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After launching Slack AI in February, Slack appears to be digging its heels in, defending its vague policy that by default sucks up customers' data—including messages, content, and files—to train Slack's global AI models.

According to Slack engineer Aaron Maurer, Slack has explained in a blog that the Salesforce-owned chat service does not train its large language models (LLMs) on customer data. But Slack's policy may need updating "to explain more carefully how these privacy principles play with Slack AI," Maurer wrote on Threads, partly because the policy "was originally written about the search/recommendation work we've been doing for years prior to Slack AI."

Maurer was responding to a Threads post from engineer and writer Gergely Orosz, who called for companies to opt out of data sharing until the policy is clarified, not by a blog, but in the actual policy language.

Enlarge / Screenshot from the documentary Who Is Bobby Kennedy? (credit: whoisbobbykennedy.com)

In a lawsuit that seems determined to ignore that Section 230 exists, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has sued Meta for allegedly shadowbanning his million-dollar documentary, Who Is Bobby Kennedy? and preventing his supporters from advocating for his presidential campaign.

According to Kennedy, Meta is colluding with the Biden administration to sway the 2024 presidential election by suppressing Kennedy's documentary and making it harder to support Kennedy's candidacy. This allegedly has caused "substantial donation losses," while also violating the free speech rights of Kennedy, his supporters, and his film's production company, AV24.

Meta had initially restricted the documentary on Facebook and Instagram but later fixed the issue after discovering that the film was mistakenly flagged by the platforms' automated spam filters.

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For the past decade, the dating app Bumble has claimed to be all about empowering women. But under a new CEO, Lidiane Jones, Bumble is now apologizing for a tone-deaf ad campaign that many users said seemed to channel incel ideology by telling women to stop denying sex.

"You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer,” one Bumble billboard seen in Los Angeles read. "Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun," read another.

Bumble intended these ads to bring "joy and humor," the company said in an apology posted on Instagram after the backlash on social media began.

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Within approximately 12 seconds, two highly educated brothers allegedly stole $25 million by tampering with the ethereum blockchain in a never-before-seen cryptocurrency scheme, according to an indictment that the US Department of Justice unsealed Wednesday.

In a DOJ press release, US Attorney Damian Williams said the scheme was so sophisticated that it "calls the very integrity of the blockchain into question."

"The brothers, who studied computer science and math at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, allegedly used their specialized skills and education to tamper with and manipulate the protocols relied upon by millions of ethereum users across the globe," Williams said. "And once they put their plan into action, their heist only took 12 seconds to complete."

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After backlash over Google's search engine becoming the primary traffic source for deepfake porn websites, Google has started burying these links in search results, Bloomberg reported.

Over the past year, Google has been driving millions to controversial sites distributing AI-generated pornography depicting real people in fake sex videos that were created without their consent, Similarweb found. While anyone can be targeted—police already are bogged down with dealing with a flood of fake AI child sex images—female celebrities are the most common victims. And their fake non-consensual intimate imagery is more easily discoverable on Google by searching just about any famous name with the keyword "deepfake," Bloomberg noted.

Google refers to this content as "involuntary fake" or "synthetic pornography." The search engine provides a path for victims to report that content whenever it appears in search results. And when processing these requests, Google also removes duplicates of any flagged deepfakes.

Enlarge / A Waymo self-driving car in downtown San Francisco on Bush and Sansome Streets as it drives and transports passengers. (credit: JasonDoiy | iStock Unreleased)

Crashing into parked cars, drifting over into oncoming traffic, intruding into construction zones—all this "unexpected behavior" from Waymo's self-driving vehicles may be violating traffic laws, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Monday.

To better understand Waymo's potential safety risks, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is now looking into 22 incident reports involving cars equipped with Waymo’s fifth-generation automated driving system. Seventeen incidents involved collisions, but none involved injuries.

Some of the reports came directly from Waymo, while others "were identified based on publicly available reports," NHTSA said. The reports document single-party crashes into "stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains" as well as instances in which Waymo cars "appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices."

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An Australian federal court sided with Elon Musk on Monday, rejecting an Australian safety regulator's request to extend a temporary order blocking a terrorist attack video from spreading on Musk's platform X (formerly Twitter).

The video showed a teen stabbing an Assyrian bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel—whose popular, sometimes controversial TikTok sermons often garner millions of views—during a church livestream that rapidly spread online.

Police later determined it was a religiously motivated terrorist act after linking the 16-year-old charged in the stabbing to a group of seven teens "accused of following a violent extremist ideology in raids across Sydney," AP News reported. Bishop Emmanuel has since reassured his followers that he recovered quickly and forgave the teen, Al Jazeera reported.

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US District Judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk's X Corp lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and violating both X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data.

X sued Bright Data to stop the company from scraping and selling X data to academic institutes and businesses, including Fortune 500 companies.

According to Alsup, X failed to state a claim while arguing that companies like Bright Data should have to pay X to access public data posted by X users.

Enlarge / WETA "Gollum" figure at Arclight at the opening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." (credit: Barry King / Contributor | WireImage)

A day after announcing that the tentatively titled Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum was scheduled for a 2026 release, Warner Bros. immediately moved to block a beloved 2009 unauthorized fan film with the exact same name on YouTube.

Less than 12 hours later, though, the studio appeared to back down from this copyright fight, reinstating the fan film on YouTube amid fan backlash protesting the copyright strike on Reddit as a "dick move."

