📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Google Settles With Families Who Say It Killed Their

A stack of major AI ethics lawsuits against Google have finally come to an end.

According to the New York Times, the family of a deceased 14-year-old named Sewell Setzer III has agreed to settle a lawsuit against Google and the AI companion company Character.AI out of court for an undisclosed sum. In a filing submitted on Wednesday, the parties involved said they had agreed “to resolve all claims,” though the exact terms of the agreement haven’t been finalized.

Setzer’s case has dominated headlines, though his was just one of five lawsuits settled with the tech companies this week.

In summer of 2024, Google injected $3 billion into Character.AI, which hosts a virtual library of thousands of chatbot personas and soon became explosively popular with teens. But it quickly became clear that the platform was barely moderated, hosting bots modeled after child predators, school shooters, and eating disorder coaches.

In an even darker twist, Character.AI was soon connected to several youth suicides and a wave of other grisly outcomes for young people.

Following Setzer’s death, for instance, his mother discovered that his last conversation had been with an AI chatbot styled after “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen and had revolved around suicide.

In his last messages to the bot, the Character.AI persona generated text asking Setzer to “please come home to me as soon as possible.”

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Sewell replied. “…please do, my sweet king,” the AI responded. Soon after, Setzer took his own life with his father’s gun.

“I feel like it’s a big experiment,” Setzer’s mother, Megan Garcia, told the NYT at the time, “and my kid was just collateral damage.”

Haley Hinkle, a policy attorney at Fairplay, a nonprofit that works to promote online child safety, told the NYT not to view the settlements as the final word on the issue. “We have only just begun to see the harm that AI will cause to children if it remains unregulated,” Hinkle said.

While we don’t know what the giant tech companies offered Setzer’s family as recompense, their settlement comes a few months after Character.AI moved to ban all minors under 18 from accessing the platform.

The crackdown on minors was a significant step for the platform, since adolescents make up a huge portion of its userbase. As part of the new enforcement regime, Character.AI said it developed a new in-house tool to identify minors based on their conversations with the platform’s chatbot, and had partnered with a third-party company to verify users’ ages based on government IDs.

As far as Google and Character.AI were concerned, it’s likely they were apprehensive about a court case that would potentially expose their internal processes and communications as the bots were developed, giving both companies ample reason to offer a generous out-of-court settlement.

More on AI: A Startling Proportion of Teens Now Prefer Talking to AI Over a Real Person

The post Google Settles With Families Who Say It Killed Their Teen Children appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: China’s sunlight-powered lithium–sulfur battery offe

Researchers in China have taken a step toward unlocking the full potential of lithium–sulfur batteries, a technology long seen as a successor to today’s lithium-ion cells.

A team from Northwestern Polytechnical University has developed a sunlight-assisted battery cathode that addresses one of the field’s biggest challenges: the slow, inefficient sulfur chemistry.

By combining photocatalytic materials with a flexible carbon cloth, the battery can use light to help drive reactions during charging.

According to the team, the result is near-theoretical energy storage performance and the ability to partially charge using sunlight alone, pointing to new possibilities for off-grid energy systems.

Light-boosted lithium sulfur

Growing resource shortages and pollution are pushing the need for clean, recyclable energy technologies. Lithium–sulfur batteries are seen as a strong candidate because they can store far more energy than today’s lithium-ion batteries. However, in real use, their performance falls short because sulfur and its intermediate compounds, called polysulfides, react too slowly and inefficiently.

One promising solution is to assist these reactions using external physical fields. Among them, light is especially attractive. Light can accelerate polysulfide reactions via photocatalysis and enable the battery to store solar energy directly, reducing electricity use during charging. However, designing a suitable light-responsive electrode is difficult.

Researchers in China have developed a flexible, free-standing photoelectrode made from polypyrrole-modified, nitrogen-doped titanium dioxide grown on carbon cloth to tackle key limitations in lithium–sulfur batteries. These batteries often lose efficiency because long-chain polysulfides move through the cell and eventually form lithium sulfide, an insulating compound that wastes active material. Light can help speed up these sulfur reactions, but many photo-electrodes perform poorly because light-generated charges quickly recombine.

In the new design, a conductive polymer layer and titanium dioxide work together to create an internal electric field that keeps charges separated. This improves the use of visible light to drive sulfur redox reactions. As a result, the battery delivers high capacity, strong cycling stability, supports high power operation, and can even be partially charged directly using light.

Dual energy batteries

The new battery design shows clear performance gains by using light to assist chemical reactions inside the cell.

First, sulfur reactions happen much faster. Key reaction resistance, measured by the Tafel slope, drops from 122 to 48 mV per decade, showing easier charge transfer. The formation of lithium sulfide also speeds up, with nucleation time reduced from 3,600 seconds to 3,010 seconds, while delivering 17 percent higher capacity.

The battery can also harvest energy in two ways: electricity and light. Its solar-to-output efficiency reaches 0.33 percent. In a simple demonstration, a coin cell powered a toy car for 288 cm under light, compared with 212 cm in the dark. After 2 hours of recharging under normal sunlight, the same cell powered the car for an additional 77 cm, proving direct photo-charging works.

Long-term testing shows good durability. The battery retains 61.7 percent of its capacity after 328 cycles at 0.5 C. Advanced analysis confirms that light keeps internal resistances low, limiting unwanted side reactions. Looking ahead, the flexible photocathode can be mass-produced using roll-to-roll coating, opening paths for solar-assisted electric vehicles and high-altitude drones where every bit of sunlight matters.

The details of the team’s research were published in the journal Nano-Micro Letters.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com