Author: Kate Knibbs
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Neo-Nazi Madness: Metas Top AI Lawyer on Why He Fired the Company
He’s not a famous name in the wider world, but copyright lawyer Mark Lemley is equal parts revered and feared within certain tech circles. TechDirt recently described him as a “Lebron James/Michael Jordan”-level legal thinker. A professor at Stanford, counsel at an IP-focused law firm in the Bay Area, and one of the 10 most-cited
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This New AI Search Engine Has a Gimmick: Humans Answering Questions
On top of that, he claims that Pearl is significantly less likely to provide misinformation than many other AI search engines—which he believes are likely to deal with “a tidal wave” of lawsuits based on bad answers they give. “Those other players are building amazing technologies. I call them Ferraris or Lamborghinis,” Kurtzig says. “We’re
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That Sports News Story You Clicked on Could Be AI Slop
Next time you’re checking sports news online, double-check the URL. For instance, a headline like “Red Sox Urged to Risk Passing on Alex Bregman in Favor of $427 Million Superstar” looks ordinary enough—and it seems, at first glance, to come from BBC Sports. But on closer inspection you may be on a knock-off called “BBCSportss,”
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Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal
Meta just lost a major fight in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors suing the company for copyright infringement over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated
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A Book App Used AI to Roast Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead
Fable, a popular social media app that describes itself as a haven for “bookworms and bingewatchers,” created an AI-powered end-of-year summary feature recapping what books users read in 2024. It was meant to be playful and fun, but some of the recaps took on an oddly combative tone. Writer Danny Groves’ summary for example, asked
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Every AI Copyright Lawsuit in the US, Visualized
In May 2020, the media and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters sued a small legal AI startup called Ross Intelligence, alleging that it had violated US copyright law by reproducing materials from Westlaw, Thomson Reuters’ legal research platform. As the pandemic raged, the lawsuit hardly registered outside the small world of nerds obsessed with copyright rules.
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Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft
Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. The dataset was created by Harvard’s newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of
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OnlyFans Models Are Using AI Impersonators to Keep Up With Their DMs
One of the more persistent concerns in the age of AI is that the robots will take our jobs. The extent to which this fear is founded remains to be seen, but we’re already witnessing some level of replacement in certain fields. Even niche occupations are in jeopardy. For example, the world of OnlyFans chatters
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Yes, That Viral LinkedIn Post You Read Was Probably AI-Generated
AI-generated writing is now all over the internet. The introduction of automated prose can sometimes change a website’s character, like when once beloved publications get purchased and overhauled into AI content mills. Other times, however, it’s harder to argue that AI really changed anything. For example, look at LinkedIn. The Microsoft-owned social media site for
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New York Times Says OpenAI Erased Potential Lawsuit Evidence
Lawsuits are never exactly a lovefest, but the copyright fight between The New York Times and both OpenAI and Microsoft is getting especially contentious. This week, the Times alleged that OpenAI’s engineers inadvertently erased data the paper’s team spent more than 150 hours extracting as potential evidence. OpenAI was able to recover much of the