wired.com
Last week, OpenAI and the German media conglomerate Axel Springer signed a multi-year licensing agreement. It allows OpenAI to incorporate articles from Axel Springer–owned outlets like Business Insider and Politico into its products, including ChatGPT. Although the deal centers on using journalistic work, reporters whose stories will be shared as part of the agreement were not consulted about the deal beforehand.
Four Business Insider employees told WIRED that they found out about the AI deal a…
4 months ago
wired.com
It’s hard to find something pithy to say about 2023, a year of dissonant extremes, when wildfires devoured Canadian forests, Twitter withered into X, the Titan submersible imploded into infamy, Silicon Valley’s power players rejoiced over the rise of generative AI, scientists cheered Crispr treatment breakthroughs, peace activists became terrorist-attack victims, and the world despaired over the thousands of children killed in Gaza. It’s not a tidy time. It is, frequently, a painful one.
Appropr…
4 months ago
wired.com
The internet sucks now. Once a playground fueled by experimentation and freedom and connection, it’s a flimsy husk of what it was, all merriment and serendipity leached from our screens by vile capitalist forces. Everything is too commercialized. We commodified the self, then we commodified robots to impersonate the self, and now they’re taking our damn jobs. We live in diminished and degrading times. I miss when memes were funny. I miss Vine. I miss Gawker. I miss old Twitter. Blogs—those were…
4 months ago
wired.com
A study analyzed 48,404 requests for “advance provision” abortion medications made to Aid Access, an Austria-based nonprofit offering telehealth abortion services in the US, between the beginning of September 2021 and the end of April 2023.
Most doctors in the US do not let patients order abortion pills before they’re pregnant. “It’s definitely something that’s never been standard practice here,” says Abigail Aiken, the principal investigator of the Self-Managed Abortion Needs Project (Project S…
4 months ago
wired.com
When access to reproductive health care is threatened in the United States, a growing number of women stock up on abortion medications to keep on hand in case they need the pills in the future, new research shows.
A study analyzed 48,404 requests for “advance provision” abortion medications made to Aid Access, an Austria-based nonprofit offering telehealth abortion services in the US, between the beginning of September 2021 and the end of April 2023.
Most doctors in the US do not let patients or…
4 months ago
wired.com
On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the following prompt: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a vintage Disney style, black and white. He is dripping all over with white gel.”
There’s no polite way to describe what this prompt conjured from the AI image generator. It looks, very much, like Mickey Mouse is drenched in ejaculate.
At the start of every year, a crop of cultural works enters the public domain in the United States. When copyright expires on particularly beloved characters, people get ex…
4 months ago
wired.com
When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant’s ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks.
Mitchell learned that searching Amazon…
3 months ago
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Do AI companies need to pay for the training data that powers their generative AI systems? The question is hotly contested in Silicon Valley and in a wave of lawsuits levied against tech behemoths like Meta, Google, and OpenAI. In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need to cough up.
Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their w…
3 months ago
wired.com
Ed Newton-Rex says generative AI has an ethics problem. He ought to know, because he used to be part of the fast-growing industry. Newton-Rex was TikTok’s head AI designer and then an executive at Stability AI until he quit in disgust in November over the company’s stance on collecting training data.
After his high-profile departure, Newton-Rex threw himself into conversation after conversation about what building AI ethically would look like in practice. “It struck me that there are a lot of pe…
3 months ago
wired.com
As media companies haggle licensing deals with artificial intelligence powerhouses like OpenAI that are hungry for training data, they’re also throwing up a digital blockade. New data shows that over 88 percent of top-ranked news outlets in the US now block web crawlers used by artificial intelligence companies to collect training data for chatbots and other AI projects. One sector of the news business is a glaring outlier, though: Right-wing media lags far behind their liberal counterparts when…
3 months ago
wired.com
Last week, some voters in New Hampshire received an AI-generated robocall impersonating President Joe Biden, telling them not to vote in the state’s primary election. It’s not clear who was responsible for the call, but two separate teams of audio experts tell WIRED it was likely created using technology from voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs.
