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Teens Are Turning to Snapchat’s ‘My AI’ for Mental Health Support — Which Doctors Warn Against

Fox News reported:

Anyone who uses Snapchat now has free access to My AI, the app’s built-in artificial intelligence chatbot, first released as a paid feature in February. In addition to serving as a chat companion, the bot can also have some practical purposes, such as offering gift-buying advice, planning trips, suggesting recipes and answering trivia questions, according to Snap.

However, while it’s not billed as a source of medical advice, some teens have turned to My AI for mental health support — something many medical experts caution against.

Dr. Ryan Sultan, a board-certified psychiatrist, research professor at Columbia University in New York and medical director of Integrative Psych NYC, treats many young patients — and has mixed feelings about AI’s place in mental health.

“They have seen a significant increase in inaccurate self-diagnosis as a result of AI or social media,” said Dr. Zachary Ginder, a psychological consultant in Riverside, California. “Anecdotally, teens seem to be especially susceptible to this self-diagnosis trend. Unfortunately, it has real-world consequences.”

Biden’s Silent Surrender on the Final COVID Frontier

Newsweek reported:

This week, President Joe Biden embraced reality and proclaimed an end to the coronavirus pandemic. Federal COVID vaccine mandates will finally lift later this month. However, the truth is that Americans have a Texas judge and Biden‘s plagiarism — not leadership — to thank for this common-sense move.

Until this month, Biden’s ongoing vaccine mandate had continued to devastate public school districts across the country. Suddenly, however, his administration announced that the Departments of Health and Human Resources (HHS) and Homeland Security “will start the process to end their vaccination requirements for Head Start educators.”

The president took the opportunity to spike the football on acknowledging the post-pandemic reality that all but the most hardened left-wing activists have already been living in. This was wildly disingenuous, however, because Biden would almost certainly have kept the Head Start vaccine mandate in place if it weren’t for a meddling federal judge in Texas.

Until a U.S. District Court judge overturned Biden’s vaccine mandate, schools — particularly those geared towards pre-kindergarteners—were still enforcing vaccine mandates for teachers and masking mandates for toddlers. Biden was forced to concede to a lawsuit brought by a slew of Republican attorneys general against HHS and its secretary, Xavier Becerra. Judge James Wesley Hendrix placed a permanent injunction that bans any state, territory, or tribal community from requiring the COVID-19 vaccine in a Head Start program.

Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio, one of the states that sued over the Biden administration’s mandate, said that “only the Biden administration would defend a rule requiring 3-year-olds to wear masks to go to Head Start — in 2023! He never had the authority, and now he can’t even claim to have the need.”

Fauci, Weingarten Try to Rewrite History on Disastrous COVID Lockdowns: ‘Show Me a School That I Shut Down’

Fox News reported:

Former White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and teachers union boss Randi Weingarten are furiously trying to rewrite history on their role in promoting the disastrous school lockdowns that paralyzed the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic and left a generation of children behind.

“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” Fauci told New York Times Magazine last month. “I gave a public health recommendation that echoed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.”

​​”We wanted to be in school. I’ve said that over and over again today,” Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one of the nation’s most powerful teachers’ unions, said during her congressional testimony about the school lockdowns last week.

But history shows that both Fauci and Weingarten vehemently pushed for COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions that led to prolonged school closures across the country.

How Far Should the Government Go to Control What Your Kids See Online?

Vox reported:

The latest onslaught of child internet safety bills is upon us as expected, and it may soon intersect with America’s ongoing culture war.

As more evidence emerges that internet platforms can harm children and either can’t or won’t do anything to protect their users, the government has understandably felt the need to step in. States are proposing and even passing laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all.

Some of them also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. That comes with another set of concerns over censorship, especially now that some administrations have politicized ideas about what’s appropriate for kids to see. We’re already getting a glimpse of what various factions in this country think the Internet should look like. We might be getting a much better look soon.

“We generally don’t like it when the government is trying to tell parents the correct way to parent their children,” said India McKinney, director of federal affairs at the EFF. “Yes, there is harmful stuff that happens online. That is absolutely true. But how do you define that in legislation, to make it clear what you mean and what you don’t mean, and in a way that platforms can [moderate]?”

