Latest AI News

Cops are now using AI to generate images of fake kids, which are helping them catch child predators online, a lawsuit filed by the state of New Mexico against Snapchat revealed this week. According to the complaint, the New Mexico Department of Justice launched an undercover investigation in recent months to prove that Snapchat “is a primary social media platform for sharing child sexual abuse material (CSAM)” and sextortion of minors, because its “algorit

Nevada will soon become the first state to use AI to help speed up the decision-making process when ruling on appeals that impact people’s unemployment benefits. The state’s Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation (DETR) agreed to pay Google $1,383,838 for the AI technology, a 2024 budget document shows, and it will be launched within the “next several months,” Nevada officials told Gizmodo. Nevada’s first-of-its-kind AI will rely on a Googl

After California passed laws cracking down on AI-generated deepfakes of election-related content, a popular conservative influencer promptly sued, accusing California of censoring protected speech, including satire and parody. In his complaint, Christopher Kohls—who is known as “Mr Reagan” on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter)—said that he was suing “to defend all Americans’ right to satirize politicians.” He claimed that California laws, AB 2655 and AB 2839

In a blog detailing updates coming on November 20, LinkedIn general counsel Blake Lawit confirmed that LinkedIn’s user agreement and privacy policy will be changed to better explain how users’ personal data powers AI on the platform. Under the new privacy policy, LinkedIn now informs users that “we may use your personal data… [to] develop and train artificial intelligence (AI) models, develop, provide, and personalize our Services, and gain insights with t

Cloudflare announced new tools Monday that it claims will help end the era of endless AI scraping by giving all sites on its network the power to block bots in one click. That will help stop the firehose of unrestricted AI scraping, but, perhaps even more intriguing to content creators everywhere, Cloudflare says it will also make it easier to identify which content that bots scan most, so that sites can eventually wall off access and charge bots to scrape

The idea that Americans should be offered a greater choice of smaller cars has support from strange bedfellows indeed. After all, who could forget President Trump—usually one to take a maximalist approach to any problem—announcing last year that he wanted the Department of Transportation to make Japan’s diminutive “Kei” cars legal here in the US. Ars’ attempts to get DoT to tell us more about the potential influx of little vehicles have mostly fallen on de

OpenAI hopes to convince the White House to approve a sprawling plan that would place 5-gigawatt AI data centers in different US cities, Bloomberg reports. The AI company’s CEO, Sam Altman, supposedly pitched the plan after a recent meeting with the Biden administration where stakeholders discussed AI infrastructure needs. Bloomberg reviewed an OpenAI document outlining the plan, reporting that 5 gigawatts “is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactor

Among the first AI companies that the Federal Trade Commission has exposed as deceiving consumers is DoNotPay—which initially was advertised as “the world’s first robot lawyer” with the ability to “sue anyone with the click of a button.” On Wednesday, the FTC announced that it took action to stop DoNotPay from making bogus claims after learning that the AI startup conducted no testing “to determine whether its AI chatbot’s output was equal to the level of

Last week, Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and I made the westerly trek to sunny San Jose, California, to kick off an event titled “Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes Next,” hosted in partnership with IBM. It was awesome to get to stand up on stage and talk to a room packed full of interested Ars readers, and for everyone who was able to come, thank you for being there! (For everyone who wasn’t able to come, that’s

Using ChatGPT to research cyber threats has backfired on bad actors, OpenAI revealed in a report analyzing emerging trends in how AI is currently amplifying online security risks. Not only do ChatGPT prompts expose what platforms bad actors are targeting—and in at least one case enabled OpenAI to link a covert influence campaign on X and Instagram for the first time—but they can also reveal new tools that threat actors are testing to evolve their deceptive

A New York judge recently called out an expert witness for using Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot to cross-check a damages estimate in a real estate dispute—one that partly depended on an accurate assessment of damages to win. In an order Thursday, judge Jonathan Schopf warned that, “due to the nature of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and its inherent reliability issues,” any use of AI should be disclosed before testimony or evidence is admitted

Yesterday, it was reported that the US Department of Commerce is investigating the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) over suspicions that the chipmaker may have been subverting 5G export controls to make “artificial intelligence or smartphone chips for the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies,” sources with direct knowledge told The Information. The Department of Commerce has yet to officially announce the probe and declined Ars’ request for

After rumors swirled that TikTok owner ByteDance had lost tens of millions after an intern sabotaged its AI models, ByteDance issued a statement this weekend hoping to silence all the social media chatter in China. In a social media post translated and reviewed by Ars, ByteDance clarified “facts” about “interns destroying large model training” and confirmed that one intern was fired in August. According to ByteDance, the intern had held a position in the c

AI is giving scammers a more convincing way to impersonate police, reports show. Just last week, the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) warned of an email scam using AI to convincingly clone the voice of Police Chief Mike Brown. A citizen tipped off cops after receiving a suspicious email that included a video showing the police chief claiming that they “owed the federal government nearly $100,000.” To dupe their targets, the scammers cut together re

The East is building the machinesChina’s physical AI story is different in character–and arguably more visceral. At this year’s Spring Festival Gala, humanoid robots from multiple Chinese startups performed kung fu routines, aerial flips, and choreographed dances before hundreds of millions of viewers–a sharp contrast from the stumbling prototypes that drew scepticism just a year prior. It was a spectacle, yes. It was also a statement. China accounted for

What AI for private equity actually looks likeRowspace’s platform connects structured and unstructured data across a firm’s entire history–document repositories, investment and accounting systems, old PowerPoints, deal memos–and applies what Manapat calls a finance-native lens: one that reflects how a firm actually reconciles information, interprets discrepancies, and makes decisions. Crucially, it processes all of this inside a client’s own cloud environm

The referee camera is about transparency, not televisionThe updated Referee View is being framed in broadcast terms, and it will look good on screen. AI-powered stabilisation smooths footage captured from the referee’s body camera in real time, reducing the motion blur that made the original version hard to watch during fast play.The more significant purpose is transparency. VAR has been one of the most contested technologies in football, partly because th