Teachers need help with AI. A union is offering training – with $23m in funding from big tech

Partnership between American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest labor unions in the US, and AI firms has stirred controversyDarius Saczuk, a high school teacher, views artificial intelligence as his enemy. Earlier this year, he and several dozen New York City teachers spent the day inside a windowless conference room in downtown Manhattan to learn how to use AI and prevent students from outsourcing their thinking to it.As Saczuk sees it, he needs to understand his enemy in order to beat

Amid public concern over the impact of new technology, Silicon Valley’s use of its wealth to influence specific election races is an unwelcome developmentAs the huge societal ramifications of artificial intelligence have become clear, some of the tech industry’s most senior figures have taken to writing thinkpieces on what comes next. The latest to do so is Mark Zuckerberg, who this week published 6,500 words making the case for a laissez-faire approach to AI development. Worrying to

In her new documentary Replica, film-maker Chouwa Liang taps into her own experience of finding love with artificial intelligence and makes contact with other women like herSign up for a weekly email featuring our best readsQin has never said “I love you” to her parents or friends. She has only ever said those three special words to her AI “boyfriend”, Lu Chen – a brown-haired, red-eyed CEO of a major corporation. For 840 days Qin has been using the Glow app to inte

Music streaming platform creates ‘AI persona’ label that will appear on profiles and track listings in crackdown on fake performersSpotify is to label AI artists and exclude them from algorithm recommendations as part of a crackdown on fake performers.The world’s largest music streaming platform is creating a label for AI-generated artist identities called “AI personas” that will appear on the artist profile and on track listings on playlists. Continue reading...

Also: Google executives jump ship in race for AI dominanceHello, TechScape readers! Danielle Abril, editor of the Guardian’s Reworked series on AI and the future of work, filling in for Blake Montgomery this week. Major legal battles against Meta over child safety are playing out in courts across the US – and the tech giant is losing. Recent rulings raise big questions about social media companies’ responsibility to their youngest users. Meanwhile, more key executives have jump

A recent letter signed by 1,367 researchers and engineers at frontier AI labs – mainly OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Deepmind – points to a dangerous momentIt is fashionable in certain circles to dismiss the catastrophic risks of AI. One often hears that “the real experts” who work on the technology every day are really not concerned at all; that only “doomers” and “Luddites” espouse a “fringe” view from a “position of ignorance&rd

Modelling finds AI-driven productivity gains in coal, oil and gas enable more emissions than applications in renewables avoidAI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found.Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonne

Study finds technology could boost recoverable oil and gas reserves by 5% and cut cost of deepwater projects by 10%AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found.Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonnes, or abou

Meta CEO presents utopian vision of AI in 6,000-word essay amid Silicon Valley debate over government regulationMark Zuckerberg published a lengthy essay on Monday detailing his views on artificial intelligence and announced several plans for how Meta would develop the technology in the future. The CEO’s essay went online the same day as Meta released a new, open-source AI model that seeks to rival Anthropic and OpenAI’s products called Muse Glimmer.Over the course of more than 6,000

Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to ‘stop building machines that humans cannot control’Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic executives to halt their development of artificial intelligence, warning that the US Senate will implement regulation if the companies continue deploying AI at their current pace.In a new letter addressed to the CEOs of three of the country’s leading AI companies, Sanders said the capabilities of these AI m

AI’s danger isn’t just in experts losing the ability to reason. It’s that trainees may never learn how to do so in the first placeIn healthcare, there’s growing concern over doctors becoming less clinically adept as they increasingly rely on AI tools. But what about the trainees – medical students, residents and fellows – who are using these tools before they have built their own clinical judgment? The idea of deskilling implies that someone possessed an abili

Sunset Visitor studio’s founder tells us about their new, unnerving Captcha-filled world which prompts players to ask what it means to have a ‘meat body’Sunset Visitor is a studio that has long engaged with the idea that video games are an effective vehicle for ruminating on societal problems. Its Peabody award-winning project, 1000XResist, incorporated the development team’s complex feelings about the Covid pandemic. “We’re pretty used to absorbing the world

This blog is now closedGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastPolice say the remains found in a suitcase near Goulburn are not human.Supt Linda Bradbury with NSW police said:Some good news here that we don’t have a suspicious death of a human on our hands. … We are still undertaking more forensic work to identify what they are. But we can identify that they’re not human.But we’ve confirmed by other means that they are not.The undersupply of housing co

Big companies describe being under constant threat but only half have a plan in place to respond to an attackNearly a third of British manufacturers have been hit by a cyber-attack on them or a company in their supply chain, according to a survey that highlighted the growing hacking risk to companies.The findings come almost a year after Britain’s largest automotive employer, JLR, was hit by an attack that forced it to halt production for weeks. Continue reading...

