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"Saudi Arabia appears to be exploiting the US messaging app Snapchat to promote the image of its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, while also imposing draconian sentences on influencers who use the platform to post even mild criticism of the future king."

"You're nailing the problem: the tech sales people and the politicians are all on the same drug, which is "This tech is perfect", because it's cheaper than more police. There's a lawsuit in the US because a black man was wrongly arrested based on facial recognition. Tech companies need to be held to account. One company we focused on, Clearview AI, scraped social networks - collected images of people's faces and data from publicly available information - to create its software. Facial recognition relies on artificial intelligence. It needs to study faces. And only the government - the DVLA etc - and social networking companies have access to a lot of faces."

"Prisma Labs has already gotten into trouble for accidentally generating nude and cartoonishly sexualised images - including those of children - despite a "no nudes" and "adults only" policy. Prisma Lab's CEO and co-founder Andrey Usoltsev told TechCrunch this behaviour only happened if the AI was intentionally provoked to create this type of content - which represents a breach of terms against its use. "If an individual is determined to engage in harmful behavior, any tool would have the potential to become a weapon," he said."

"WHEN 14-YEAR-OLD MOLLY Russell died in 2017, her cell phone contained graphic images of self-harm, an email roundup of "depression pins you might like," and advice on concealing mental illness from loved ones. Investigators initially ruled the British teen's death a suicide. But almost five years later, a British coroner's court has reversed the findings. Now, they claim that Russell died "from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content"-and the algorithms themselves are on notice."

"Getty points to images produced by Stable Diffusion which contain its copyright watermark, suggesting that Stable Diffusion has ingested and is reproducing copyrighted material without permission (Stability AI has not yet commented publicly on the lawsuit). The same level of evidence is harder to come by when examining ChatGPT's text output, but there is no doubt that it has been trained on copyrighted material. OpenAI will be hoping that its text generation is covered by "fair use", a provision in copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material for "transformative" purposes. That idea will probably one day be tested in court."

"They still have far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it - making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing. But the basic existence of that technology is years old, at this point. And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal - not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it."

"The CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for creating artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E 2, said "regulation of AI is essential" as he testified in his first appearance in front of the US Congress. The apocalypse isn't coming. We must resist cynicism and fear about AI Stephen Marche Stephen Marche Read more Speaking to the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, Sam Altman said he supported regulatory guardrails for the technology that would enable the benefits of artificial intelligence while minimizing the harms. "We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models," Altman said in his prepared remarks."

"Next year's elections in Britain and the US could be marked by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, experts have warned, as generated images, text and deepfake videos go viral at the behest of swarms of AI-powered propaganda bots. Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington this week that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users."

"It shows rapid technological advances are allowing governments and political actors to distort reality, and fake content is easier to publish than ever before. "The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information," the report said. "The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself." Artificial intelligence was "wreaking further havoc on the media world", the report said, with AI tools "digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability". This is not just written AI content but visual, too. High-definition images that appear to show real people can be generated in seconds."

"This article discusses the legal implications of a novel phenomenon, namely, digital reincarnations of deceased persons, sometimes known as post-mortem avatars, deepfakes, replicas, holographs, or chatbots. To elide these multiple names, we use the term 'ghostbots'. The piece is an early attempt to discuss the potential social and individual harms, roughly grouped around notions of privacy (including post-mortem privacy), property, personal data and reputation, arising from ghostbots, how they are regulated and whether they need to be adequately regulated further. For reasons of space and focus, the article does not deal with copyright implications, fraud, consumer protection, tort, product liability, and pornography laws, including the non-consensual use of intimate images ('revenge porn'). This paper focuses on law, although we fully acknowledge and refer to the role of philosophy and ethics in this domain."

"Musicians are therefore worried - about being made to perform material they otherwise wouldn't, or being usurped by a fantasy. "I can't help but think that I can be easily replaced," says Flora Rose, a singer-songwriter on TikTok. "I'm spending months crafting my debut EP, [and meanwhile] people can make tracks in one click." When it comes to the arts, AI tends to provoke horror or ridicule - as when an AI photograph won a major photography competition, or when ChatGPT declared young adult weepie The Fault in Our Stars "one of the best books of all time". In February, the lawyer behind a lawsuit on behalf of visual artists whose work was being used to generate AI art called any generative image "an infringing derivative work"."

"Carolan, who is 18 and has just completed an art foundation course in Cardiff, decided architecture would be a safer path to follow. "It feels like it will be a more secure degree. Lots of psychology goes into architecture," he says. "You need to understand the core of what you're doing." He is doubtful that images made by artificial intelligence will replace the art exhibited in galleries, but he worries that commercial projects previously requiring a team of artists may in the future need only one to work with AI and neaten up the final product. "The options will probably get limited as time goes on. Personally, I'd find it a bit depressing if there wasn't a human element, but whether or not we'd notice I'm not sure. I always thought things like art would be one of the last things robots would be able to do.""

"After lunch at a friend's house, his host motioned to him to observe his 11-year-old son, who "walked to the couch and lay on his side. With his arm extended in front of him cradling his phone, he… went vacant. For the next hour, he was comatose. No signs of life other than his open eyes and an occasional finger swipe. 'We have to make him stop, pull him out, every time,' his dad said. My head filled with images of opium dens in China. Something about the stillness, the lying on his side." There are two insights to be derived from this domestic scene. The first is that the addictive properties of social media have been ratcheted up a further notch. In metaphorical terms, if Instagram and YouTube dispense marijuana, then TikTok provides "digital crack cocaine", as Forbes magazine once colourfully expressed it."

"This is the broad goal of a new field known as embodied AI, and Li's not the only one embracing it. It overlaps with robotics, since robots can be the physical equivalent of embodied AI agents in the real world, and reinforcement learning - which has always trained an interactive agent to learn using long-term rewards as incentive. But Li and others think embodied AI could power a major shift from machines learning straightforward abilities, like recognizing images, to learning how to perform complex humanlike tasks with multiple steps, such as making an omelet."

"This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt."

"Although disinformation has been extensively discussed as a powerful weapon employed by state and non-state actors, especially given the quick rise of AI tools capable of generating fabricated texts, sounds, and moving or still images,"

"In the future, it may be possible to guard against this kind of photo misuse through technical means. For example, future AI image generators might be required by law to embed invisible watermarks into their outputs so that they can be read later, and people will know they're fakes. But people will need to be able to read the watermarks easily (and be educated on how they work) for that to have any effect. Even so, will it matter if an embarrassing fake photo of a kid shared with an entire school has an invisible watermark? The damage will have already been done."

"And he emphatically doesn't see the process of building an AI image as dehumanised, or even one in which the human is sidelined. "I don't see it as a threat to creativity. For me, it really is setting me free. All the boundaries I had in the past - material boundaries, budgets - no longer matter. And for the first time in history, the older generation has an advantage, because AI is a knowledge accelerator. Two thirds of the prompts are only good if you have knowledge and skills, when you know how photography works, when you know art history. This is something that a 20-year-old can't do.""