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Bible Verses of the Day

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. [Matthew 10:29-31, ESV]

What's in this week's issue?

• ❤️‍🩹 MIT News: Browsing negative content online worsens mental health — there is a plug-in that can help

• 😯 Google says its new AI models can identify emotions — and that has experts worried

• ⛅️ Easy Cloud News

• 📰 AI News

• 🧰 AI Tools

People struggling with their mental health are more likely to browse negative content online, and in turn, that negative content makes their symptoms worse, according to a series of studies by researchers at MIT. The group behind the research has developed a web plug-in tool to help those looking to protect their mental health make more informed decisions about the content they view.

The findings were outlined in an open-access paper by Tali Sharot, an adjunct professor of cognitive neurosciences at MIT and professor at University College London, and Christopher A. Kelly, a former visiting PhD student who was a member of Sharot’s Affective Brain Lab when the studies were conducted, who is now a postdoc at Stanford University’s Institute for Human Centered AI.

Google says its new AI model family has a curious feature: the ability to “identify” emotions. Announced last Thursday, the PaliGemma 2 family of models can analyze images, enabling the AI to generate captions and answer questions about people it “sees” in photos. Experts TechCrunch spoke with were alarmed at the prospect of an openly available emotion detector.

“This is very troubling to me,” Sandra Wachter, a professor in data ethics and AI at the Oxford Internet Institute, told TechCrunch. “I find it problematic to assume that we can ‘read’ people’s emotions. It’s like asking a Magic 8 Ball for advice.”

Easy Cloud News

• ⛅️ Easy Cloud’s Services (link)

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Listen or read the following transcript as Matt Chandler speaks on the topic of Worship from Colossians 3:1–16.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

AI News

• ☔️ Google DeepMind’s GenCast predicts weather more accurately using AI (link)

• 🎹 MIT News: Live improvisation between an AI “jam_bot” and keyboardist Jordan Rudess (link)

• 💸 AWS pledges $100M in cloud credits to help education organizations build learning tools (link)

• 🆕 OpenAI’s ‘Shipmas’ to bring 12 days of new features, which may include Sora AI (link)

• 🇨🇳 Hugging Face CEO has concerns about Chinese open source AI models (link)

AI Tools

• 🐋 Beluga: Christian sermon and lecture transcripts, translations and more (link)

• 🖼️ Relight AI: Free AI background changer online (link)

• 📚️ Brieflane: Book summaries for busy readers (link)

• ✍️ MinutesLink: AI notetaker for online calls (link)

• 📆 Postiz: Your ultimate social media scheduling tool (link)