In 2009, director Chris Bouchard—who most recently directed Netflix's The Little Mermaid—released The Hunt for Gollum through Independent Online Cinema after he claimed to have "reached an understanding" with the rightsholder of The Lord of the Rings books, then called Tolkien Enterprises (now called Middle-earth Enterprises).

Enlarge / Ripton, VT - July 16, 2023: Ethan Poploski stood in front of his family's home, which had been destroyed by a landslide overnight. (credit: Boston Globe / Contributor | Boston Globe)

Vermont may soon become the first state to force fossil fuel companies to pay their fair share to cover recovery efforts from climate change damages. This week, the state's potentially groundbreaking law passed a preliminary vote in the Senate, where a final vote is expected soon that would likely send the law to the governor's desk. And there's reportedly broad enough support to override any attempt to veto the law.

By passing a law that mimics the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program—which "forces the parties responsible for the contamination" of lands "to either perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanup work"—Vermont hopes to create a Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program.

If enacted, the law could end up costing fossil fuel companies billions for climate damages in Vermont alone and serve as a model for other states similarly seeking to combat their worst impacts.

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Ethan Zuckerman wants to release a tool that would allow Facebook users to control what appears in their newsfeeds. His privacy-friendly browser extension, Unfollow Everything 2.0, is designed to essentially give users a switch to turn the newsfeed on and off whenever they want, providing a way to eliminate or curate the feed.

Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, is suing Meta to release a tool allowing Facebook users to "unfollow everything." (Photo by Lorrie LeJeune)

The tool is nearly ready to be released, Zuckerman told Ars, but the University of Massachusetts Amherst associate professor is afraid that Facebook owner Meta might threaten legal action if he goes ahead. And his fears appear well-founded. In 2021, Meta sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creator of the original Unfollow Everything, Louis Barclay, leading that developer to shut down his tool after thousands of Facebook users had eagerly downloaded it.

Zuckerman is suing Meta, asking a US district court in California to invalidate Meta's past arguments against developers like Barclay and rule that Meta would have no grounds to sue if he released his tool.

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As the US moves toward criminalizing deepfakes—deceptive AI-generated audio, images, and videos that are increasingly hard to discern from authentic content online—tech companies have rushed to roll out tools to help everyone better detect AI content.

But efforts so far have been imperfect, and experts fear that social media platforms may not be ready to handle the ensuing AI chaos during major global elections in 2024—despite tech giants committing to making tools specifically to combat AI-fueled election disinformation. The best AI detection remains observant humans, who, by paying close attention to deepfakes, can pick up on flaws like AI-generated people with extra fingers or AI voices that speak without pausing for a breath.

Among the splashiest tools announced this week, OpenAI shared details today about a new AI image detection classifier that it claims can detect about 98 percent of AI outputs from its own sophisticated image generator, DALL-E 3. It also "currently flags approximately 5 to 10 percent of images generated by other AI models," OpenAI's blog said.

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Continuing its crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may potentially sue Robinhood Markets over securities violations alleged in the popular investing app's crypto unit, Robinhood Crypto said Monday.

In a recent SEC filing, Robinhood Markets Chief Financial Officer Jason Warnick confirmed that Robinhood Crypto has received investigative subpoenas from the SEC regarding its "cryptocurrency listings, custody of cryptocurrencies, and platform operations."

Despite Robinhood cooperating with these investigations, the SEC sent a "Wells Notice" on Monday, the filing said. The notice alerted Robinhood that SEC staff had made a "preliminary determination" recommending that the SEC "file an enforcement action" alleging that Robinhood Crypto had violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Enlarge / Kenneth Dintzer, litigator for the US Department of Justice, exits federal court in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2023, during the antitrust trial to determine if Alphabet Inc.'s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Near the end of the second day of closing arguments in the Google monopoly trial, US district judge Amit Mehta weighed whether sanctions were warranted over what the US Department of Justice described as Google's "routine, regular, and normal destruction" of evidence.

Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google's revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements. These agreements, the DOJ and state attorneys general argued, work to maintain Google's monopoly over search.

According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ's attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law."

Enlarge / John Schmidtlein, partner at Williams & Connolly LLP and lead litigator for Alphabet Inc.'s Google, arrives to federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Oct. 2, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Halfway through the first day of closing arguments in the Department of Justice's big antitrust trial against Google, US District Judge Amit Mehta posed the question that likely many Google users have pondered over years of DOJ claims that Google's market dominance has harmed users.

"What should Google have done to remain outside the crosshairs of the DOJ?" Mehta asked plaintiffs halfway through the first of two full days of closing arguments.

According to the DOJ and state attorneys general suing, Google has diminished search quality everywhere online, primarily by locking rivals out of default positions on devices and in browsers. By paying billions for default placements that the government has argued allowed Google to hoard traffic and profits, Google allegedly made it nearly impossible for rivals to secure enough traffic to compete, ultimately decreasing competition and innovation in search by limiting the number of viable search engines in the market.

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In mid-June 2019, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella received a rude awakening in an email warning that Google had officially gotten too far ahead on AI and that Microsoft may never catch up without investing in OpenAI.

With the subject line "Thoughts on OpenAI," the email came from Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, who is also the company’s executive vice president of AI. In it, Scott said that he was "very, very worried" that he had made "a mistake" by dismissing Google's initial AI efforts as a "game-playing stunt."

It turned out, Scott suggested, that instead of goofing around, Google had been building critical AI infrastructure that was already paying off, according to a competitive analysis of Google's products that Scott said showed that Google was competing even more effectively in search. Scott realized that while Google was already moving on to production for "larger scale, more interesting" AI models, it might take Microsoft "multiple years" before it could even attempt to compete with Google.