AI News

OpenAI is sticking to its story that it never intended to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice when seeking an actor for ChatGPT’s “Sky” voice mode. The company provided The Washington Post with documents and recordings clearly meant to support OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s defense against Johansson’s claims that Sky was made to sound “eerily similar” to her critically acclaimed voice acting performance in the sci-fi film Her. Johansson has alleged that OpenAI hired

Former and current OpenAI employees received a memo this week that the AI company hopes to end the most embarrassing scandal that Sam Altman has ever faced as OpenAI’s CEO. The memo finally clarified for employees that OpenAI would not enforce a non-disparagement contract that employees since at least 2019 were pressured to sign within a week of termination or else risk losing their vested equity. For an OpenAI employee, that could mean losing millions for

The European Center for Digital Rights, known as Noyb, has filed complaints in 11 European countries to halt Meta’s plan to start training vague new AI technologies on European Union-based Facebook and Instagram users’ personal posts and pictures. Meta’s AI training data will also be collected from third parties and from using Meta’s generative AI features and interacting with pages, the company has said. Additionally, Meta plans to collect information abo

Photos of Brazilian kids—sometimes spanning their entire childhood—have been used without their consent to power AI tools, including popular image generators like Stable Diffusion, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned on Monday. This act poses urgent privacy risks to kids and seems to increase risks of non-consensual AI-generated images bearing their likenesses, HRW’s report said. An HRW researcher, Hye Jung Han, helped expose the problem. She analyzed “less th

Elon Musk is so opposed to Apple’s plan to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT with device operating systems that he’s seemingly spreading misconceptions while heavily criticizing the partnership. On X (formerly Twitter), Musk has been criticizing alleged privacy and security risks since the plan was announced Monday at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. “If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies,” Mu

Three major features in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will not be available to European users this fall, Apple says. They include iPhone screen mirroring on the Mac, SharePlay screen sharing, and the entire Apple Intelligence suite of generative AI features. In a statement sent to Financial Times, The Verge, and others, Apple says this decision is related to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Here’s the full statement, which was attributed to Apple

Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues to reveal how photos of real children casually posted online years ago are being used to train AI models powering image generators—even when platforms prohibit scraping and families use strict privacy settings. Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second repo

For many artists, it’s a precarious time to post art online. AI image generators keep getting better at cheaply replicating a wider range of unique styles, and basically every popular platform is rushing to update user terms to seize permissions to scrape as much data as possible for AI training. Defenses against AI training exist—like Glaze, a tool that adds a small amount of imperceptible-to-humans noise to images to stop image generators from copying ar

anyone in there? Could AIs become conscious? Right now, we have no way to tell. Scientists struggle to define consciousness, AI or otherwise. Lindsey Laughlin – Jul 10, 2024 7:00 am | 362 Credit: BlackJack3D/Getty Images Credit: BlackJack3D/Getty Images Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Advances in artificial intelligence are making it increasingly di

A Spanish youth court has sentenced 15 minors to one year of probation after spreading AI-generated nude images of female classmates in two WhatsApp groups. The minors were charged with 20 counts of creating child sex abuse images and 20 counts of offenses against their victims’ moral integrity. In addition to probation, the teens will also be required to attend classes on gender and equality, as well as on the “responsible use of information and communica

Continuing to evolve the fact-checking service that launched as Twitter’s Birdwatch, X has announced that Community Notes can now be requested to clarify problematic posts spreading on Elon Musk’s platform. X’s Community Notes account confirmed late Thursday that, due to “popular demand,” X had launched a pilot test on the web-based version of the platform. The test is active now and the same functionality will be “coming soon” to Android and iOS, the Comm

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined progressive groups—including Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and the Tech Oversight Project—pressuring the US Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market due to alleged antitrust concerns, Reuters reported. In a letter to the DOJ’s chief antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, groups demanding more Big Tech oversight raised alarms that Nvidia’s top rivals apparently “are str

After withdrawing his lawsuit in June for unknown reasons, Elon Musk has revived a complaint accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of fraudulently inducing Musk to contribute $44 million in seed funding by promising that OpenAI would always open-source its technology and prioritize serving the public good over profits as a permanent nonprofit. Instead, Musk alleged that Altman and his co-conspirators—“preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the exist

Artists defending a class-action lawsuit are claiming a major win this week in their fight to stop the most sophisticated AI image generators from copying billions of artworks to train AI models and replicate their styles without compensating artists. In an order on Monday, US District Judge William Orrick denied key parts of motions to dismiss from Stability AI, Midjourney, Runway AI, and DeviantArt. The court will now allow artists to proceed with discov

Booming demand for artificial intelligence is encouraging big tech companies and their suppliers to explore converting old power stations and industrial sites into data centers. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into building data centers to power cloud computing and AI services, but it has become increasingly challenging to find suitable locations with sufficient power for the energy-hungry facilities. Many data center markets

If you were suspected of a crime, would you trust a chatbot to accurately explain what happened? Some police departments think the tech is ready. And officers who have started using chatbots to quickly complete their most dreaded task of drafting police reports seemingly don’t want to go back to spending hours each week doing their own paperwork. In June, a police department in Frederick, Colorado, boasted that it was the “first law enforcement agency in t

OpenAI and Anthropic have each signed unprecedented deals granting the US government early access to conduct safety testing on the companies’ flashiest new AI models before they’re released to the public. According to a press release from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the deal creates a “formal collaboration on AI safety research, testing, and evaluation with both Anthropic and OpenAI” and the US Artificial Intelligence Safety

After Stanford Internet Observatory researcher David Thiel found links to child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) in an AI training dataset tainting image generators, the controversial dataset was immediately taken down in 2023. Now, the LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) team has released a scrubbed version of the LAION-5B dataset called Re-LAION-5B and claimed that it “is the first web-scale, text-link to images pair dataset to be thoro

A controversial facial recognition tech company behind a vast face image search engine widely used by cops has been fined approximately $33 million in the Netherlands for serious data privacy violations. According to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA), Clearview AI “built an illegal database with billions of photos of faces” by crawling the web and without gaining consent, including from people in the Netherlands. Clearview AI’s technology—which has

The Department of Justice is reportedly deepening its probe into Nvidia. Officials have moved on from merely questioning competitors to subpoenaing Nvidia and other tech companies for evidence that could substantiate allegations that Nvidia is abusing its “dominant position in AI computing,” Bloomberg reported. When news of the DOJ’s probe into the trillion-dollar company was first reported in June, Fast Company reported that scrutiny was intensifying mere