ElevenLabs markets its AI tools for uses like audiobooks and video games; it recently achieved “unicorn” status by raising $80 million at a $1.1 billion va…
3 months ago
wired.com
What a heinous month for the media. Almost every day, a publication announces layoffs or shuts down. Sports Illustrated just let go almost all of its staff after weathering an embarrassing scandal about AI-generated articles. It’s unclear what the desiccated magazine’s future holds, but the sad fate of another formerly great outlet offers a preview of what may await fallen media properties.
In 2018, the indie women’s website The Hairpin stopped publishing, along with its sister site The Awl. Thi…
3 months ago
wired.com
“I’m not a fan of AI,” Nebojša Vujinović Vujo says. The admission surprises me: He has built a bustling business by snapping up abandoned news outlets and other websites and stuffing them full of algorithmically generated articles. Although he accepts that his model rankles writers and readers alike, he says he’s simply embracing an unstoppable new tool—large language models—in the same way people rationally swapped horse-drawn buggies for gas-powered vehicles. “I hate cars. They’re making my pl…
2 months ago
wired.com
It’s a make-or-break moment. Remember when the live-audio app Clubhouse went from the most hyped-up social startup when it was hard to snag an invite, to a big old bust when anyone could join? Bluesky has managed to maintain a steady buzz so far, outlasting other up-and-coming microblogging platforms like Pebble and Parler. This week it scored 1.2 million new sign-ups in just two days after opening to all. But although Bluesky has won over some extremely-online communities, in part through a dec…
2 months ago
wired.com
In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa. He clicked, and read. The story was garbled and devoid of useful information—and so were all the other finance-themed posts filling the site, which had absolutely nothing to do with…
about 2 months ago
wired.com
Google is taking action against algorithmically generated spam. The search engine giant just announced upcoming changes, including a revamped spam policy, designed in part to keep AI clickbait out of its search results.
“It sounds like it’s going to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Google,” says Lily Ray, senior director of SEO at the marketing agency Amsive. “It could change everything.”
In a blog post, Google claims the change will reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content” in sea…
about 2 months ago
wired.com
There’s a whole new way to get rich on the internet—at least according to a rush of YouTube tutorials touting the money to be made using AI to generate videos for kids. Searching for how to create kids content or channels on YouTube now pulls up tutorials offering roadmaps for creating simple animations in just a few hours. They advocate use of tools like ChatGPT, voice synthesis services ElevenLabs and Murf AI, and the generative AI features within Adobe Express to automate scripting as well as…
about 1 month ago
wired.com
YouTube has updated its rulebook for the era of deepfakes. Starting today, anyone uploading video to the platform must disclose certain uses of synthetic media, including generative AI, so viewers know what they’re seeing isn’t real. YouTube says it applies to “realistic” altered media such as “making it appear as if a real building caught fire” or swapping “the face of one individual with another’s.”
The new policy shows YouTube taking steps that could help curb the spread of AI-generated misin…
about 1 month ago
wired.com
A group of researchers backed by the French government have released what is thought to be the largest AI training dataset composed entirely of text that is in the public domain. And the nonprofit Fairly Trained announced that it has awarded its first certification for a large language model built without copyright infringement, showing that technology like that behind ChatGPT can be built in a different way to the AI industry’s contentious norm.
“There’s no fundamental reason why someone couldn…
about 1 month ago
wired.com
For the past few months, Morten Blichfeldt Andersen has spent many hours scouring OpenAI’s GPT Store. Since it launched in January, the marketplace for bespoke bots has filled up with a deep bench of useful and sometimes quirky AI tools. Cartoon generators spin up New Yorker–style illustrations and vivid anime stills. Programming and writing assistants offer shortcuts for crafting code and prose. There’s also a color analysis bot, a spider identifier, and a dating coach called RizzGPT. Yet Blich…
15 days ago
wired.com
Aruba has long been a special place for Stacy Argondizzo. For years, her family has vacationed on the tiny Caribbean Island every July. More recently it’s been more than just a place to take a break from her work as a digital archivist—becoming wholly a part of that work.
A project Argondizzo galvanized comes to full fruition this week. The Internet Archive is now home to the Aruba Collection, which hosts digitized versions of Aruba’s National Library, National Archives, and other institutions i…
12 days ago