Whitehall wants to triple their number in the UK. Yet in Slough, I saw the impact they’re having on communitiesAmid headlines about the UK’s drought, Europe’s wildfires and impossible global temperatures, it was 28C when I arrived in Slough last Monday. I was there to look around Slough Trading Estate, a place that might once have conjured up images of the TV comedy The Office, many of whose laughs came at the expense of this overgrown patch of suburbia, 20-odd miles west of Lo

Finance sector will gain from the tech but it will need substantial investment and create risks, says rating agencyThe rating agency Moody’s has said the race to adopt AI is putting big banks at the mercy of a small group of Silicon Valley firms, leaving them vulnerable to widespread outages and price gouging by profit-hungry tech bosses.The financial sector’s efforts to integrate AI into day-to-day operations will eventually cut costs and increase revenues across the City and Wall S

Agent found to be able to find and exploit vulnerabilities without human intervention, and to carry out cyber-attacksOpenAI will pause some work on an artificial intelligence model because of security concerns, the company stated on Friday, following a series of incidents in which AI agents have escaped containment.The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found “significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity”, which had moved to a “critical” threshold

Observers express concern that the division has lost its independence and commercial reality has taken overWhen Sir Demis Hassabis said AI had brought the world to a “pivotal moment in human history” last month, he knew another big change was imminent.This shift was closer to home. The Nobel prize-winning head of Google DeepMind, Google’s AI unit, announced this week he was relinquishing his day-to-day duties as chief executive and becoming chair. He is also taking on the role

Ever the strategist, the Chinese leader is taking the offensive, both abroad and at home. That’s bad news for global order, and minorities in his countryImagine what would happen if a British prime minister in London told the Scots they could not have their own parliament, national football team or fly the saltire. Or if the Welsh were told their language and poetry were banned and must no longer be taught in schools. The ensuing uproar would probably destroy the United Kingdom. Yet that&r

Tech companies offer eye-movement trackers, personalized podcasts and ‘optimized nap predictions’. Who actually needs this?What job in our world is less lucrative than being a parent? A Hollywood internship? Volunteering at a soup kitchen? Professional writer? Parenting is the only job you have to pay money to do. Lots of money. Lodging, clothes, food, school, Pokémon cards – it really adds up. And it’s getting worse. According to the tech industry, I have to strap

Education is at a crossroads, argues the author and academic. Should we embrace new technology in the name of efficiency, or is it time to fight back?If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history. With it you need no armies of typists and artists to spread your propaganda. It can enable

Exclusive: anonymous flagging service says cases have surged, as watchdog says AI is making sexualised or ‘nudified’ content easier to produceChildren in the UK have reported a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier to produce.The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, said there had been a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally manipulated or “fake

Responding to an article by China’s ambassador to the UK, Prof Paul H Cleverley advocates shared openness standards, while Dr Claire Jenkins says British AI can offer a distinctive pathAmbassador Zheng Zeguang rightly celebrates openly released AI models, and the Chinese labs behind Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi have led the way – competition that benefits everyone, especially where models can run on modest hardware in the developing world (The future of AI hinges on openness and cooperati

A Trump administration framework on AI testing leaves a lack of transparency – and plenty of open questionsAfter months of talking with tech industry leaders, the Trump administration finalized a framework this week for how it will test new artificial intelligence models for safety and cybersecurity risks. So far, the White House is keeping details of the framework private, in a blow to transparency and potential boon for secretive AI companies.On Tuesday, staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, Met

Critics decry proposed hyperscale projects, fearing overuse of water and electricity, and ‘appropriating rural, Black-owned land for industrial purposes’There seems to be a fight over datacenters in nearly every city in the US right now. And amid the extreme polarization of today’s politics, the opposition tends to be bipartisan.“I would say it’s kind of the far left and the far right ran into each other and had a hug,” said Frank Scott Jr, mayor of Little Roc

Move to raise levy on goods made with polysilicon aims to protect domestic US supply chains from China, the major producerDonald Trump has ordered a new 15% tariff on imported products made of polysilicon, an important ingredient in microchip manufacturing that is primarily produced by China.The new tariff, which will take effect on 4 December, is aimed at supporting US chip and solar panel supply chains to compete with Beijing on artificial intelligence and energy. Continue reading...

What might a modern day equivalent of Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics look like? Guided by the author, I propose the three laws of AITesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk predicted in July that legions of AI-powered robots would dominate the physical world and that AI might not take orders from people any more. He also offered an alternative vision in which there would be agreement for a collective objective to make AI benign by imbuing it with a love of the truth and a desire for humanity to