In the space of 24 hours, a piece of Russian disinformation about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife buying a Bugatti car with American aid money traveled at warp speed across the internet. Though it originated from an unknown French website, it quickly became a trending topic on X and the …
Read More »Google’s Nonconsensual Explicit Images Problem Is Getting Worse
In early 2022, two Google policy staffers met with a trio of women victimized by a scam that resulted in explicit videos of them circulating online—including via Google search results. The women were among the hundreds of young adults who responded to ads seeking swimsuit models only to be coerced …
Read More »Google’s Repair Policy Is Broken
Google makes some of my favorite hardware. I love the Pixel line of phones. I use Nest Hubs and speakers as my smart home controllers. Nest cameras earned recommendations in our security camera and video doorbell guides. Hell, we even like the Pixel Watch 2. There is an appealing elegance …
Read More »How Apple Intelligence’s Privacy Stacks Up Against Android’s ‘Hybrid AI’
At its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10, Apple announced a late but major move into AI with “Apple Intelligence,” confirming months-long rumors that it would partner with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to iPhones. Elon Musk, one of the cofounders of OpenAI, was quick to respond on X, branding ChatGPT-powered …
Read More »Proton Is Launching Encrypted Documents to Take On Google Docs
When particle physicist Andy Yen launched the privacy-focused email service Proton Mail as an ambitious crowdfunding campaign in 2014, the ultimate goal was to make it easier for people to be private online. Now, more than a decade on, his Switzerland-based company, Proton, is in the process of taking one …
Read More »Google Search Ranks AI Spam Above Original Reporting in News Results
Recently, I was using Google and stumbled upon an article that felt eerily familiar. While searching for the latest information on Adobe’s artificial intelligence policies, I typed “adobe train ai content” into Google and switched over to the News tab. I had already seen WIRED’s coverage that appeared on the …
Read More »YouTube’s Rulings on Gaza War Videos Spark Internal Backlash
A month after Hamas militants from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival last October, the Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stilla premiered “HarbuDarbu” on YouTube. The military hype song celebrates Israeli forces waging war in Gaza and has drawn over 25 million views; its critics have termed the song a …
Read More »He Helped Invent Generative AI. Now He Wants to Save It
In 2016, Google engineer Illia Polosukhin had lunch with a colleague, Jacob Uszkoreit. Polosukhin had been frustrated by a lack of progress in his project, using AI to provide useful answers to questions posed by users, and Uszkoreit suggested he try a technique he had been brainstorming that he called …
Read More »Activists Disrupt Amazon Conference Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
A group of six activists disrupted the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to protest Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The protest, which interrupted the keynote speech from Dave Levy, AWS worldwide public sector vice president, is the …
Read More »With AI Tools, Scientists Can Crack the Code of Life
In 2021, AI research lab DeepMind announced the development of its first digital biology neural network, AlphaFold. The model was capable of accurately predicting the 3D structure of proteins, which determines the functions that these molecules play. “We’re just floating bags of water moving around,” says Pushmeet Kohli, VP of …
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