"The worst was seeing small, especially creative, businesses — and even graphics designers — hopping on the trend.
[...]
Every single one of those businesses, even the small ones, could have afforded to pay an artist. But they didn’t."
technews
Yeah, not great. Hope the public rejects this!
"Under the [UK government] proposals, tech companies will be allowed to freely use copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models unless creative professionals and companies opt out of the process."
"Fun, of course, is subjective — but the novelty of seeing a military robot DJ at a club is pretty striking, even if it was at a stuffy SF networking event."
"Meta is betting that characters generated by artificial intelligence will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3bn users."
https://www.ft.com/content/91183cbb-50f9-464a-9d2e-96063825bfcf
Archived link: https://archive.is/uBMVw
"After a wave of coverage in outlets like Rolling Stone and posts circulating on social media, the bot accounts are just now being noticed, and the reaction is confusion, frustration, and anger."
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/3/24334946/meta-ai-profiles-instagram-facebook-bots
#news #TechNews #technology #AI #ChatBots #meta #facebook #instagram
"Counsel for plaintiffs in a copyright lawsuit filed against Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to the team behind the company’s Llama AI models to use a data set of pirated ebooks and articles for training."
"What's worse, as Berlin historian Henrik Schönemann discovered while experimenting with the bot, is that it seems trained to avoid pinning blame for Frank's death on the actual Nazis responsible for her death, instead redirecting the conversation in a positive light."
“I have a PhD in AI, worked to develop some of the algorithms used by generative AI,” one developer wrote. “I deeply regret how naively I offered up my contributions.”
https://www.wired.com/story/video-game-industry-artificial-intelligence-developers/
Virgin Money's AI-powered chatbot will scold you if you use the word "virgin".
https://www.ft.com/content/670f5896-1fe5-4a31-b41f-ad4f5b91202f
Archived link: https://archive.is/gGVgt
"But to [Aaron, the creator of the anti-AI software Nepenthes], the fight is not about winning. Instead, it's about resisting the AI industry further decaying the Internet [...]."
Or to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre:
"You don’t fight enshittification because you are going to win, you fight enshittification because it is enshittification."
#news #TechNews #technology #ai #nepenthes #enshittification
"[California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s] memo clearly illustrates what a legal clusterfuck the AI industry represents, though it doesn’t even get around to mentioning U.S. copyright law, which is another legal gray area where AI companies are perpetually running into trouble."
Edited 79d ago
"Wait, isn't this the plot to the "Terminator" movies?"
https://futurism.com/openai-signs-deal-us-government-nuclear-weapon-security
#news #technology #TechNews #AI #OpenAI #military #terminator
"The original video showing off Google's Gemini offerings in Workspace was posted five days ago and showed the AI generating a response for a small-business owner in Wisconsin. In the response, Gemini claims Gouda accounts for "50 to 60% of the world's cheese consumption.
The edited ad now shows a Gemini response that says Gouda "is one of the most popular cheeses in the world."
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-super-bowl-ad-gemini-ai-gouda-cheese-2025-2
Archived link: https://archive.is/2cX3i
Not sure what the chances of this bill passing are, but it's certainly interesting to see the efforts.
"Under Hawley’s proposed law, “technology or intellectual property” developed in China would be barred from importation into the U.S. Anyone found violating these restrictions could face up to 20 years in prison, as well as substantial monetary penalties of up to $1 million for individuals and $100 million for companies."
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/law-proposed-to-criminalize-deepseek
"Australia’s Department of the Treasury has found that Microsoft’s Copilot can easily deliver return on investment, but staff exposed to the AI assistant came away from the experience less confident it will help them at work."
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/australian_treasury_copilot_pilot_assessment/
"The New York Times has reportedly approved artificial intelligence tools that newsroom staff can use for editing copy, summarizing information, coding, and writing. The publication announced in an internal email that product and editorial staff will receive AI training, according to Semafor, and introduced a new internal AI tool called Echo for summarizing articles, briefings, and other company activity."
https://www.theverge.com/news/613989/new-york-times-internal-ai-tools-echo
"CEO Marc Benioff said Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, does not plan to hire engineers this year because of the success of AI agents created and used by the company."
https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/27/salesforce-marcbenioff-layoffs-tech-agents/
#news #TechNews #technology #AI #salesforce #labor #WorkersRights
"Rita Contreras, a hairstylist in Brooklyn, said that in the past six months, the number of clients walking in with AI images has ballooned.
[...]
“I have to just say, ‘This is not a real person. This is not real hair,’”"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/23/ai-hair-inspo-wedding-stylists-businesses/
Archived link: https://archive.is/erYG5
If you still use one of these devices, you might want to start looking into alternatives.
"In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally [...] Starting on March 28, recordings of everything command spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud."
via https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114166991733057284
#news #TechNews #technology #amazon #alexa #AmazonEcho #privacy #security
#TechNews picks of day:
This is a large category, skipped descriptions to keep it manageable
GENERAL TECH NEWS
@404mediaco
@arstechnica
@verge
@heiseonline (in German)
@2600
@themarkup
@osnews
@TechCrunch
@TechDesk
@WIRED
@Engadget
@TomsHardware
@EuronewsNext
@mobilesyrup
@Golemde (in German)
@ZDNet
@PCMag
@BGR
@sciencefocus
@Gizmodo
@canaltech (in Portuguese)
@TechTudo (in Portuguese)
@Adrenalinebr (in Portuguese)
@TecMundo (in Portuguese)
@Tecnoblog (in Portuguese)
🧵 1/3
Edited 34d ago
Wait. Is this reading correct?
"Under current law, content produced entirely by AI immediately enters the public domain, allowing unrestricted commercial use."
https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2025/03/20/ai-generated-works-are-public-domain-court-affirms/
Other news coverage:
"Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright Act is that human authorship is required for registration."
"The new feature would likely be an unwelcome one for users who would rather keep comments AI-free on Instagram, especially those who believe their friends deserve genuine comments as opposed to AI slop."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/21/meta-spotted-testing-ai-generated-comments-on-instagram/
#news #technology #TechNews #meta #instagram #SocialMedia #AI #slop
"Being pro-labor and pro-AI is incompatible, as AI devalues the work that actual workers do, making them less valuable to the market and easier to underpay going forward."
https://www.vulture.com/article/ghibli-portrait-chatgpt-ai.html
#news #technology #TechNews #AI #labor #WorkersRights #ghibli #StudioGhibli
Edited 18d ago
Oh wow, the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) annual challenge for writers that started as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999 is shutting down.
"NaNoWriMo lost significant community support when it took a stand in favor of the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing. [...] Around the same time, the nonprofit was also lambasted for inconsistent moderation on its all-ages forums, which created an unsafe environment for teenage writers, community members claimed."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/01/nanowrimo-shut-down-after-ai-content-moderation-scandals/
#news #technology #TechNews #NaNoWriMo #NationalNovelWritingMonth #writing #AI