scene and uploaded it to Facebook, where it had been flagged by a user. Mercy’s job was to determine whether it had breached any of the company’s guidelines that prohibit particularly violent or graphic content. She looked closer at the video as the person filming zoomed in on the crash. She began to recognise one of the faces on the screen just before it snapped into focus: the victim was her grandfather.

Mercy pushed her chair back and ran towards the exit, past rows of colleagues who looked on in concern. She was crying. Outside, she started calling relatives. There was disbelief – nobody else had heard the news yet. Her supervisor came out to comfort her, but also to remind her that she would need to return to her desk if she wanted to make her targets for the day. She could have a day off tomorrow in light of the incident – but given that she was already at work, he pointed out, she may as well finish her shift.

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The tech company’s new Windows machines can take constant screenshots of users’ every action – quelle surprise , it’s a privacy minefield

On 20 May, Yusuf Mehdi, a cove who rejoices in the magnificent title of executive vice-president, consumer chief marketing officer of Microsoft, launched its Copilot+ PCs , a “new category” of Windows machines that are “designed for AI”. They are, needless to say, “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built” and they will “enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC”.

What kinds of things? Well, how about generating and refining AI images in near real-time directly on the computer? Bridging language barriers by translating audio from 40-plus languages into English? Or enabling you to “easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC”.

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The New Zealand-born photographer was planning to take a portrait of a farm owner when two animals caught his eye

For the last two years, Mark Aitken has been working on a photo series in Lapland. “It’s called Presence of Absence ,” he says, “and it explores the liminal and sometimes uncanny boundaries between life and death experienced by people living in this extreme climate and landscape.”

Aitken, who was born in New Zealand, raised in South Africa and has lived in London for years, took this photo in spring of this year, on a sheep farm. “Kukkola is a borderland hamlet in Finnish Lapland on the River Tornio, near Sweden. The farm has been running for 20 years and this lamb is one of about 100 born in March and April,” he says.

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Hackers claim they obtained barcode data for hundreds of thousands of tickets to Eras tour and demand millions in ransom

Hackers claimed this week that they had obtained barcode data for hundreds of thousands of tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, demanding that Ticketmaster pay millions in ransom money or they would leak the information online.

The hacking group posted samples of the data to an online forum– ticket data on Swift’s shows in Indianapolis, Miami, and New Orleans – and alleged that it possessed an additional 30m million barcodes for other high-profile concerts and sporting events.

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Threat Matrix service monitors social media profiles and flags up death threats, racism and sexist comments

The All England Lawn Tennis Club is using artificial intelligence for the first time to protect players at Wimbledon from online abuse.

An AI-driven service monitors players’ public-facing social media profiles and automatically flags death threats, racism and sexist comments in 35 different languages.

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It won’t be long till everything from Drag Race to Keeping Up With the Kardashians could be written without humans – and you might be able to write yourself as the hero of a new show. But will robot TV ever be up to snuff?

Justine Bateman won’t name names, but a TV showrunner friend once came to her with a dilemma: their show’s team was well into filming its second season when a network executive had an idea. A character in the pilot hadn’t tested well with audiences, so they were just going to go in, use a little AI, and swap in someone else.

The showrunner – and Bateman, an actor and director – were understandably incensed. “When you change the beginning of something, you change the creative trajectory,” says Bateman. “There’s going to be whiplash for the viewer when they get to episode three or four because what was set up in the pilot got messed with and now doesn’t make sense.” Using AI might have seemed like a simple solution to the executive, but to the showrunner, it was catastrophic.

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Governments should use fiscal policies to atone for technology-related carbon emissions, urges report

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Governments faced with economic upheaval caused by artificial intelligence should consider fiscal policies including taxes on excess profits and a green levy to atone for AI-related carbon emissions, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF said unlike previous technological breakthroughs such as the steam engine, generative AI – the term for computer systems such as ChatGPT that can produce convincing, human-like text, voices and images from simple hand-typed prompts – can spread “much faster” and advances in the technology are happening at “breakneck speed”.

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Campaigning door-to-door is nothing new, but selling your party’s vision in the UK election to someone when you can’t see them can be a mixed blessing

Since their debut just over a decade ago, smart doorbells have been a revelation for anyone interested in home security and, though most won’t admit it, being a bit nosey. They’ve also transformed door knocking for political canvassers.

While doorbell camera footage of passersby pilfering packages or behaving badly can be found all over the internet, spare a thought for those campaigning for the country’s future.

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A new essay on the rise of superintelligent machines pivots from being a warning to humanity to a rallying cry for an industrial complex to bolster American military defence

Ten years ago, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published Superintelligence , a book exploring how superintelligent machines could be created and what the implications of such technology might be. One was that such a machine, if it were created, would be difficult to control and might even take over the world in order to achieve its goals (which in Bostrom’s celebrated thought experiment was to make paperclips).

The book was a big seller, triggering lively debates but also attracting a good deal of disagreement. Critics complained that it was based on a simplistic view of “intelligence”, that it overestimated the likelihood of superintelligent machines emerging any time soon and that it failed to suggest credible solutions for the problems that it had raised. But it had the great merit of making people think about a possibility that had hitherto been confined to the remoter fringes of academia and sci-fi.

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