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

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image via theverge.com

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

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

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image via theverge.com

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

Twitter is being rebranded as X

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image via theverge.com

X.com now redirects to Twitter.com, following a tweet from Twitter owner Elon Musk today, and an “interim X logo” will replace the Twitter bird logo later today. Leading up to the change, Musk spent a lot of time tweeting about it.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/23/23804629/twitters-rebrand-to-x-may-actually-be-happening-soon

Google’s AI pitch is a recipe for email hell

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image via theverge.com

But Google’s onstage ideas were almost impressive in their ability to serve precisely none of writing’s core purposes. Its examples of Help me write calcify the worst tendencies of “professional” communications. They’re bland, bloated boilerplate that turns a human prompt into something that uses more words to say less.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/13/23719115/google-ai-help-me-write-communications-email

Speed Trap

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image via theverge.com

“[Google] came to us and said, the internet is broken, ads aren’t loading, blah blah, blah. We want to provide a better user experience to users by coming up with this clean standard,” says one magazine product executive. “My reaction was that the main problem is ads, so why don’t you fix the ads? They said they can’t fix the ads. It’s too hard.”

https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mobile-pages-search-publishers-lawsuit

Google announces the Pixel Fold

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image via theverge.com

We had expected to see it last year, but the Fold didn’t make the cut for I/O in 2022, and rumors about its launch haven’t slowed down in the year since. Google has focused on teaching Android developers to make their apps work on foldable devices and larger screens, which may pay off next week with the launch of this device and the new Pixel Tablet.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/4/23711353/google-pixel-fold-announced

Elon Musk removes Twitter’s ‘government-funded media’ labels after outlets flee the platform

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image via theverge.com

Twitter has removed the “government-funded” and “state-affiliated” labels that led several news outlets to stop tweeting on the platform. When asked why Twitter has dropped the labels, Elon Musk says it was a “suggestion” from Walter Isaacson, the author of his upcoming biography, according to NPR reporter Bobby Allyn. Neither NPR, PBS, nor CBC have said whether they will resume their activity on Twitter now that the labels are gone. In a statement provided to The Verge, CBC spokesperson Leon Mar says the organization is “reviewing this latest development and will leave our Twitter accounts on pause before taking any next steps.” NPR and PBS didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment, but we’ll update this article if we hear back.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/21/23692449/elon-musk-twitter-government-funded-media-labels-removed