Technology

Eli Collins, a vice president of product management at Google DeepMind, first demoed generative AI video tools for the company’s board of directors back in 2022. Despite the model’s slow speed, pricey cost to operate, and sometimes off-kilter outputs, he says it was an eye-opening moment for them to see fresh video clips generated from a random prompt.

Now, just a few years later, Google has announced plans for a tool inside of the YouTube app that will allow anyone to generate AI video clips, using the company’s Veo model, and directly post them as part of YouTube Shorts. “Looking forward to 2025, we're going to let users create stand-alone video clips and shorts,” says Sarah Ali, a senior director of product management at YouTube. “They're going to be able to generate six-second videos from an open text prompt.” Ali says the update could help creators hunting for footage to fill out a video or trying to envision something fantastical. She is adamant that the Veo AI tool is not meant to replace creativity, but augment it.

Snapchat is reserving the right to put its users’ faces in ads, according to terms of service related to its “My Selfie” tool (formerly “AI Selfies”), which allows users and their friends to create AI-generated images trained on their selfies. 

Users have the option to opt out of this by toggling off a “feature” in the app called “See My Selfie in Ads,” but according to 404 Media’s testing this feature is on by default.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2963866

Archived link

• Research from Infyos has identified that companies accounting for 75 per cent of the global battery market have connections to one or more companies in the supply chain facing allegations of severe human rights abuses.

• Most of the allegations of severe human rights abuses involve companies mining and refining raw materials in China that end up in batteries globally, particularly in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China.

• “The relative opaqueness of battery supply chains and the complexity of supply chain legal requirements means current approaches like ESG audits are out of date and don’t comply with new regulations. Most battery manufacturers and their customers, including automotive companies and grid-scale battery energy storage developers, still don’t have complete supply chain oversight," says Sarah Montgomery, CEO & co-founder, Infyos.

• Supply chain changes are needed to eliminate widespread forced labour and child labour abuses occurring in the lithium-ion battery market, Infyos added.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills Tuesday to crack down on the use of artificial intelligence to create false images or videos in political ads ahead of the 2024 election. 

A new law, set to take effect immediately, makes it illegal to create and publish deepfakes related to elections 120 days before Election Day and 60 days thereafter. It also allows courts to stop distribution of the materials and impose civil penalties. 

“Safeguarding the integrity of elections is essential to democracy, and it’s critical that we ensure AI is not deployed to undermine the public’s trust through disinformation -– especially in today’s fraught political climate,” Newsom said in a statement. “These measures will help to combat the harmful use of deepfakes in political ads and other content, one of several areas in which the state is being proactive to foster transparent and trustworthy AI.”

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2958203

There is an interesting study (May 2024), also linked in the article: When Online Content Disappears

Historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days.

However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy – many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion.

"The risks are manifold. Not just that technology may fail, but that certainly happens. But more important, that institutions fail, or companies go out of business. News organisations are gobbled up by other news organisations, or more and more frequently, they're shut down," says Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a tool that collects and stores snapshots of websites for posterity. There are numerous incentives to put content online, he says, but there's little pushing companies to maintain it over the long term.

Despite the Internet Archive's achievements thus far, the organisation and others like it face financial threats, technical challenges, cyberattacks and legal battles from businesses who dislike the idea of freely available copies of their intellectual property. And as recent court losses show, the project of saving the internet could be just as fleeting as the content it's trying to protect.

"More and more of our intellectual endeavours, more of our entertainment, more of our news, and more of our conversations exist only in a digital environment," Graham says. "That environment is inherently fragile."

• VOA.

The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history.

Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above the list of links they usually see in results. As first spotted by a user on Twitter, when people searched for “Hieronymus Bosch” on Google, it included a couple of images from the real painting, but the first and largest image they saw was an AI-generated version of it.