"[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."
"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
"Inevitably creating the potential for bots emailing other bots and absolutely nothing else to worry about."
"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
"Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool."
Fair enough.
"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
"A federal judge in California ruled Monday that Anthropic likely violated copyright law when it pirated authors’ books to create a giant dataset [...] but that training its AI on those books without authors' permission constitutes transformative fair use under copyright law. "
https://www.404media.co/judge-rules-training-ai-on-authors-books-is-legal-but-pirating-them-is-not/
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
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."
"If you let workers believe that AI will soon replace them, they are going to try as much as they can to hold on to their jobs, do everything the boss says and behave so that they are not going to be fired."
https://restofworld.org/2025/tiktok-moderators-turkey/
(CW for brief references to the types of internet content moderators have to deal with.)
"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
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
"According to OpenAI’s internal tests, o3 and o4-mini, which are so-called reasoning models, hallucinate more often than the company’s previous reasoning models [...]"
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/18/openais-new-reasoning-ai-models-hallucinate-more/
A few years ago, way before "AI" and LLMs became a thing, I made a game called Detective, where the players were randomly paired either with another player, or a chatbot, and had to figure out whether they're speaking with a "robot", or a human pretending to be one.
Looks like we're all playing that game now.
"AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing. People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people."
Today we launch the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) with project contributions of MCP (Anthropic), goose (Block) and AGENTS.md (OpenAI), creating a shared ecosystem for tools, standards, and community-driven innovation.
Learn more about this major step toward open, interoperable agentic AI: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-formation-of-the-agentic-ai-foundation
#AgenticAI #AAIF #OpenSourceAI #AIStandards #Interoperability #OpenInnovation #LinuxFoundation #Anthropic #Block #OpenAI #MCP #goose #AGENTSmd #FOSS #TechNews
"After announcing plans to find and restrict underage users on YouTube, the company now says it will start detecting whether Google users based in the US are under 18."
https://www.theverge.com/news/716154/google-ai-age-estimation-under-18
Newsmast x Bonfire
We’re excited to share that Newsmast and @bonfire are working together!
We’re collaborating across several key areas:
🔎 Enhancing discoverability for Channels on Bonfire
🧭 Improving interoperability between the Channels app and Bonfire
🌌 Partnering to offer services for organisations around Bonfire’s Mosaic initiative
#Bonfire #Newsmast #Fediverse #SocialWeb #TechNews #FediNews
Bonfire x Newsmast
We’re excited to share that Bonfire and @newsmast are working together.
We’re collaborating across several key areas:
🔎 Enhancing discoverability for Channels on Bonfire
🧭 Improving interoperability between the Channels mobile app and Bonfire
🌌 Partnering to offer services for organisations around Bonfire’s Mosaic initiative
#Bonfire #Newsmast #Fediverse #SocialWeb #TechNews #FediNews
