ChatGPT hallucinates defamatory murder claim, faces privacy complaint

Privacy advocacy group Noyb has filed a GDPR complaint against OpenAI after ChatGPT falsely claimed a Norwegian man murdered two of his children. As reported by Natasha Lomas for TechCrunch, the AI chatbot generated completely fabricated information stating that Arve Hjalmar Holmen was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in prison for killing his sons. …

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Report: Google’s two-year journey to counter OpenAI with Gemini

Google’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT launch sparked a dramatic two-year transformation within the tech giant, according to an extensive report by Paresh Dave and Arielle Pardes in Wired. The article details how Google, despite having developed transformer-based architecture (the “T” in ChatGPT), found itself playing catch-up in the generative AI race. When ChatGPT debuted in …

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Interview: Sam Altman discusses OpenAI’s evolution into a consumer tech company

In a wide-ranging interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed insights about the company’s unexpected transformation from a research lab into a major consumer technology company. Altman explained that ChatGPT’s viral success in late 2022 forced the organization to rapidly pivot its operations and strategy. “What I wanted was to get …

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AI crawlers overwhelm open source infrastructure

Free and open source software (FOSS) projects are facing severe infrastructure challenges due to aggressive crawling by AI companies. According to a report by Niccolò Venerandi, multiple FOSS projects have experienced outages and service disruptions from AI crawlers that ignore standard protocols like robots.txt. SourceHut founder Drew DeVault reported that LLM crawlers are accessing expensive …

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Russo brothers develop AI tools for filmmakers while exploring AI’s impact

Hollywood directors Anthony and Joe Russo are building a high-tech studio aimed at harnessing AI to empower artists rather than replace them. According to technology journalist Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal, the directors of “Avengers: Endgame” are investing in AI technology that could help filmmakers create content on smaller budgets. The Russos received …

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Opinion: AI companies threaten open knowledge by not giving back

Author Molly White argues that AI companies are endangering free knowledge projects by exploiting them without contributing back. In her newsletter “Citation Needed,” White describes how generative AI companies use open resources like Wikipedia while placing costly demands on their infrastructure and failing to provide attribution or financial support. The real threat isn’t AI using …

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Tech industry struggles to define AI agents

The tech industry continues to promote AI agents as transformative tools, but lacks consensus on what they actually are. According to TechCrunch reporters Maxwell Zeff and Kyle Wiggers, major companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Salesforce are using inconsistent definitions, creating confusion. OpenAI even contradicted itself, publishing different explanations in the same week. Ryan Salva, senior …

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Google’s stake in AI startup Anthropic revealed as 14 percent

Google owns 14 percent of AI startup Anthropic, according to legal filings obtained by The New York Times. As reported by Cade Metz, Nico Grant, and David McCabe, Google’s investment comes with significant limitations: the tech giant cannot own more than 15 percent of the company and holds no voting rights or board seats. The …

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AI-generated content overloads social media through brute force

Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, reports that generative AI is being used as a “brute force attack” on social media algorithms, flooding platforms with low-quality content at unprecedented scale. In his article, Koebler explains that AI creators can produce dozens of posts in minutes, allowing them to quickly identify and exploit what performs well …

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AI voice cloning tools lack effective safeguards against misuse

Most AI voice cloning services have inadequate protections against nonconsensual voice impersonation, according to a Consumer Reports investigation. The study examined six leading publicly available tools and found that five had easily bypassed safeguards. As reported by NBC News, four services (ElevenLabs, Speechify, PlayHT, and Lovo) merely require checking a box confirming authorization, while Resemble …

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