Google quietly paying journalists to generate articles using unreleased AI

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1. Google quietly paying journalists to generate articles using unreleased AI

Google is paying select publishers to test a secretive AI platform designed to produce news articles. The in-beta AI tool allows under-resourced publishers to create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets.

Google claims the effort is still in its "early stages" and defended the AI as a way to help news organizations, especially smaller publishers. However, the tool feels more like yet another AI-generated nail in its coffin, as it integrates journalism-regurgitating AI into its search algorithms.

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2. OpenAI says New York Times 'hacked' ChatGPT to build copyright lawsuit

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss parts of the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against it, arguing that the newspaper "hacked" its chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial-intelligence systems to generate misleading evidence. OpenAI said the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through "deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI's terms of use."

The Times is among several copyright owners that have sued tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work in AI training, including groups of authors, visual artists, and music publishers.

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3. Alibaba’s new AI system ‘EMO’ creates realistic talking and singing videos from photos

Alibaba's Institute for Intelligent Computing has developed an artificial intelligence system called "EMO" that can animate a single portrait photo and generate videos of a person talking or singing in a lifelike fashion. The system uses a direct audio-to-video synthesis approach, bypassing the need for intermediate 3D models or facial landmarks.

The researchers trained the model on a dataset of over 250 hours of talking head videos curated from speeches, films, TV shows, and singing performances. EMO significantly outperforms existing methods on metrics measuring video quality, identity preservation, and expressiveness.

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4. Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader

Particle.news, a new startup led by former Twitter engineers, is offering a personalized, multi-perspective news reading experience that leverages AI to summarize news and fairly compensates authors and publishers. The startup, founded by former Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour, and co-founder Marcel Molina, aims to make it easier to keep up with news using AI.

The platform offers a demo of its technology for logged-out users via its website, where articles are featured along with their summary, timestamp, and sources they draw from. The end product will likely differ as Particle is launching its private beta for testing and intends to offer a mobile app in the future.

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5. Willy Wonka Experience Glasgow: a metaphor for the overpromises of AI?

The Willy Wonka Experience Glasgow, an immersive children's theatrical experience in Scotland, was advertised with AI-generated images as more wondrous than it was. The event's massive discrepancy with its ads led to police calls and attendees demanding refunds of the £35-a-head tickets. 

The original poster called for AI ads to be regulated. Since then, obsessed X users have discovered that the man behind the event, Billy Coull, also appears to be using AI to produce low-quality self-published books on Amazon and that the Wonka Experience Glasgow performers were given a script that appears to have been AI generated.

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