Google is taking action against algorithmically generated spam. The search engine giant just announced upcoming changes, including a revamped spam policy, designed in part to keep AI clickbait out of its search results. “It sounds like it’s going to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Google,” …

In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, …

After a year of carefully limiting sign-ups to those with invites, the Twitter-style social app Bluesky this week threw open the doors for anyone to join. It’s a make-or-break moment. Remember when the live-audio app Clubhouse went from the most hyped-up social startup when it was hard to snag an …

“I’m not a fan of AI,” Nebojša Vujinović Vujo says. The admission surprises me: He has built a bustling business by snapping up abandoned news outlets and other websites and stuffing them full of algorithmically generated articles. Although he accepts that his model rankles writers and readers alike, he says …

What a heinous month for the media. Almost every day, a publication announces layoffs or shuts down. Sports Illustrated just let go almost all of its staff after weathering an embarrassing scandal about AI-generated articles. It's unclear what the desiccated magazine’s future holds, but the sad fate of another formerly …

Last week, some voters in New Hampshire received an AI-generated robocall impersonating President Joe Biden, telling them not to vote in the state’s primary election. It’s not clear who was responsible for the call, but two separate teams of audio experts tell WIRED it was likely created using technology from …

As media companies haggle licensing deals with artificial intelligence powerhouses like OpenAI that are hungry for training data, they’re also throwing up a digital blockade. New data shows that over 88 percent of top-ranked news outlets in the US now block web crawlers used by artificial intelligence companies to collect …

Ed Newton-Rex says generative AI has an ethics problem. He ought to know, because he used to be part of the fast-growing industry. Newton-Rex was TikTok’s head AI designer and then an executive at Stability AI until he quit in disgust in November over the company’s stance on collecting training …

Do AI companies need to pay for the training data that powers their generative AI systems? The question is hotly contested in Silicon Valley and in a wave of lawsuits levied against tech behemoths like Meta, Google, and OpenAI. In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus …

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, …