Tech News – Page 88 – by Arlin Schaffel

AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart

The concern is that machine-generated content has to be balanced with a lot of human review and would overwhelm lesser-known wikis with bad content. While AI generators are useful for writing believable, human-like text, they are also prone to including erroneous information, and even citing sources and academic papers which don’t exist. This often results in text summaries which seem accurate, but on closer inspection are revealed to be completely fabricated.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/ai-is-tearing-wikipedia-apart

Once valued at $5.7 billion, Vice may now be headed for bankruptcy

Vice started as a punk zine in Montreal in the 1990s, expanding into a global media brand that included a print magazine, a vast digital content operation, a TV and film production studio, and its own TV network, Vice TV. It racked up prestigious journalism awards with its flagship program, Vice News Tonight. Vice’s brash reporting style helped define a new era of news, starting in the mid-2000s, that courted a younger audience, while drawing hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from establishment media companies, including Disney and Fox. The company, however, has failed to turn a profit for years, losing money and resorting to successive rounds of staff layoffs.
https://qz.com/once-valued-at-5-7-billion-vice-may-now-be-headed-for-1850394233

Here’s why you have to deal with so many annoying webPs now

The magical(ly crappy) thing about webPs is that they seem to be simultaneously ubiquitous and also barely supported. Countless times I've tried to upload a webP to Twitter or PC Gamer's content management system only to have it rejected. Photoshop didn't officially support webP until February 2022.
https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-why-you-have-to-deal-with-so-many-annoying-webps-now/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR3mrq9pR3WQ8DG6WETVXuHkxhrq0u0LEeoGKuj1I-PrK7HtQZicgT0XvFU#lh4a7t6pr58zynm7m3i

Siri is being left behind – and Apple knows it

According to “more than three dozen former Apple employees who worked in its AI and machine learning groups,” Apple’s attempts to improve Siri have been hampered by “organizational dysfunction and a lack of ambition,” with the software now “widely derided” by many still working at the company. According to “more than three dozen former Apple employees who worked in its AI and machine learning groups,” Apple’s attempts to improve Siri have been hampered by “organizational dysfunction and a lack of ambition,” with the software now “widely derided” by many still working at the company.
https://www.techradar.com/news/siri-is-being-left-behind-and-apple-knows-it

The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going to Break Large Parts of the Internet

If you want to test a free platform’s ability to protect content over the long haul, here’s a fun test: Upload an image, post it somewhere, then wait a decade to see if it sticks around. Odds are, it won’t. Which is why, perhaps, it’s not totally surprising to learn that Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously—the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn’t been actively removed (and is incredibly popular). Until now.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3vkq/the-imgur-apocalypse-is-going-to-break-large-parts-of-the-internet

Snapchat introduces AI chatbot to mixed reviews

The feature, dubbed My AI, is pinned to the top of users' chat feeds and only paid subscribers can remove it. Snap called My AI "an experimental, friendly, chatbot" which can perform tasks such as answering questions, offering advice, or planning trips. A Snap spokesperson told the BBC the "vast majority" of people with early access to My AI had been enjoying it, with millions of messages sent per day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65388258

Microsoft Edge caught leaking every website you visit to Bing

image via 9to5google.com

This week a Reddit user spotted that Microsoft’s Edge browser has been sending all visited URLs to “bingapis.com.” When users visit a URL on their browser, that data is sent to Bing for nearly all URLs. While there appears to be nothing malicious going on here, the issue has privacy implications as there’s no disclosure this is happening and it is enabled by default. In a statement, Microsoft confirmed that it is aware of these reports and that the company will take “appropriate action to address any issues,” but offered no explanation of why this is happening.
https://9to5google.com/2023/04/26/microsoft-edge-bing-urls/