The Guardian

Collective experiment found switching profile to ‘male’ and ‘bro-coding’ text led to big increase in reach, though site denies favouring posts by men Do your LinkedIn followers consider you a “thought leader”? Do hordes of commenters applaud your tips on how to “scale” your startup? Do recruiters slide into your DMs to “explore potential synergies”? If not, it could be because you’re not a man. C…

The use of AI in the surprise game-of-the-year contender has sparked a heated cultural and ethical debate, and raised existential questions for artists, writers and voice actors • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Arc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every…

Prepare to have your perspective shattered by the comedian’s visits to our US tech overlords. The upcoming advancements for those with disabilities are life-changing Washing machines liberated women to get soul-crushing jobs that ate up their free time. Social media gave the world one revolution – before it destabilised democracies everywhere else. Now AI is here, and its main job seems to be rep…

Need for new road taxes is clear – but there are concerns that pricing plan could stall transition away from petrol Three pence: a small charge per mile for an electric vehicle, but a giant conceptual leap for Britain. Chancellors of the exchequer have long resisted any form of road pricing as politically toxic. That may be about to change next week: Rachel Reeves, perhaps inured to being pillori…

In this week’s newsletter: When the video-sharing site launched in 2005, there were fears it would replace terrestrial television. It didn’t just replace it – it invented entirely new forms of content. ASMR, anyone? • Don’t get The Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Barely a month goes by without more news of streaming sites overtaking traditional, terrestrial TV. Predominant among those…

Users noted that in a raft of now-deleted posts, the chatbot would frequently rank Musk top in any given field Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, has been telling users the world’s richest person is smarter and more fit than anyone in the world, in a raft of recently deleted posts that have called into question the bot’s objectivity. Users on X using the artificial intelligence chatbot in the past week have n…

Technology secretary fears digital frontier may be outpacing regulator, with AI chatbots a particular concern The UK’s internet regulator, Ofcom, is at risk of losing public trust if it fails to use its powers to tackle online harms, the technology secretary, Liz Kendall, has said. Kendall last week told Ofcom’s chief executive, Melanie Dawes, she was deeply disappointed at the pace of the regula…

Leading US stock markets tumble less than 24 hours after strong results from chipmaker Nvidia sparked gains Fears of a growing bubble around the artificial intelligence frenzy resurfaced on Thursday as leading US stock markets fell, less than 24 hours after strong results from chipmaker Nvidia sparked a rally. Wall Street initially rose after Nvidia, the world’s largest public company, reassured …

Staffordshire students say signs material was AI-generated included suspicious file names and rogue voiceover accent Students at the University of Staffordshire have said they feel “robbed of knowledge and enjoyment” after a course they hoped would launch their digital careers turned out to be taught in large part by AI. James and Owen were among 41 students who took a coding module at Staffordsh…

X chatbot suggested gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ‘designed for disinfection’ not mass executions Europe live – latest updates French public prosecutors are investigating allegations by government ministers and human rights groups that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, made statements denying the Holocaust. The Paris public prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday night it was expanding an exi…

Gaming platform to use facial age estimation to limit chats to similar age groups, as allegations of grooming grow The online games platform Roblox is to start blocking children from talking to adult and much older teen strangers from next month as it faces fresh lawsuits alleging it has been exploited by predators to groom children as young as seven. Roblox has reached 150 million daily players …

Jensen Huang opens earnings call with attempt to dispel concerns after his $5tn firm beat Wall Street expectations Global share markets rose after Nvidia posted third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street estimates, assuaging for now concerns about whether the high-flying valuations of AI firms had peaked. On Wednesday, all eyes were on Nvidia, the bellwether for the AI industry and the most val…

Online gaming company says voluntary age assurance technology will limit teens and children messaging users outside their own age groups Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast As Roblox rolls out new age assurance features to prevent teens and kids from chatting with adults they do not know, it has insisted Australia’s upcoming under-16s social media ban should not apply to …

US company that defends millions of websites against malicious attacks suffers unidentified problem A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Monday, causing error messages to flash up across websites. Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, suffered an unidentified problem on Tuesday, …

Forty years ago, the Nintendo Entertainment System dominated the markets in Japan and the US. But in Europe, a technologically superior rival was making it look like an ancient relic There’s an old maxim that history is written by the victors, and that’s as true in video games as it is anywhere else. Nowadays you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Nintendo Entertainment System was the only conso…