Also: Google executives jump ship in race for AI dominance

Hello, TechScape readers! Danielle Abril, editor of the Guardian’s Reworked series on AI and the future of work, filling in for Blake Montgomery this week. Major legal battles against Meta over child safety are playing out in courts across the US – and the tech giant is losing. Recent rulings raise big questions about social media companies’ responsibility to their youngest users. Meanwhile, more key executives have jumped ship from Google as it battles OpenAI and Anthropic in the race for AI dominance, and Meta’s smart glasses face a fearsome backlash. Let’s dig in!

‘I’ve definitely lost followers’: influencers face backlash over Meta ‘pervert glasses’ content

This man was secretly snapped by someone with smartglasses. He’s not alone in calling that a violation of privacy

Tell us: do you believe you have been filmed by Meta’s smartglasses without your consent?

Restaurants, pubs and theatres ban Meta’s ‘spy glasses’ over privacy fears

‘I’m not spying’: how Meta’s smartglasses have divided opinion

Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to ‘pause AI development’ in interest of humanity

Rising number of UK children report seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves

The White House’s plan to vet potentially dangerous AI is cloaked in secrecy

‘This is very real redlining’: outrage in Little Rock as two datacenters loom

Safety fears as scientists make first viruses designed by AI

SpaceX beats revenue expectations in first earnings report after IPO crash

Using ‘spy glasses’ made by Facebook owner leads to floods of negative comments, say content creators

It was hardly an offensive video. Amid the buzz of the Tour de France finale, Oliver Hooson filmed himself whipping up a delicious-looking flat white for a fellow cycling enthusiast. But after posting the footage on social media, the comments that soon rolled in were a real shock. “PERV,” read one. “Out here pushing creep glasses,” said another. His mistake? Documenting the moment with Meta’s “spy glasses”.

Despite being marketed as the latest must-have gadget, Meta’s smartglasses, which can record video footage while being worn, have faced a vicious backlash, particularly relating to concerns about surveillance. There are widespread fears about the glasses being used to film people, especially women, without their consent, and the resultant footage being posted on social media. This has earned them the label of “pervert glasses”, and content creators, no matter how they are used, have faced a flood of negative comments for deploying them.

After his fall from grace, media’s former enfant terrible is now sober and helping others with his addiction recovery newsletter and podcast, The Small Bow

Every other Tuesday, AJ Daulerio wakes up at 5.30am and meditates for five to 20 minutes before beginning his multistep daily journaling protocol: reading a selection from a poetry anthology, then a passage from one of his daily wisdom readers (his go-to is a heavily annotated copy of Leo Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom); writing his Fear of the Day and gratitude list, then sharing his spiritual takeaway in a note to his three kids.

After a banana and coffee, Daulerio trains Brazilian jujitsu before hitting a 9.45am meditation at Besant Lodge – a community center just below the Hollywood sign that once served as a meeting place for mid-century mystics – immediately followed by him leading a recovery meeting of his own through Zoom.

Companies must ensure people know when they are interacting with artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look real

From apparently conspiring to steal elections to abusing staff or performing embarrassing dance moves, the last few years have seen plenty of fake content made about politicians intended to malign its targets and mislead the public.

Now EU rules aim to stem the flood of this deceptive content: starting from Sunday, artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look authentic must be labelled.

Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of Covid to the health of their adult caregivers

The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says.

Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt: “That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair.” But she is on a drive to puncture the prevailing narrative that the best way to address online harms is a social media ban for teenagers.

All the young people the Guardian spoke to disagreed with aspects of the government’s proposed block

Sixteen- and 17-year-olds in Britain are to be encouraged to observe a midnight to 6am social media curfew but will be able to opt out by changing their account settings.

From next spring, they will be urged to refrain from using certain apps, with the block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden.

As imaging tools become more sophisticated, online predators are using images of children to make extreme pornography

• UK parents warned over posting images of children amid AI sexual abuse fears

The two photos started out as typical teenage selfies: looking into the mirror, fully clothed. But once online predators had got hold of those pictures and ran them through an AI imaging tool, they had become the basis for extreme pornography videos.

These examples come from the Report Remove service, which allows children who have had explicit pictures of themselves distributed without their consent to flag the image confidentially and have it blocked or taken down from social media. Due to breakthroughs in AI, and the wide availability of AI models and nudification apps, some under-18s are becoming victims without even being in contact with criminals.