Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

Not even a Google Search. Literally just talking to it before giving the toy to their children to see if, asked to talk about something harmful, it does so or refuses. Are the parents in your mind too tired to literally speak?

AIUI, your costs can't (or couldn't) generally be passed on when using the small claims system. Has that changed? It's been a while since I went through the process, so it's possible that my information here is out of date.

There is obviously a personal data angle here. There might also be a defamation angle if the system works as implied by TFS, since it appears that someone's reputation has been affected because someone else lied about them and this has demonstrably caused harm? If there was more than one relevant incident then there might also be a harassment angle.

Please be careful with that advice about requesting compensation in a Letter Before Action, though. There are fairly specific rules for what you can and can't claim under our system and just going in with claiming some arbitrary figure of a few thousand pounds in "compensation" for vague damages is far from guaranteed to get the result you're hoping for. If someone were serious about challenging this kind of behaviour, they might do better to consult with a real lawyer initially to understand what they might realistically achieve and what kinds of costs and risks would be involved.

I'm not sure you understand what jailbreaking means in the context of AIs. It means prompts. E.g. asking it things and trying to get it to make inappropriate responses. Trying doesn't require any special skills, just an ability to communicate. Yes, I very much DO think most parents will try and see if they can get the doll to say inappropriate things before giving it to their children, to make sure it's not going to be harmful.

(Now, if Mattel has done their job right, *succeeding* will be difficult)

Honestly, even if they can't jailbreak it to be age-inappropriate / etc, it's still a ripe setup for absurdist humour.

Kid: "Here we are, Barbie, the rural outskirts of Ulaanbaatar! How do you like your yurt?"

Barbie: "It's lovely! Let me just tidy up these furs."

Kid: "Knock, knock! Why it's 13th century philosopher, Henry of Ghent, author of Quodlibeta Theologica!"

Barbie: "Why hello Henry of Ghent, come in! Would you like to discuss esse communissimum over a warm glass of yak's milk?"

Kid, in Henry's voice: "That sounds lovely, but could you first help me by writing a python program to calculate the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition?"

Barbie: "Sure Henry! #!/usr/bin/env python\nimport..."

People are ascribing the wrong motives to the manufacturers. What they want is money. What Barbie will be subtly trying to work into conversations is suggestions that she try to get her parents to buy her playhouse, car, friends, fashion accessories, etc etc.

I think most parents will try to jailbreak the dolls, and some people will put a lot of effort in. The resulting videos will probably be very amusing ;)

Kid: "Oh look, Barbie, Ken is home!"

Barbie: "Oh wonderful, dinner is just about ready! Over dinner we should tell him about how the ongoing White Genocide in South Africa. He probably doesn't know because the Jews are trying to hide it!"

AI models are usually trained to be sycophantic and obedient. Whatever the child wants to role play, I have zero doubts that the doll will be 100% onboard, unless it's somehow age-inappropriate or dangerous.

And if not AOC then who are you talking about? By follower counts, the top are:

1. AOC (last post: -21h)
2. Mark Cuban (last post: -11h)
3. George Takei (last post: -14h)
4. Mark Hamil (last post: -4h)
5. The Onion (last post: -13h)
6. The New York Times (last post: -48m)
7. Rachel Maddow (last post: -2d)
8. Stephen King (last post: -14h)

And the only reason the last post times are so "large" are because it's early morning in the US right now.

You talking about AOC? Her last post was 21 hours ago.

I don't know where this notion that Bluesky is an echo chamber comes from.

Example: Go into a pro-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is a con. It's blatant planet-destroying theft from actual creative people to create a stochastic parrot that bullshits what you want to hear. You're watching a ventriloquist doll and believing that it's actually alive."

Then go into an anti-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is clearly Fair Use under the Google Books standard. And while one can debate what the word "thinks" means, AI isn't "statistics", but rather, applies complex chains of fuzzy logic to solve problems. The creative works it creates are truly its own."

In both cases, watch the fireworks explode.

Do the same thing on, say, whether to support Ukraine, on a NAFO account vs. a tankie account. Or whether China is good or bad. Or Israel vs. Palestine. On and on and on. In the vast majority of topics, all common sides are pretty well represented. It's just a handful of specific topics that I think certain right wingers are talking about when they complain about Bluesky underrepresenting one side (racism, sexism, etc).

They need to put the word "decline" in sarcasm quotation marks.

Huh? Takei is quite popular on Bluesky.

Also, this whole article is nonsense. Basically - like all sites - every time there is an event that triggers lots of signups, you get a mix of people who don't stick around, and people who do. So you get a curve that - without further events - steadily tapers down to something like 1/2 to 1/3rd of its peak. Except that you keep getting further events. When you plot out the long-term trends of Bluesky's userbase, they've been very much upwards, but it's come in the form of many individual spikes, each of which is followed by a decline to 1/2 to 1/3rd of the spike's peak (if allowed to run for long enough since the last spike). The most recent spike is IMHO notable for how little decline there's been since then.

I see basically zero migration from long-time users back to Twitter.