AI News

Back in the mid-1990s, when The Net was among the top box office draws and Americans were just starting to flock online in droves, kids had to swipe their parents’ credit cards or find a fraudulent number online to access adult content on the web. But today’s kids—even in states with the strictest age verification laws—know they can just use Google. Last month, a study analyzing the relative popularity of Google search terms found that age verification law

Pushing to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that its chatbots caused a teen’s suicide, Character Technologies is arguing that chatbot outputs should be considered “pure speech” deserving of the highest degree of protection under the First Amendment. In their motion to dismiss, the developers of Character.AI (C.AI) argued that it doesn’t matter who the speaker is—whether it’s a video game character spouting scripted dialogue, a foreign propagandist circulating mi

The testing must have gone well because Google is now allowing more chatbot makers to sign up for AdSense. “AdSense for Search is available for websites that want to show relevant ads in their conversational AI experiences,” said a Google spokesperson. If people continue shifting to using AI chatbots to find information, this expansion of AdSense could help prop up profits. There’s no hint of advertising in Google’s own Gemini chatbot or AI Mode search, bu

The rapid proliferation of AI chatbots has made it difficult to know which models are actually improving and which are falling behind. Traditional academic benchmarks only tell you so much, which has led many to lean on vibes-based analysis from LM Arena. However, a new study claims this popular AI ranking platform is rife with unfair practices, favoring large companies that just so happen to rank near the top of the index. The site’s operators, however, s

The most popular online destination for deepfake porn shut down permanently this weekend, 404 Media reported. “Mr. Deepfakes” drew a swarm of toxic users who, researchers noted, were willing to pay as much as $1,500 for creators to use advanced face-swapping techniques to make celebrities or other targets appear in non-consensual pornographic videos. At its peak, researchers found that 43,000 videos were viewed more than 1.5 billion times on the platform.

In an unusual move, Google issued a statement late in the day after Cue’s testimony to dispute the implication that it may already be losing its monopoly. During questioning by DOJ attorney Adam Severt, Cue expressed concern about losing the Google search deal, which is a major source of revenue for Apple. This contract, along with a similar one for Firefox, gives Google default search placement in exchange for a boatload of cash. The DOJ contends that is

A day after the US Copyright Office dropped a bombshell pre-publication report challenging artificial intelligence firms’ argument that all AI training should be considered fair use, the Trump administration fired the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter—sparking speculation that the controversial report hastened her removal. Tensions have apparently only escalated since. Now, as industry advocates decry the report as overstepping the office’s au

Privacy watchdog Noyb sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta Wednesday, threatening to pursue a potentially billion-dollar class action to block Meta’s AI training, which starts soon in the European Union. In the letter, Noyb noted that Meta only recently notified EU users on its platforms that they had until May 27 to opt their public posts out of Meta’s AI training data sets. According to Noyb, Meta is also requiring users who already opted out of AI tra

Google’s DeepMind research division claims its newest AI agent marks a significant step toward using the technology to tackle big problems in math and science. The system, known as AlphaEvolve, is based on the company’s Gemini large language models (LLMs), with the addition of an “evolutionary” approach that evaluates and improves algorithms across a range of use cases. AlphaEvolve is essentially an AI coding agent, but it goes deeper than a standard Gemin

On Wednesday, the world was a bit perplexed by the Grok LLM’s sudden insistence on turning practically every response toward the topic of alleged “white genocide” in South Africa. xAI now says that odd behavior was the result of “an unauthorized modification” to the Grok system prompt—the core set of directions for how the LLM should behave. That prompt modification “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic” and “violated xAI’s int

New Orleans police have reportedly spent years scanning live feeds of city streets and secretly using facial recognition to identify suspects in real time—in seeming defiance of a city ordinance designed to prevent false arrests and protect citizens’ civil rights. A Washington Post investigation uncovered the dodgy practice, which relied on a private network of more than 200 cameras to automatically ping cops’ phones when a possible match for a suspect was

Google is constantly making changes to its search rankings, but not all updates are equal. Every few months, the company bundles up changes into a larger “core update.” These updates make rapid and profound changes to search, so website operators watch them closely. The March 2024 update was unique. It was one of Google’s largest core updates ever, and it took over a month to fully roll out. Nothing has felt quite the same since. Whether the update was goo

Gemini 2.5 goes gold Even though Gemini 2.5 was revealed a few months ago, the older 2.0 Flash has been the default model all this time. Now that 2.5 is finally ready, the 2.5 Flash model will be swapped in as the new default. This model has built-in simulated reasoning, so its outputs are much more reliable than 2.0 Flash. Google says the release version of 2.5 Flash is better at reasoning, coding, and multimodality, but it uses 20–30 percent fewer tokens

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google used to be all about the 10 blue links, but that was then, and this is now. You have to scroll farther than ever to get to the links in Google search results, and now this trend is being taken to its ultimate conclusion. At I/O, the company has announced a major expansion of AI Mode search, which heralds a new era for its signature product. There are big changes coming, some of which will start rewriting the web sooner than you

Ever since a mourning mother, Megan Garcia, filed a lawsuit alleging that Character.AI’s dangerous chatbots caused her son’s suicide, Google has maintained that—so it could dodge claims that it had contributed to the platform’s design and was unjustly enriched—it had nothing to do with C.AI’s development. But Google lost its motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Wednesday after a US district judge, Anne Conway, found that Garcia had plausibly alleged that Googl

The Google Home app is where you interact with all of Google’s smart home gadgets, like cameras, thermostats, and smoke detectors—some of which have been discontinued, but that’s another story. It also accommodates smart home devices from other companies, which can make managing a mixed setup feasible if not exactly intuitive. A dash of AI might actually help here. Google began testing Gemini integrations in Home last year, and now it’s opening that up to

Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for today’s software engineer. Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can “instantly generate a to-do list” that eliminates the burden of “wading through weeks of commits.” What these companies don’t say is that these tools are, by temperament if not default, easily tricked by malicious actors into performing hostile actions against their users. Research

The OnePlus approach covers most of the established AI use cases. There will be AI VoiceScribe, a feature that records and summarizes calls in popular messaging and video chat apps. Similarly, AI Call Assistant will record and summarize phone calls, a bit like Google’s Pixel phones. However, these two features are India-only for now. Globally, OnePlus users will get AI Translation, which pulls together text, voice, camera, and screen translation into a sin

According to the company, Photos has more than 1.5 billion monthly users, and it stores more than 9 trillion photos and videos. When using the Photos app on a phone, you are prompted to automatically upload your camera roll, which makes it easy to keep all your memories backed up (and edge ever closer to the free storage limit). Photos has also long offered almost magical search capabilities, allowing you to search for the content of images to find them. T

In some ways, Getty Images has emerged as one of the most steadfast defenders of artists’ rights in AI copyright fights. Starting in 2022, when some of the most sophisticated image generators today first started testing new models offering better compositions, Getty banned AI-generated uploads to its service. And by the next year, Getty released a “socially responsible” image generator to prove it was possible to build a tool while rewarding artists, while