If you spend much time on social media, you’ll have surely noticed the surge in AI-generated video filling up your feed. We were promised superintelligence but instead got “AI slop” – clips-for-clicks of people and pets doing funny, diverting, but ultimately pointless things. Or worse. Deepfake videos of politicians or celebrities have improved in line with the advancing sophistication of ...
Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, has been ordered to pay $375m (£280m) in damages after it was found to have knowingly harmed children’s mental health. In what was described by campaigners as a “watershed moment”, a court in New Mexico, USA, has found the company had concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social ...
Social media platform Bluesky says it has gained 700,000 new users in the week following the US election. Bluesky, which was originally conceived as part of Twitter by its former chief executive Jack Dorsey, says the new sign-ups are largely from the US and UK. The company has increased its membership from 9 million people in September to 14.5 million ...
The UK has unveiled a punchy new climate goal to slash its emissions by 81% by 2035. The government said it is on a mission to “tackle the climate crisis in a way that makes the British people better off”, by investing in clean, home-grown power and cutting ties with volatile fossil fuel markets. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said: “The ...
Battle lines have been drawn between the almost 200 countries meeting in Azerbaijan as they seek to agree a new pot of money to help developing countries cope with climate change. Over the last two days, leaders have swanned to the capital Baku for the COP29 climate summit to give glitzy speeches on how much they are doing and how ...
The Guardian has quit the social media platform X. The news organisation announced its decision on Wednesday to stop posting from official editorial accounts on the platform, formerly known as Twitter. “We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the outlet said ...
Tweaking the routes of a small number of planes could reduce the warming effect of contrails by half and cost less than €4 per ticket, according to a study. Contrails (or condensation trails) are the lines left in the sky when warm, moist exhaust fumes from an aircraft mix with the cold air to produce ice crystal clouds. They can ...
Keir Starmer’s arrival at COP29, with a promise to drastically cut the UK’s carbon emissions by 81%, will be a small ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy start to the climate talks. The election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to drag the world’s largest economy out of the negotiations, was a colossal setback for a round of talks ...
A legal challenge over the decision to give consent to the UK’s largest untapped oil field has begun in Edinburgh. Greenpeace and Uplift have jointly raised a judicial review at the Court of Session, arguing consent for the Rosebank oil field northwest of Shetland ought to be paused and reassessed. The two environmental groups are also arguing against the exploration ...
Argentinian negotiators have been summoned home from global climate talks in Azerbaijan by the President Javier Milei’s government. The team were ordered to pack up and leave on Wednesday, just three days into the two-week COP29 summit in Azerbaijan. No reason was given, but the Argentinian president – a right-wing populist who has previously dubbed the climate crisis a “socialist ...