Media & Entertainment

At a dinner party the other night, a very accomplished business person told a story about how he and his wife were certain that their devices were listening to their conversations. “I was talking to my wife about a pair of designer shoes that she wanted to purchase, and not 10 minutes later while she was doing some online research for work, she saw an ad for that exact pair of shoes. She hadn’t searched for the shoes; the ad just appeared. Clearly, our computers or our phones are listening.” Some people nodded in agreement, and others began to chime in. Continue Reading →

CNN obtained an internal memo to Meta's (formerly Facebook's) content moderation team that noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.” The memo was in direct response to requests for guidance from Meta's internal and external fact checkers. Continue Reading →

Bloomberg is reporting that Apple’s next major product – a mixed-reality headset – is set to arrive next year. The headset itself is likely to be priced between $2,000 and $3,000, packing a Mac-level M2 chip, more than 10 cameras placed inside and outside of the device, and the highest-resolution displays ever featured in a mass-market headset. Continue Reading →

DeviantArt, the "largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts," announced DreamUp, an AI-powered text-to-image generator service powered by Stable Diffusion. The new service has seriously angered some members of the community, so much so that DeviantArt announced that all hosted images will be "automatically labeled as NOT authorized for use in AI datasets." Continue Reading →

When dealing with evil robots or rogue AI, one of the most common science fiction plot devices is for the human hero to do or think of something that the machine couldn't understand – something only a human would do. It's about as cliché and formulaic as cliché and formulaic gets. Here's a plot twist. Continue Reading →

I've been joking that my blog has become the "Elon Channel," where it's "All Elon, All the Time." In case you missed it, the organization we knew as Twitter is gone. It took Elon less than a week to fire half the staff and demolish years of goodwill. All that remains is a tech stack and a skeleton crew. Oh, and the threat of thermonuclear name & shame. Continue Reading →

Holly+, the AI-generated digital twin of experimental musician Holly Herdon, does a pretty good job singing "Jolene," Dolly Parton's country classic. Continue Reading →

Elon Musk recently wrote, "Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences," he followed with, "Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world." Twitter cannot serve two masters. So, which will it be, "a free-for-all hellscape," or "the most respected advertising platform in the world." Continue Reading →

In an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event, Disney CEO Bob Chapek said the company is working on a way to tailor experiences based on how you interact with its physical and digital offerings: “When you’re in a park, we should know what your viewing habits are on Disney Plus.” Continue Reading →

Shutterstock (a leading stock image company) has partnered with OpenAI to sell AI-generated artwork. Craig Peters, CEO of Getty Images (another leading stock image company), believes firms racing to sell AI art could step into illegal territory: "I think that’s dangerous. I don’t think it’s responsible. I think it could be illegal." Continue Reading →