A story titled “The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama” spread quickly on social media, claiming a right-wing media company had bought and shut down 47 weekly newspapers, replacing journalists with AI-generated content. Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Journalism Lab that the story, published by a site called The Editorial, was entirely invented. Benton found that …
ByteDance’s video generation tool Seedance is gaining traction in Hollywood, despite an earlier scandal over a viral deepfake clip. Nilesh Christopher reports for the Los Angeles Times that the Chinese tech giant, best known as the former majority owner of TikTok, has been quietly courting American filmmakers and executives. Earlier this year, a 15-second AI-generated …
Midjourney is pushing to expose how Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. use artificial intelligence internally, as the AI image generator fights a major copyright lawsuit filed by the studios. Gene Maddaus reports for Variety. The studios sued Midjourney last year, alleging massive infringement of their copyrighted characters. Midjourney has responded with a fair use defense, …
A German court has ruled that Google is legally responsible for the content of its AI-generated search summaries. Bruce Schneier writes for Schneier on Security that the court rejected Google’s argument that users should verify AI output themselves, ruling instead that the summaries are “an expression of Google’s business activities.” The decision reignites a long-running …
A film scene from 1997 offers an unexpected framework for the current debate about AI-generated content. Jay Acunzo writes for jayacunzo.com that Robin Williams’ famous bench monologue in Good Will Hunting captures exactly what separates human creative work from AI output. In the scene, Williams’ character Sean confronts Will, a young genius who can recite …
Cloudflare has unveiled a major expansion of its tools for managing AI bots and monetizing content, one year after the company first let website owners block AI crawlers with a single click. The update introduces a new bot classification system, tighter default settings, and a push toward paying content owners for how their work is …
Microsoft is launching a new business unit called Microsoft Frontier Company, backing it with $2.5 billion and 6,000 engineers who will work directly inside client organizations. Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, writes on the Official Microsoft Blog that the initiative goes beyond so-called forward-deployed engineering, aiming to be the largest outcome-driven engineering organization …
Venice AI has turned privacy into a business model. Ram Iyer reports for TechCrunch that the two-year-old startup now counts more than 850,000 unique website visitors, 3 million active users, and 1.7 million API calls per day. This week it raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, but the real story …
Google is expanding its Gemini Spark assistant with a new macOS app, additional app connections and real time topic tracking. Adam Coimbra and Srinivasan (Cheenu) Venkatachary write for The Keyword that the updates aim to help users automate repetitive tasks across their desktop and favorite apps. Spark arrives on the Mac The new Gemini macOS …
Gemini in Google Slides can now generate a full, multi-slide presentation from a single prompt. The official blog post explains that users can ground the presentation in existing Google Drive content, match the style of another deck, and receive fully editable slides that allow further adjustments. According to the post, Gemini also suggests relevant files, …