The News

AI companies are only now designing their products not to tell teens to kill themselves

Leading AI companies are scrambling to put safety features into the products they rolled out to billions of users, after it was revealed their AI chatbots were encouraging kids to kill themselves. In the past few days, both Meta (BBC) and OpenAI (TechRadar) have are both adding new guardrails, with OpenAI also adding some parental control features. This hasn’t gone perfectly with ChatGPT users saying they’re being directed towards suicide help lines for unrelated queries (r/ChatGPT).

The Sizzle: As funny as it is to see OpenAI speedrun content moderation, it boggles the mind that these companies are somehow making the same mistakes as social media companies before them. These are ENORMOUS companies worth more than a trillion dollars putting out products that do this? Can you imagine the reaction if any normal product were killing kids like this? Aren’t these people supposedly obsessed with “AI safety?” This FT article makes the interesting point that LLMs’ technical constraint of limited memory can make enforcing guardrail instructions difficult (but I trust the Silicon Valley nerds can figure it out).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Why is no one in Australia talking about this local blockbuster game?

One of the most anticipated sequels in the gaming world comes out today, and it’s Australian-made (Bloomberg, $). Hollow Knight: Silksong is the sequel to the 2017 surprise smash hit 2D action scroller Hollow Knight from Adelaide-based independent studio Team Cherry. The original title sold a whopping 15 million copies — not bad for a three man studio. Silksong is currently the most wish-listed title on Steam and its fans were so keen for its release that they created a bizarre role-playing game involving pretending to find copies of the unreleased game in real life (WIRED, $).

The Sizzle: Australian gaming journalist (and Sizzler) Harrison Polites published an interesting newsletter asking why this game, the sequel to one of Australia’s greatest cultural hits of the last decade, has received no buzz in Australian media (Infinite Lives). He mentions the lack of gaming journalism, opaque gaming sales data and Team Cherry’s lack of self-promotion. I’m going to be a bit more cynical and add to that list: there’s no one making space in Australian mainstream culture for our own gaming. Sad.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Popular VPNs appear to be secretly run by Chinese company

Several popular VPNs appear to linked to a Chinese company sanctioned by the US for its military involvement (Open Tech Fund). New research shows that there are two clusters of free VPNs on the Google Play Store with more than 700 million downloads that are linked to Qihoo 360 and, as a result, the China’s People’s Liberation Army. It also raises security and privacy concerns about these VPN, including “extraction of user location information, despite claiming that this is not collected”.

The Sizzle: CC’ing all your browsing history to Xi Jingping is an extreme example, but I do have broader concerns about VPNs. There are clearly some top level providers but, even still, it’s essentially impossible to know from the outside what a VPN provider is doing to your data. And that’s before we get into the scourge of “free” VPNs. With the teen social media ban imminent, I’m worried that people assume that VPNs are inherently safe when actually they can be incredibly risky.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

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Oh, Also

Do not read this on the toilet

People who take their phone to the toilet are more likely to get haemorrhoids because of the additional time on the loo, research suggests (Guardian). A UK study found that “toilet scrollers” were nearly 50% more likely to get the swollen veins in their rectums or anus.

So what should the 2/3rds of us who take their phone to the toilet do if they can’t bear leaving it behind? “Set a two TikTok limit,” one doctor said. I’m going further and telling you that you shouldn’t read more than one Sizzle edition on the toilet, thank you very much.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electronic & electrical

Computing

Mobile

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.