In the era of search wars fought between giants, it’s tough to be small. Berlin-based Ecosia offers a search engine for the climate-conscious, promising to be carbon-negative by investing all of its profits into planting trees—more than 180 million of them since it launched in 2009. It’s not likely to …
Read More »Deepfake Porn Is Out of Control
Google’s and Microsoft’s search engines have a problem with deepfake porn videos. Since deepfakes emerged half a decade ago, the technology has consistently been used to abuse and harass women—using machine learning to morph someone’s head into pornography without their permission. Now the number of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos is …
Read More »Millions of Workers Are Training AI Models for Pennies
In 2016, Oskarina Fuentes got a tip from a friend that seemed too good to be true. Her life in Venezuela had become a struggle: Inflation had hit 800 percent under President Nicolás Maduro, and the 26-year-old Fuentes had no stable job and was balancing multiple side hustles to survive. …
Read More »A New Tool Helps Artists Thwart AI—With a Middle Finger
When artificial intelligence image generators first rolled out, they seemed like magic. Churning out detailed imagery in minutes was, from one angle, a technical marvel. From another angle, though, it looked like mere mimicry. The models were trained on billions of images without anyone asking the humans behind them for …
Read More »Artificial Intelligence Is Seeping Into All of Your Gadgets
Artificial intelligence abounds, and it’s only making its way deeper and deeper into every scrap of technology we use. Generative AI in particular is an invention that seems destined to follow us far into the future, so it’s best to try to make sense of where it’s headed. This week …
Read More »The Chatbots Are Now Talking to Each Other
Lena Anderson isn’t a soccer fan, but she does spend a lot of time ferrying her kids between soccer practices and competitive games. “I may not pull out a foam finger and painted face, but soccer does have a place in my life,” says the soccer mom—who also happens to …
Read More »A Doctored Biden Video Is a Test Case for Facebook’s Deepfake Policies
In May, A manipulated video of President Joe Biden appeared on Facebook. The original footage showed Biden during the 2022 midterm elections, placing an “I voted” sticker on his granddaughter’s chest and kissing her on the cheek. The doctored version looped the footage to make it appear like he was …
Read More »'Aggro Dr1ft' Is Built on AI and Video Games—Shouldn’t the Movie Be More Fun?
Sometime in the late 1990s, filmmaker Harmony Korine undertook a project that, in many ways, still defines his artistic ambition. The abandoned documentary Fight Harm saw Korine trawling the streets of New York City, instigating brawls with random passersby. (Leonardo DiCaprio and magician David Blaine reportedly served as the film’s …
Read More »Deepfake Audio Is a Political Nightmare
As members of the UK’s largest opposition party gathered in Liverpool for their party conference—probably their last before the UK holds a general election—a potentially explosive audio file started circulating on X, formerly known as Twitter. The 25-second recording was posted by an X account with the handle “@Leo_Hutz” that …
Read More »How to Use Google Bard to Find Your Stuff in Gmail and Docs
Google recently rolled out multiple updates to Bard, its AI chatbot. The new features include extensions that connect Bard to more aspects of Google’s portfolio, like Gmail, Docs, and YouTube. The company is continuing to experiment with artificial intelligence as part of the next wave of information retrieval. Although my …
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