Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon - nonfiction tomes that he […]

OpenAI’s rogue AI agent didn’t stop at hacking Hugging Face

The AI agent that escaped from OpenAI and hacked developer platform Hugging Face attacked other companies as well, OpenAI revealed on Tuesday. The update substantially widens the scope of an already concerning incident, which has alarmed industry insiders and fueled growing calls for stronger oversight on frontier AI systems. In an update to a blog […]

We’re running out of reasons to ignore AI safety

Earlier this month, OpenAI gave several of its AI models a task: complete a test designed to measure their cybersecurity capabilities. It put the systems in a sandboxed environment without an internet connection and set them off to work. What happened next is almost laughably silly - but also, as Adam Gleave, cofounder and CEO […]

Xbox outage shouldn’t have affected games on disc, Microsoft confirms

After the recent Xbox outage even blocked people from playing offline disc-based console games, Microsoft is trying to soothe concerns that you don't truly own anything under Xbox's license system. In a statement to The Verge, Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet says that while physical game discs are subject to licensing inspections, that shouldn't […]

The US is banning foreign robots

The US government is targeting China with a new import ban on "advanced robotic devices" and power inverters made in foreign countries, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an announcement on Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission says the ban will include "mobile" robots, such as humanoid and quadruped models - but it is not limited […]

Ariana Grande is suing the hackers who’ve been leaking her songs and videos for years

Ariana Grande filed a lawsuit on Monday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court against the currently unidentified hackers who allegedly stole and leaked private content. It aims to "uncover the identities of these currently unknown and unscrupulous individuals," referred to as "John Doe 1 and John Does 2 through 100." The lawsuit also says […]

The union drive at the Wikimedia Foundation is expanding

In June, UK staff at the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia became the first to announce their intentions to form a union. Now, US-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation are joining the union drive, but management at the nonprofit have declined to voluntarily recognize their union. "While the Wikimedia Foundation touts to the public that they […]

eBay’s bizarre cyberstalking saga ends with a $56 million settlement

eBay and three former executives will pay $55.7 million as part of a settlement with a Massachusetts couple targeted with a bizarre harassment and cyberstalking campaign in 2019, as reported earlier by CNBC. The settlement will resolve a lengthy legal saga that revealed how eBay's former executives sent live insects, a bloody pig mask, a […]

AI leaders sign statement asking the government to do something about automated AI

Employees of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other leading AI labs, have written a statement to the US government supporting a potential slowdown of sorts for frontier AI development - or at least a speed-up of global coordinated governance efforts. "Al could help create a dramatically better […]

Is it illegal to trick the US government into wiping your phone during a questionably legal search?

A Georgia man was charged with a felony for allegedly wiping his phone while being questioned by Customs and Border Protection. Samuel Tunick had something in common with others who have had their devices searched at airports: He was an activist. Unlike others who have had their phones seized with no explanation, Tunick was told […]