Even as Apple Inc.’s shares have powered their way to a fresh record high, worries over cooling demand

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 23, 2023--

Apple employees will reportedly be restricted from using ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools. The

Heather Armstrong's haters say 'good riddance' and call the blogger selfish for killing herself

TL;DR: As of August 11, get this Apple iPad (6th gen) and Beats Flex Headphones

Due to billion-dollar losses in technical development, DAZN will stream Paul and Diaz's boxing match in virtual reality using Meta's Stadium platform

By Luc Cohen NEW YORK FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was grilled on Tuesday about what a U.S. prosecutor

Omegle, a popular website used to video chat with strangers, is shutting down after almost 15 years. The closure comes amid increasing criticism that the site endangered its users, with reports of child sexual abuse and other crime on the platform. Omegle allowed users to sign up and then be launched into a video chat with another stranger using the site. The two could chat for as long as they wished – until they ended that conversation and embarked on a new one. The app was launched in 2009, and became popular almost straight away. Its founder said that its popularity was a result of “meeting new people being a basic human need”. Quickly, however, it became known for explicit and other criminal content. Leif K-Brooks, the company’s founder, admitted that Omegle had been misused, “including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes”. The site attempted to introduce new features to stop that misuse, such as “monitored chats” that would allow moderators to try and stop criminals using the site. But they did not work, and the site continued to receive criticism for its lack of safety. Now Mr K-Brooks has said that the criticism has become too much, and Omegle will shut down. The intensity of the fight over use of the site had forced him to decide to shut it down, he said, and it will stop working straight away. “As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s,” wrote Leif K-Brooks, who has run the website since founding it. Omegle saw a huge surge in popularity during the pandemic, as people not only flocked to the site but recorded their interactions and shared them on social media. But that popularity also brought more awareness of the problems on the site, and increased criticism of it. Mr K-Brooks acknowledged that criticism. But he also suggested that at least some of it was in bad faith, and that it was intended to force the site to shut down. “In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users,” he wrote. He said that the site had been shut down on the basis of “fear”. “If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next?”, he wrote, comparing the end of Omegle to “shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil”. The decision to shut down Omegle comes amid increasing concern about regulation of the internet and how best to protect its users. It comes just days after the introduction of the UK’s Online Safety Act, for instance, which aims to hold platforms to account for crimes on their platform, including online grooming. Read More Omegle anonymous chat app shuts down after 14 years Setback for Ireland as EU legal adviser recommends revisit of Apple tax case New AI Pin clips ChatGPT to your clothes Setback for Ireland as EU legal adviser recommends revisit of Apple tax case New AI Pin clips ChatGPT to your clothes Google issues three-week warning to Gmail account holders

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 5, 2023--

Google has been accused of “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet” in order to train its AI chatbot Bard. The class-action lawsuit filed in California alleges that Google and its AI division DeepMind used data from millions of Americans without their knowledge or consent to build its generative AI products. “Personal data of every kind, especially conversational data between humans, is critical to the AI training process,” the lawsuit notes. “This is how products like Bard develop human-like communication capabilities. Creative and expressive works are just as valuable because that is how AI products learn to ‘create’ art.” Google updated its online privacy policy earlier this month, stating that it can use publicly available data to train its artificial intelligence tools. According to the latest lawsuit, this change was designed to “double-down on its position that everything on the internet is fair game for the company to take for private gain and commercial use, including to build and enhance AI products like Bard”. Beyond freely available data, the lawsuit claims that Google illegally accessed “at least 200 million materials explicitly protected by copyright”, including the text from books and articles behind paywalls. Among those copyrighted materials is allegedly a book written by one of the plaintiffs named in the legal action. Many of the other plaintiffs named are listed solely as users of Google products like Search and Gmail, as well as other online platforms like TikTok. The lawsuit alleges that Google scraped “the entire internet to take anything it could, whether contributed on Google platforms or not, and without regard for the privacy, property, and consumer protection interests of hundreds of millions of Americans who shared their insights, talents, artwork, data, personally identifiable information, and more, for specific purposes, not one of which was to train large language models to profit Google while putting the world at peril with untested and volatile AI products”. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which features similar capabilities to Google’s Bard, also has a proposed class action lawsuit filed against it, which accuses the chatbot of drawing on “massive amounts of personal data from the internet”. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent, but a spokesperson told Reuters that the allegations were “baseless”. Read More Google’s AI chatbot Bard can now talk Elon Musk reveals plan to use AI to reveal mysteries of the universe

The Microsoft Surface event on Thursday featured a bevy of artificial intelligence announcements. The company

This content originally appeared on Mashable for a US audience and has been adapted for