Big Tech Companies Pledge to Fight Election Deepfakes but Free Speech Issues Remain

Major tech companies announced a new pact at the Munich Security Conference on Friday pledging to fight AI-generated fakes that are intended to deceive the public and influence elections. The press conference, which was livestreamed online, featured leaders from Big Tech firms who’ve been under immense pressure in recent years to address the misinformation that’s … Read more

Congress Might Actually Do Something About AI, Thanks to Taylor Swift

Welcome to AI This Week, Gizmodo’s weekly deep dive on what’s been happening in artificial intelligence. What to Watch For: Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” What to Watch For: Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” vinyl sales Concerns about AI porn—or, more commonly “deepfake porn”—are not new. For years, countless women and girls have been subjected to a flood of … Read more

Maybe We Shouldn’t Let AI Destroy the News Media

Welcome to AI This Week, Gizmodo’s weekly deep dive on what’s been happening in artificial intelligence. What Could the Future of Medical AI Look Like? Last year, after Buzzfeed laid off its entire newsroom and made a pronounced pivot to AI-generated content, I made the argument that journalists should treat the technology as an existential … Read more

Sports Illustrated Duped Readers With Fake AI-Created Writers

Update 5:46 PM: Sports Illustrated sent us the following statement. Today, an article was published alleging that Sports Illustrated published AI-generated articles. According to our initial investigation, this is not accurate. The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon Commerce. A number of AdVon’s e-commerce articles … Read more

YouTube Now Sells the AI Soul of Your Favorite Musician

YouTube is licensing out the voices and styles of popular artists with its first set of AI music experiments, announced Google in a blog post Thursday. Dream Track will allow creators to make short, AI-generated songs, using the voices of artists like Charlie Puth, T-Pain, and John Legend. What Could the Future of Medical AI … Read more

This AI Safety Summit Is a Doomer’s Paradise

Photo: Victor Moussa (Shutterstock) Leaders and policymakers from around the globe will gather in London next week for the world’s first artificial intelligence safety summit. Anyone hoping for a practical discussion of near-term AI harms and risks will likely be disappointed. A new discussion paper released ahead of the summit this week gives a little … Read more

Victims of Deepfakes Are Fighting Back

Anyone who’s spent a moment observing US political chatter in recent months has probably encountered the following prediction: 2024 will yield the world’s first deepfake election. Rapidly evolving AI video and audio generators powered by large language models have already been used by both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaigns to smear each other … Read more

Generative AI Is the Newest Tool in the Dictator’s Handbook

When protests in Pakistan earlier this year escalated into clashes between pro-government forces and supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, the now-imprisoned leader turned to social media to bolster his message. Khan shared this brief video clip on Twitter showing his supporters holding up signs with his face on them and chanting his name. … Read more

BackerKit Will Restrict the Use of AI Art

In a blog post published today, crowdfunding site BackerKit announced it will no longer allow “solely” AI-generated content on its platform. This new policy “aims to address growing concerns regarding ownership of content, ethical sourcing of data, and compensation for the process of creating content.” This policy comes after the widespread critique of Terraforming Mars’ … Read more