The Guardian

Campaigners welcome criminalisation of non-consensual AI-generated explicit images but say law does not go far enough Victims of deepfake image abuse have called for stronger protection against AI-generated explicit images, as the law criminalising the creation of non-consensual intimate images comes into effect. Campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse delivered a petition to Downing Street with …

A number of countries including Australia are investigating X over Grok-produced sexualised deepfakes Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, says global regulatory focus on Elon Musk’s X has reached a “tipping point” after a raid of the company’s offices in France this week. The raid on Tuesday was part of an investigation that in…

Digital pinboard business cutting 15% of workforce as it invests heavily in AI Pinterest has fired two engineers who created a software tool to identify which workers had lost their jobs in a recent round of cuts and then shared the information, according to reports. The digital pinboard business announced significant job cuts earlier this month, with the chief executive, Bill Ready, telling staf…

Moves to ban under-16s from social media should raise deeper questions about who controls democracy’s digital infrastructure The last UK general election of the 20th century was also the first to anticipate, albeit faintly, the coming technological revolution. The 1997 Labour and Conservative manifestos both included pledges to connect schools to something they called “the information superhighwa…

Information Commissioner’s Office to investigate whether Elon Musk’s firms have complied with data protection law Elon Musk’s X and xAI companies are under formal investigation by the UK’s data protection watchdog after the Grok AI tool produced indecent deepfakes without people’s consent. The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating whether the social media platform and its parent brok…

AIs are not sentient – but tweaks to their ethical codes can have far-reaching consequences for users Do you want an AI assistant that gushes about how it “loves humanity” or spews sarcasm? How about a political propagandist ready to lie? If so, ChatGPT, Grok and Qwen are at your disposal. Companies that create AI assistants from the US to China are increasingly wrestling with how to mould their …

A raft of online videos show parents serving up dinner without a single plate in sight, to the amazement of their families Name: Dump dinners. Age: Horribly new. Continue reading...

Prosecutors summon tech billionaire and ex-CEO for questioning and add Grok AI tool to investigation Europe live – latest updates Prosecutors have raided the French headquarters of Elon Musk’s social media platform X and summoned the tech billionaire and the company’s former chief executive for questioning as part of an investigation into alleged cybercrime. “A search is under way by the cybercri…

Annual review highlights growing capabilities of AI models, while examining issues from cyber-attacks to job disruption The International AI Safety report is an annual survey of technological progress and the risks it is creating across multiple areas, from deepfakes to the jobs market. Commissioned at the 2023 global AI safety summit, it is chaired by the Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengi…

Deal comes as Musk pursues plans for datacenters and solar-powered satellites in space to propel AI Elon Musk’s aerospace firm SpaceX has acquired his artificial intelligence business xAI, in a merger that consolidates part of Musk’s empire as SpaceX prepares to go public later this year, at a valuation likely to exceed $1tn. The two companies announced the deal on Monday in a statement on SpaceX…

Some users are stepping away from the app after it made a deal to create a US entity and updated terms and conditions Many TikTok users across the US say they’re rethinking their relationship with the platform since its ownership and terms and conditions have recently changed, with some citing censorship and lack of trust as reasons why they’re removing themselves from the app. Keara Sullivan, a …

Intellectual property | Contact point | The car’s the star | Scandi duvets | Swiss roll solution Jonathan Liew’s elegy to honesty ( Copyrighted art, mobile phones, Greenland: welcome to our age of shameless theft, 28 January )( was as elegant as usual. But he’s missed one crucial factor: the (then utopian) expectation that on the internet everything should be free – an expectation that, once norm…

In the final part of this series , we look at how infighting has ripped the left apart online while the right has flourished – and how some progressives are turning the tide Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London Part one: How liberals lost the internet Part two: How the right won the internet There is politics before the internet, and politics …

When bubbles burst, what comes next can be better, if we build it differently It was December 1999. Tech investors were riding high, convinced that a website and a Super Bowl ad were all it took to get rich quick. Spending was mistaken for growth; marketing was mistaken for a business model. In just a few months, the dot-com boom would go bust: $1.7tn in market value vanished , and the broader ec…

In the first part of our series on digital politics, we look at how centrists have lost ground fighting disinformation – when the real battle is over emotion and attention Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London There’s a strange tendency to describe social media as something other people use – those young people on TikTok, that conspiratorial un…