New child safety initiatives and other digital technology stories to read

Governments and businesses have announced a range of new measures and legislation to improve online safety for children.

The Australian government is to legislate to ban social media for children under 16, Reuters reports, while Norway will enforce a minimum age limit of 15.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told newspaper VG: "Children must be protected from harmful content on social media. These are big tech giants pitted against small children’s brains. We know that this is an uphill battle, because there are strong forces here, but it is also where politics is needed," The Guardian reports.

Businesses have also been taking steps to protect young people online. Gaming platform Roblox will bar under-13s from accessing social hangouts – online spaces where different players can talk to each other via text or voice messages.

Apple, meanwhile, has launched a new feature in Australia, allowing children to report nude images and videos, sent through iMessage directly to the company, which can then report these messages to the police. Updates to Apple’s operation system mean that if a sensitive image is detected, children will be shown two intervention screens offering resources or an option to contact a parent or guardian.

And Meta has launched new tools for Instagram that prevent screenshots and screen-recording of disappearing images as part of ongoing efforts to stop criminals from tricking young people into sending them intimate photos.

Children’s charity NSPCC said that while the move was a step in the right direction, the company needed to do more. Richard Collard, associate head of child safety online policy, said: “Questions remain as to why Meta are not rolling out similar protections on all their products, including on WhatsApp where grooming and sextortion also take place at scale.”

The UK has also announced plans to personally fine bosses of social media companies and online market places if they fail to tackle the sale and promotion of dangerous and illegal knives.

Over 10,500 people within the creative industry – including actor Julianne Moore, Radiohead singer Thom Yorke and Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus – have signed a statement to warn artificial intelligence (AI) companies that unlicensed use of their work is a threat to their livelihoods.

There are currently multiple legal battles between creative professionals and tech firms that use their work to train AI models, with claims that using intellectual property without permission is a breach of copyright.

“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” the statement says.

Speaking to The Guardian, British composer and former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex who organized the letter, said: "There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free."

The American Federation of Musicians, the US actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, the European Writers’ Council and Universal Music Group are among other organizations that have signed the statement.

A priest in Poland has created a small chapel, that as well as an altar, lectern, chairs and crucifix, has an AI-based program that allows visitors to ask questions about Catholicism and faith. The Vatican has also launched new AI-enabled services for St Peter's Basilica that will allow virtual access to the Basilica.

Amazon's cloud computing services division, AWS, will invest $1.3 billion in Italy over the next five years as part of expansions to its data centre business.

The code behind the Nobel-prize-winning AI tool for modelling protein structures is now available for non-commercial use, as announced by Google DeepMind, reports Nature.

A new report finds that the UK economy would have had a £111 billion boost if businesses had been quicker to adopt digital technology.

A new United Nations report highlights the role of digital technology and innovation in accelerating the deployment of renewable energy, but also stresses the need for governance.

Ageing populations and demographic shifts present challenges for retirement systems globally. AI could help, write experts from Mercer and Marsh McLennan, by helping on investment and retirement decisions – but trust will need to be built first.

Water security is a global problem – and it's only set to get worse, writes Anja Eimer of Siemens. But, digital twins could help the water management industry to improve efficiency, save clean water and improve services.

Given the pace of change introduced by AI, it continues to raise significant challenges around ethics, privacy and governance. A new report from the World Economic Forum's AI Governance Alliance explores how to tackle issues like data privacy, algorithmic bias and transparency.