In response to EU’s strict regulations, Meta announced this week it will halt ad displays for teens and instead use a subscription-based model for social platforms. However, while Meta plans to start this November 6th, it also said it will be temporary as the company assesses implications of new EU regulations and there will be further updates forthcoming.
While we don’t agree on much, there is laudable consensus behind a massive Meta lawsuit, which declares addicting kids to social platforms and causing a youth mental health crisis is deceitful and must be stopped. The lawsuit has been filed in California by 33 states and supported by 9 attorneys general and the District of Columbia. It claims that to maximize profit, Meta also misled the public about how dangerous its Instagram and Facebook platforms are and that it concealed how it manipulates children and teens.
This includes a role for the federal government and provides oversight over safety tests companies use to evaluate conversation bots, such as Chat GPT and will introduce industry standards for identifying AI driven products.
Here’s a new buzzword for your Bingo card: “agentic AI”, which describes systems that act by themselves rather than in response to a prompt. Salesforce was all over the concept last week, announcing its Agentforce collection. According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.”