Tech 24

The law is finally catching up with social media. This week, a California jury found Meta and Google liable for addicting a child to their platforms. On Tuesday, the French Senate will vote to ban under-15s from social media, with other countries making similar plans. Is humanity saved? Or are things more complicated than that?

Five years and more than $80 billion later, Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality dream seems to be being dismantled, and replaced with equally ambitious AI projects. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

It started quietly, with a handful of posts on tech forums and Reddit explaining why and how you should uninstall and unsubscribe from ChatGPT. Now the campaign #QuitGPT has more than 4 million participants worldwide, and the numbers are still climbing. FRANCE 24 tech journalist Charlotte Lam tells us more.

In the hours leading up to the US attack on Iran, Donald Trump announced that technology company Anthropic would be banned from all work with the federal government. At the same time, Anthropic's artificial intelligence chatbot Claude was reportedly being used by the Pentagon to prepare the attack. FRANCE 24 tech journalist Charlotte Lam gives us her analysis.

A struggle to control artificial intelligence is playing out just as the United States increasingly deploys the technology in conflicts from Venezuela to Iran.

Slandered by one AI robot and misquoted in a news article by another, US-based software engineer Scott Shambaugh has made it his mission to become the cautionary tale by which we start to take autonomous artificial intelligence seriously.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Pentagon used Anthropic's AI model, Claude, as part of its operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

A newly released batch of more than three million documents from the US Department of Justice is casting fresh light on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to some of the biggest names in tech.

When the Mongolian language started to disappear from classrooms in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in China's north, many turned to the internet to keep their language and culture alive. A new investigation shows those remaining online spaces are being targeted by the Chinese government.

French President Emmanuel Macron wants to fast-track legislation to ban social media for teens under the age of 15, with parliament slated to vote on a draft proposal on Monday. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

Iran is 10 days into an internet blackout, which rights groups say is intended to prevent further protests and conceal the regime's deadly crackdown. What happens now is unclear. Iranian digital activists are warning the blackout may become "permanent," but local media report that the authorities are considering a gradual return to the internet.

France's AI and Digital Ambassador Clara Chappaz says making public image generation a paid feature of Grok is a "scam", adding to the outcry over how tech mogul Elon Musk has dealt with a torrent of deepfake sexual abuse on his social media platform X.

How did the US pull off its complex extraction operation in the heart of Caracas that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro? The answer is less about futuristic, top-secret weapons and more about scale and coordination. Tech 24's Peter O'Brien looks at the aircraft, electronic warfare, space and cyber capabilities behind the raid.

Australia is about to become the first major democracy to impose a nationwide ban on social media access for under-16s. When the world-first measure comes into force on December 10, platforms including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Twitch, will be required to remove existing under-16 accounts and block the ability to create new ones. The government says the legislation is necessary to curb rising online bullying, self-harm content and addictive design, which it says intentionally targets young users.

With the launch of ChatGPT three years ago to the day, it looked like America had won the next major technology race before it had even started. But the landscape has since shifted dramatically. China is overtaking the United States in open-source models, Europe is walking back its regulatory ambitions, and the internet is drowning in AI-generated rubbish.

The European Commission triggered a political meltdown this week with proposals to loosen some of the EU's landmark digital regulations. The package, announced on Wednesday as part of a push to boost European innovation, drew condemnation from privacy advocates and lawmakers who accuse the Commission of capitulating to pressure from Washington and Big Tech.

Reports suggest Yann Le Cun, one of the "godfathers of AI", is leaving Meta after over a decade pioneering artificial intelligence research at Mark Zuckerberg's tech titan. Le Cun says he no longer believes that scaling up large language models of the kind that power ChatGPT will lead to superhuman intelligence. Instead, he is betting on "world models", AI that learns more like a baby than a bot.

From Nvidia's record-breaking demand to Elon Musk's latest factory ambitions, the race to secure the hardware behind artificial intelligence is accelerating fast. FRANCE 24's Charlotte Lam tells us more.

Small businesses worldwide are being targeted by scammers using fake Google Maps reviews to extort money. The fraudsters post one-star reviews – ever-more convincing thanks to AI – then demand payment to take them down. FRANCE 24 investigated one scheme targeting businesses in France and Spain.

Nigeria's technology regulator says the country must wield more power over TikTok, setting its own rules rather than relying on global content policies. He tells us why in this edition of Tech 24.

Major chipmaker Nexperia is being torn apart by a tug-of-war between China and the Netherlands, sparking concerns from the global automotive industry. The fight started in September, when the Dutch government seized control of Nexperia, headquartered in the Netherlands but owned by a Chinese firm. This weekend, Nexperia employees at the Chinese branch received conflicting orders from higher-ups in China and in the Netherlands. On Tech 24, we look at how the saga is affecting EU-China relations, how the United States is involved, and what it all means for your next car purchase.

We're used to video game characters repeating the same lines of scripted dialogue. But artificial intelligence is now allowing players to have unique, unscripted conversations with the characters they encounter. In Tech 24, explore this experimental tech and its path to the mainstream.

It's artificial intelligence versus the entertainment industry, as Bollywood stars sue YouTube and an AI-generated actor makes her world stage debut. In this edition of Tech 24, we explain why these developments could change what it means to be an artist in the age of AI.

It's crunch time for "chat control", the European Commission's plan to scan private messages and report content suspected of being child sexual abuse. At a European Council meeting on Friday, security officials from across the EU debated the latest proposal, whereby photos and links sent on messaging apps – encrypted or not – would be scanned on-device by an artificial intelligence on the lookout for child sexual abuse material, known to the general public as child pornography.