Overnight, TikTok video feeds started going silent—not as some sort of weird Charlie Chaplin homage, but because Universal Music Group did, as previously threatened, pull its expansive song catalog, igniting a “Mute-pocalypse” where videos featuring music by many of the industry’s biggest names (Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Lana Del Rey, Bad Bunny, Britney Spears, Drake, Post Malone, Fleetwood Mac) were suddenly flagged for copyright infringement.
The reason
Robocalls are annoying enough, but the growth of generative artificial intelligence could make it much easier for phone-based scams to fool people. Now, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is hoping to head off this potential threat before it becomes an even bigger problem.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, on Wednesday, proposed new rules that would make robocalls using AI-generated voices illegal.
“AI-generated voice cloning and images are already sowing
It’s about to get tougher for viewers to share logins on more popular streaming services. The Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ trio will now disallow users from sharing passwords outside of their households.
On Wednesday, subscribers of Disney-owned Hulu received an email informing them that, starting March 14, the company would start adding “limitations on sharing your account outside of your household.” The company also revised its Terms of Service to explicitly ban p
The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits rose last week to the highest level in 11 weeks, though layoffs remain at historically low levels.
Applications for unemployment benefits climbed to 224,000 for the week ending Jan. 27, an increase of 9,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
The four-week average of claims, a less volatile measure, rose by 5,250, to 207,750.
Weekly unemployment claims are seen as a proxy for the numb
Long before ChatGPT, natural language AI researchers, many of them in academia, shared their research openly. The free-flowing exchange of information and innovation allowed the AI community at large to reproduce, validate, and criticize one another’s work. That all changed with the arrival of supersized LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4, when investors started pushing research labs to treat the details of their discoveries as valuable intellectual property—that is, to keep the un
Uber drivers have seen a “marked decrease” in their monthly average gross earnings in the past year, according to a new research report from Gridwise, an app that helps gig workers track their earnings.
Uber drivers reported a 17.1% decline in gross earnings in 2023 compared to the year prior, the report said. Gridwise’s report pulls from its database of anonymized gig mobility data from more than 500,000 gig drivers and findings from a survey conducted with 528
Congressional hearings featuring Big Tech head honchos, including yesterday’s affair between the Senate Judiciary and the execs from major social platforms, often get a bad rap. These bitter brawls have been panned at turns as “kabuki theater” and “hot mess[es]”—and for good reason. With a few exceptions, the primary output of these events tends to be new viral C-SPAN clips.
But that doesn’t mean they’re entirely useless.
Most business leaders are all too familiar with the challenges of protecting their organizations from hackers and spammers. But what do you do when legitimate customers are the ones participating in fraudulent activities?
“Friendly fraud,” also known as first-party fraud, occurs when customers file a fraud claim or charge-back despite being satisfied with a purchase. Sometimes it can be done unintentionally—when, for example, a family member makes a purchase wit
Once, body cameras were attached only to cops, part of an effort to produce more evidence, de-escalate tense situations, and reduce force and abuse. The jury is still out on how effective they are, but the technology is spreading fast, and not just within policing. Increasingly, other sectors have adopted the cameras, and nowadays you might spot bus drivers, paramedics, sanitation workers, and even hospital and retail employees sporting the cameras. The idea is mostly twofold: to enforce acco
Without AI, there wouldn’t be much to say about Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra.
While it’s a very nice Android phone overall, it’s not vastly different from last year’s Galaxy S23 Ultra. I could point to the new titanium frame, the flat display that feels a bit roomier than the old Ultra’s curved glass, or the requisite annual upticks in display brightness and processing power. Still the overall impression isn’t so different from the S23