AI Is About to Make Social Media (Much) More Toxic

The Atlantic reported:

We joined together to write this essay because we each came, by different routes, to share grave concerns about the effects of AI-empowered social media on American society.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who has written about the ways in which social media has contributed to mental illness in teen girls, the fragmentation of democracy and the dissolution of a common reality. Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google, is a co-author of a recent book about AI’s potential impact on human society.

Last year, the two of us began to talk about how generative AI — the kind that can chat with you or make pictures you’d like to see — would likely exacerbate social media’s ills, making it more addictive, divisive and manipulative. As we talked, we converged on four main threats—all of which are imminent — and we began to discuss solutions as well.

Half of Americans Say Congress Should Take ‘Swift Action’ to Regulate AI: Poll

The Hill reported:

About half of Americans said Congress should be taking action to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) technology, according to a poll released Thursday.

Fifty-four percent of polled registered voters said Congress should take “swift action” to regulate the technology in a way that promotes privacy, fairness and safety to ensure “maximum benefit to society with minimal risks,” according to the poll conducted for the Omidyar Network-funded Tech Oversight Project.

Only 15% of respondents said that regulating AI will stifle innovation and put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage, according to the poll shared exclusively with The Hill.

The poll also found that 41% of voters said Congress should be the driving force behind AI regulation. Just 20% said that tech companies, such as Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, should be leading the way. An additional 39% said they are not sure who should lead on AI regulations.

Despite TikTok Ban Threat, Influencers Are Flocking to a New App From Its Parent Company

CNN Business reported:

In the days after TikTok’s CEO was grilled by Congress for the first time, many TikTok users began posting about an alternative platform called Lemon8, sometimes with eerily similar language.

Multiple creators described the app as being like “if Pinterest and Instagram had a baby, with TikTok’s algorithm.” Some compared it to TikTok circa 2020 and encouraged other influencers to join the app before it grows. They also asked followers to share their Lemon8 usernames in the comments.

As it turned out, the app wasn’t just a random alternative to TikTok. Lemon8 is a social media platform launched in the United States earlier this year by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance amid federal and state efforts to ban or restrict TikTok in the country over national security concerns.

The early traction for Lemon8 hints at the whack-a-mole challenge lawmakers could face in reining in TikTok and other social media platforms. It also carries some hints of TikTok’s own rise, which was reportedly fueled in part by ByteDance spending heavily to advertise the service on rival platforms Facebook and Snapchat. This time, however, the best place to promote the next TikTok may be on TikTok itself.

Microsoft Opens Up Its AI-Powered Bing to All Users

CNN Business reported:

Microsoft is rolling out the new AI-powered version of its Bing search engine to anyone who wants to use it.

Nearly three months after the company debuted a limited preview version of its new Bing, powered by the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, Microsoft is opening it up to all users without a waitlist — as long as they’re signed into the search engine via Microsoft’s Edge browser.

Bing now gets more than 100 million daily active users each day, a significant uptick in the past few months, according to Yusuf Mehdi, a VP at Microsoft overseeing its AI initiatives. Google, which has long dominated the market, is also adding similar AI features to its search engine.

Microsoft’s moves also come amid heightened scrutiny on the rapid pace of advancement in AI technology. In March, some of the biggest names in tech, including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, called for artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.”

‘We Will Never Forget’: Canadians and Americans React to U.S. Lifting COVID Border Restrictions

The Epoch Times reported:

While the United States recently announced it will end its COVID-19 vaccine requirements for international air travelers and at the Canadian border, The Epoch Times spoke with some Canadians and Americans who expressed deep frustration with the rules being implemented in the first place, vowing not to forget being separated from their loved ones.

“We will never thank a government whose deliberate implementation of discriminatory, baseless mandates, targeted a group whose only threat was the rejection of their false political science narrative,” said Hope Vanbeselaere Marsh, a Manitoba woman who was separated from her husband in Texas in March 2020. “While many are content to pretend the last three years never happened, we will never forget.”

The Canadian government announced it would drop all COVID-19 border restrictions for anyone entering the country, which included proof of COVID-19 vaccination, quarantine and isolation requirements, and the controversial ArriveCAN application, on Oct. 1, 2022.