Social Media

Meta is rolling out AI-powered upgrades to its social platforms. Meta announced a chat interface, image generator, and celebrity tie-ins for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. The new capabilities take advantage of LLaMa 2 and an unnamed image generator, presumably CM3leon.

A new regulatory body created by the European Union promises to peer inside the black boxes that drive social media recommendations. The European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT) will study the algorithms that identify, categorize...

Tech-savvy music fans who are hungry for new recordings aren’t waiting for their favorite artists to make them. Social media networks exploded last week with AI-driven facsimiles of chart-topping musicians.

Developers of language models will have to pay for access to troves of text data that they previously got for free. The discussion platform Reddit and question-and-answer site Stack Overflow announced plans to protect their data from being used to train large language models.

What does an entrepreneur do after co-founding one of the world’s top social networks? Apply the lessons learned to distributing hard news. Kevin Systerom and Mike Krieger, who co-founded Instagram, launched Artifact, an app that uses reinforcement learning to recommend news articles...

Meet the Romanian government’s automated political adviser. The Prime Minister of Romania launched ION, a system that summarizes and organizes public comments for cabinet ministers, Politico.eu reported.

Tired of rap battles composed by ChatGPT? Get ready for the next wave of AI-generated fun and profit. Cloned voices are taking center stage in productions by upstart creators and monied corporations alike.

Microsoft aimed to reinvent web search. Instead, it showed that even the most advanced text generators remain alarmingly unpredictable. In the two weeks since Microsoft integrated an OpenAI chatbot with its Bing search engine, users have reported...

An experiment in using chatbots to dispense mental-health counseling raised questions about ethics.

Pictures produced by AI went viral, stirred controversies, and drove investments. A new generation of text-to-image generators inspired a flood of experimentation, transforming text descriptions into mesmerizing artworks and photorealistic fantasies.

A blockbuster app produces sexualized avatar images, even when the original portraits were safe for work.

Members of the AI community tested the limits of the ChatGPT chatbot, unleashing an avalanche of tweets that made for sometimes-great, sometimes-troubling entertainment.

Artists are rebelling against AI-driven imitation. DeviantArt, an online community where artists display and sell their work and marketplace for digital art, launched DreamUp, a text-to-image generator that aims to help artists thwart attempts to imitate their styles or works.

United States colleges tracked activists using a natural language processing system intended to monitor their mental health.

As the United States (along with several other countries) gears up for general elections, AI is helping campaigns attract voters with increasing sophistication.