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The latest news and views from the world of ICT and edtech

UK government considers taking action on TikTok

TikTok could find itself in the crosshairs of UK authorities as they consider whether the video-sharing app should be banned. Security minister Tom Tugendhat told Sky News he had asked the National Cyber Security Centre to look into the Chinese-owned platform, which has more than one billion users worldwide. Despite its popularity, it has come under heightened scrutiny in Europe and the US over its links to Beijing - with concerns that it could be used to collect user data en masse. Sky News contacted TikTok about the increasingly hardline approaches, as the UK mulls over following its allies in banning the app from government devices. A spokesperson for TikTok said they would be “disappointed” by such a move.

OpenAI announces ChatGPT successor - GPT-4

OpenAI has released GPT-4, the latest version of its hugely popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, BBC News has reported. The new model can respond to images - providing recipe suggestions from photos of ingredients, for example, as well as writing captions and descriptions. It can also process up to 25,000 words, about eight times as many as ChatGPT. Millions of people have used ChatGPT since it launched in November 2022. Popular requests include asking it to write songs, poems, marketing copy and computer code, and helping with homework - although teachers say students shouldn’t use it. ChatGPT answers questions using natural, human-like, language, and it can also mimic writing styles, such as those of songwriters and authors. It uses the internet as it was in 2021 as its knowledge database.