When users first found out about Adobe’s new terms of service (which were quietly updated in February), there was an uproar. Adobe told users it could access their content “through both automated and manual methods” and use “techniques such as machine learning in order to improve [Adobe’s] Services and Software.” Many understood the update as … Read more
Danish media outlets have demanded that the nonprofit web archive Common Crawl remove copies of their articles from past data sets and stop crawling their websites immediately. This request was issued amid growing outrage over how artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI are using copyrighted materials. Common Crawl plans to comply with the request, first issued … Read more
Over 170 images and personal details of children from Brazil have been scraped by an open-source dataset without their knowledge or consent, and used to train AI, claims a new report from Human Rights Watch released Monday. The images have been scraped from content posted as recently as 2023 and as far back as the … Read more
ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s approach to building artificial intelligence came under fire this week from former employees who accuse the company of taking unnecessary risks with technology that could become harmful. Today OpenAI released a new research paper apparently aimed at showing it is serious about tackling AI risk by making its models more explainable. In … Read more
Turning to a friend or coworker can make tricky problems easier to tackle. Now it looks like having AI chatbots team up with each other can make them more effective. I’ve been playing this week with AutoGen, an open source software framework for AI agent collaboration developed by researchers at Microsoft and academics at Pennsylvania … Read more
In his polarizing “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were “tech ethics” and “trust and safety,” a term used for work on online content moderation, which he said had been used to subject humanity to “a mass demoralization campaign” against new technologies such … Read more
As anyone who so much as glanced at the internet in the past few weeks probably noticed, Google’s sweeping AI upgrade to its search engine had a rocky start. Within days of the company launching AI-generated answers to search queries called AI Overviews, the feature was widely mocked for producing wrong and sometimes bonkers answers, … Read more
A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google’s aggressive drive to commercialize generative AI—and also the treacherous and fundamental limitations of that technology. Google’s … Read more
When bizarre and misleading answers to search queries generated by Google’s new AI Overview feature went viral on social media last week, the company issued statements that generally downplayed the notion the technology had problems. Late Thursday, the company’s head of search Liz Reid admitted the flubs had highlighted areas that needed improvement, writing that … Read more
A majority of US TikTok creators don’t believe the platform will be banned within a year, and most haven’t seen brands they work for shift their marketing budgets away from the app, according to a new survey of people who earn money from posting content on TikTok shared exclusively with WIRED. The findings suggest that … Read more
