Nightshade, a project from the University of Chicago, gives artists some recourse by “poisoning” image data, rendering it useless or disruptive to AI model training. Ben Zhao, a computer science professor who led the project, compared Nightshade to “putting hot sauce in your lunch so it doesn’t get stolen from the workplace fridge.”
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/26/nightshade-the-tool-that-poisons-data-gives-artists-a-fighting-chance-against-ai/
“The new orb is coming and the next iterations will look quite different,” Blania said during a fireside chat at a StrictlyVC event on Wednesday. He noted that he joined the company about four years ago and the Orb’s initial design predated his career at the company. Over the past seven days, more than 190,000 new accounts were created and about 3.13 million people total have signed up for Worldcoin, according to its website. “The thesis is very simple. We race toward billions of users as fast as we possibly can,” Blania said.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/worldcoin-to-launch-new-orb-to-make-its-eyeball-scanning-device-look-more-friendly/
BeReal, a rising social media app that emphasizes authenticity, is making its first outreach to brands and celebrities. Starting February 6, brands and celebrities will be able to sign up as “RealBrands” or “RealPeople,” and fans can watch them share behind the scenes moments from their lives that they might not share elsewhere.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/bereal-which-now-has-23m-daus-is-onboarding-brands-and-celebs/
Palworld is a new video game where players can capture knockoff Pokémon and put them to work in a factory manufacturing AR-15s. It sold 5 million copies in 3 days. Die hard Pokémon fans are angry online because they see Palworld as a cheap asset flip and they believe, without evidence, that Pocketpair used AI to create it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3m5nw/palworld-pokemon-game-ai-controversy
A “shocking” amount of the internet is machine-translated garbage, particularly in languages spoken in Africa and the Global South, a new study has found. Researchers at the Amazon Web Services AI lab found that over half of the sentences on the web have been translated into two or more languages, often with increasingly worse quality due to poor machine translation (MT), which they said raised “serious concerns” about the training of large language models.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3w4gw/a-shocking-amount-of-the-web-is-already-ai-translated-trash-scientists-determine
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Epic v. Apple began in 2020 after Epic implemented its own payment system for Fortnite’s virtual currency, bypassing Apple’s commission on in-app purchases. Apple banned Epic from its iOS App Store and Epic filed a lawsuit in response, claiming the App Store — and Apple’s overall walled-garden approach to iOS — violated US antitrust laws. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected most of Apple’s claims and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals largely affirmed the decision.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24039983/supreme-court-epic-apple-antitrust-case-rejected
“We’re not trying to kill your phone,” said CEO and founder Jesse Lyu on a call with press ahead of the Las Vegas tech show. “The phone is an entertainment device, but if you’re trying to get something done it’s not the highest efficiency machine. To arrange dinner with a colleague we needed four-five different apps to work together. Large language models are a universal solution for natural language, we want a universal solution for these services — they should just be able to understand you.”
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/09/can-a-striking-design-set-rabbits-r1-pocket-ai-apart-from-a-gaggle-of-virtual-assistants/