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Back in the pandemic depths of December 2020, when so many Americans were working, learning and performing essential daily tasks online, the Federal Communications Commission launched an emergency program to help low-income people connect to high-speed internet with a $50-per-month subsidy. That was extended with the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has provided $30 a month for internet service. An estimated 23 million households currently get the subsidy. But they won’t for much longer. Efforts to renew funding for the ACP have stalled in Congress and are expected to run out by the end of the month. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Kelcee Griffis of Tech Brew about her reporting on the ACP and the people who rely on it.

 

The following content may be disturbing to some listeners.

For years, child sexual abuse material was mostly distributed by mail. Authorities used investigative techniques to stem its spread. That got a lot harder when the internet came along. And AI has supercharged the problem.

“Those 750,000 predators that are online at any given time looking to connect with minor[s] … they just need to find a picture of a child and use the AI to generate child sexual abuse materials and superimpose these faces on something that is inappropriate,” says child safety advocate and TikTokker Tiana Sharifi.

The nonprofit Thorn has created new design principles aimed at fighting child sexual abuse. Rebecca Portnoff, the organization’s vice president of data science, says tech companies need to develop better technology to detect AI-generated images and commit not to use this material to train AI models.

This week: Startups are taking longer to go public or sell to a buyer. What does that say about the state of tech? Also, the dating app Bumble once courted women by letting them make the first move. We’ll explain why Gen Z is prompting Bumble to change things up. But first, discount retail giant Walmart announced this week it is shutting down its telehealth business, as well as its network of low-cost health clinics. There were 51 of those clinics scattered across five states throughout the country. They were part of Walmart’s big push into health care, announced in 2019. So what happened?

Marketplace’s Lily Jamali is joined by Christina Farr, author of the health tech newsletter Second Opinion, for her take on this week’s tech news.

Just how capable is today’s artificial intelligence at beating humans at their own games? That’s one of the metrics tracked by an annual report put together by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, or HAI. And its latest AI Index report finds the tech is quickly gaining on humans. According to the report, AI now exceeds human capability not only in areas like simple reading comprehension and image classification, but also in domains that start to approach human logic, like natural language inference (the ability to draw inferences from text) or visual reasoning (the ability to deduce physical relationships between visual objects). Still, there are areas where the bots haven’t quite caught up. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nestor Maslej, research manager at HAI and editor in chief of the index report, to learn more.

In October, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft, beginning a deep-space mission to one of Jupiter’s moons to determine if it’s capable of supporting life. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the Clipper was built, to learn more about the mission and see the spacecraft before its shipped off to Cape Canaveral, Florida, later this month.

A massive general election is currently underway in India. It’s been described as the “largest democratic exercise in history.” And tech platforms are a big part of it. Many Indian voters get their information online, where misinformation and disinformation can spread quickly. That includes deepfakes of prominent public figures, like Bollywood actor Aamir Khan, spreading false information about who or which political parties they are endorsing. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific policy director and senior international counsel with the international human rights group Access Now, about how deepfakes and online misinformation have become a problem for voters in India. They also discuss a recent report from Access Now and Global Witness, an environmental and human rights nonprofit, about YouTube’s advertisement moderation standards in India.