August 2023 – Page 2

AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge

United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created. Nobody really knows how things will shake out around US copyright law and artificial intelligence, but the court cases have been piling up. Sarah Silverman and two other authors filed suit against OpenAI and Meta earlier this year over their models’ data scraping practices, for instance, while another lawsuit by programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick alleges that data scraping by Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI amounted to software piracy.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court

Your Next Lyft Journey Will Be Full of Ads

Regular users of Lyft need to prepare themselves for a barrage of ads hitting the ride-hailing service's app this week. It's hard to believe someone would look at the Lyft app enough to make ads a viable money-making exercise. However, according to the company's chief business officer, Zach Greenberger, Lyft users check the app an average of nine times per ride. Combine that with detailed (anonymized) user data, and the potential for targeted advertising to generate additional revenue is there.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/your-next-lyft-journey-will-be-full-of-ads

Slack’s biggest redesign ever tries to tame the chaos of your workday

The overarching goal of the new design, Weiss says, was to give users more context and more focus. “We think of these as modes of work that you have,” he says. “I catch up on everything that’s going on, I respond to inbound, I triage and respond to all the activity, and then I go through my to-do list of what I need to follow up on — that’s what this is organizing, is modes of working rather than types of objects.” For more chaotic, everything-all-at-once Slack users, Slack has also been reworking its multi-windowing system so you can have multiple views open at a time. It all adds up to not quite a total reorganization of Slack but at least a slightly different way of thinking about the app. Before, it was two things: the list of all your stuff on the side and whatever you’re currently engaged with in the middle. Now, there’s a third organizational layer in between, aiming to sort and filter all the stuff you care about in a few different ways. “It was about actually putting all the things that we’ve built over time into a sensible, comprehensible place,” Weiss says. It’s going to look and feel really different to a lot of users at first, but Weiss is confident users will like the new tools. And if the pitch doesn’t resonate, well, that’s why Slack rolls out new products slowly — and has been testing it for a while.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23824562/slack-redesign-app-dms-activity-later

Zoom denies training AI on calls without consent

Zoom has updated its terms of service after a backlash over fears that it trained its artificial intelligence (AI) models on customer calls. Talking to the BBC, before the terms of service were updated, data protection specialist Robert Bateman said: "The terms appeared to give the service provider a lot of freedom to use data generated by its users for many different purposes." He said that while there was a question mark over the risks that could arise, "alarm bells should ring when you encounter broad contractual provisions like these".
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66430429