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Daily Tech Newsletter - 2025-12-23
AI Deepfakes and School Surveillance: Ethical and Safety Implications
AI-generated deepfakes are emerging as a potent tool for cyberbullying and harassment, as evidenced by an incident in Louisiana where a middle school student was targeted and expelled after retaliating against a classmate who circulated AI-generated nude images of her. This incident highlights the urgent need for schools and adults to adapt to the realities of these technologies. Simultaneously, schools are increasingly adopting AI-powered surveillance systems, including facial recognition and bathroom listening devices, with limited data to prove their effectiveness in enhancing safety and raising student privacy concerns. The implementation of these technologies is often occurring without sufficient transparency or input from students, parents, and teachers, leading to distrust and prompting questions on whether these methods are truly more effective compared to alternative safety measures. Experts are calling for healthcare AI to achieve a much higher level of accuracy than human performance. Furthermore, issues with AI's ability to augment human capabilities are magnified by "automation bias" among professionals.
Relevant URLs:
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/boys-school-shared-ai-generated-nude-images-after-128611202
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/12/16/ai-bathroom-monitors-welcome-to-americas-new-surveillance-high-schools/
The "Spiky" Nature of AI and the Rise of Agent-Driven Interfaces
AI models, particularly LLMs, are exhibiting a "spiky" or "jagged" intelligence, excelling in specific tasks due to targeted training benchmarks while struggling with others, which echoes human intelligence. This inherent characteristic shapes AI development and dictates strategies for optimizing usability and capabilities. Meanwhile, Google has introduced A2UI, an open-source protocol enabling agents to create richer, more secure user interfaces via declarative JSON. A2UI addresses the limitations of traditional chat-based interactions by allowing LLMs to request structured UI elements while mitigating UI injection risks.
Relevant URLs:
- https://www.exponentialview.co/p/we-are-all-spiky
- https://www.marktechpost.com/2025/12/22/google-introduces-a2ui-agent-to-user-interface-an-open-sourc-protocol-for-agent-driven-interfaces/
Meta's Perception Encoder Audiovisual (PEAV) for Enhanced Multimodal AI
Meta has unveiled PEAV, a new family of encoders designed for joint audio and video understanding. By training on a vast dataset of audio-video pairs with text captions, PEAV learns aligned representations, enabling cross-modal retrieval and improving performance on various audio and video benchmarks. PEAV serves as the core perception engine for Meta’s SAM Audio model.
Relevant URLs:
AI-Assisted Cooking and Autonomous Fleet Maintenance
LLMs are finding practical applications in daily life, exemplified by the author's experience using Claude to generate a custom web application for cooking and fleet management. Separately, a tutorial details the creation of an autonomous fleet-analysis agent using SmolAgents and a local Qwen model, capable of analyzing telemetry data and generating maintenance diagnostics. This highlights the utility of smaller, local LLMs to automate and deliver end-to-end real-time results. The shift to Open Models has reduced the cost of AI, which translates to an estimated $24.8 billion in savings for consumers in 2025.
Relevant URLs:
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/23/cooking-with-claude/#atom-everything
- https://www.marktechpost.com/2025/12/22/how-to-build-a-fully-autonomous-local-fleet-maintenance-analysis-agent-using-smolagents-and-qwen-model/
- https://www.exponentialview.co/p/2025-in-25-stats
MIT's Research Highlights: From Quantum Computing to Nanomaterials
MIT researchers continue to make significant contributions across various fields, including quantum computing, nano-materials, AI, and healthcare innovations. The university's emphasis on practical applications is evident in their development of technologies for national security, medicine, and energy resilience, contributing significantly to both scientific advancement and economic growth.
Relevant URLs:
AI-Generated Misinformation in Deep-Sea Imagery
The proliferation of AI-generated images is creating challenges in discerning authentic deep-sea footage from AI fabrications, particularly given the public's limited knowledge of abyssal creatures. These inaccuracies pose a threat to genuine scientific communication and public understanding of deep-sea ecosystems.
Relevant URLs:
Google DeepMind's Gemma Scope 2 for AI Interpretability
Google DeepMind researchers released Gemma Scope 2, an open suite of interpretability tools designed for Gemma 3 language models. This enhances AI safety by allowing teams to attribute model behaviors to internal features and to study biases.
Relevant URLs:
Flock Surveillance Camera Vulnerabilities
Flock, a surveillance technology company, exposed numerous Condor PTZ cameras to the open internet without password protection. This breach allowed unauthorized access to live streams, archived video, and administrator control panels, prompting significant privacy concerns given that these cameras track individual movements and record high-resolution video, in some cases capturing faces.
Relevant URLs:
Navigation with LLMs: Claude in Chrome Resolves Cloudflare Issue
The author leveraged the Claude in Chrome browser extension to identify a Cloudflare rule causing an open CORS policy and, thus, has now fixed the configuration. Relevant URLs:
Google's Medical AI: Errors and Reliability Concerns
Google's Med-Gemini AI model made a notable diagnostic error, mistaking the "basilar ganglia" for the "basal ganglia," raising serious concerns among medical professions about the reliability of AI-driven healthcare recommendations and solutions. Relevant URLs: