A group of sex industry professionals and advocates issued an open letter to EU regulators on Thursday, claiming that their views are being overlooked in vital discussions on policing AI technology despite also being implicated in AI’s momentous rise. In response to European internet regulations, a collective of adult industry members—including sex workers, erotic filmmakers,…
A United Nations report released today proposes having the international body oversee the first truly global effort for monitoring and governing artificial intelligence. The report, produced by the UN secretary general’s High Level Advisory Body on AI, recommends the creation of a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to gather up-to-date information…
Think of any topic vaguely related to raising kids imaginable, and there’s probably a post about it on Mumsnet, the long-running, enormously popular, controversy-spurring UK-based parenting forum for mothers. Over its more than two decade-long history, Mumsnet has amassed an archive of more than six billion words written by its highly engaged user base, on…
Synthetic voices have been proliferating for years, and the generative AI boom of the new ’20s has sped that process right along. AI voices are everywhere—in podcasts, in political campaigns, and in chatbots where they maybe-not-so-subtly replicate celebrity voices. Soon, they’ll be all up in your audiobooks too. Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company, announced a…
Apple’s forthcoming iOS 18 is loaded with a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered capabilities. The new mobile OS can rewrite your text messages, summarize emails, and identify objects in photos. But one of the most fun features is Image Playground, which generates cartoonlike illustrations based on a text prompt. While Apple has shown examples of its output…
When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it was quite obviously a fake, seeing as Harris is neither a communist nor, to the best of our knowledge, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably generated by X’s…
If anyone could make the Dark Side sound good, it was James Earl Jones. The actor, who died Monday at the age of 93, provided the voice for Darth Vader in more than a dozen Star Wars properties, from A New Hope to Star Tours. He made the Force sound ominous in a way that…
Last month, Google’s GameNGen AI model showed that generalized image diffusion techniques can be used to generate a passable, playable version of Doom. Now, researchers are using some similar techniques with a model called MarioVGG to see whether AI can generate plausible video of Super Mario Bros. in response to user inputs. The results of…
Last year, WIRED reported that deepfake pornography is only increasing, and researchers estimate that 90 percent of deepfake videos are of porn, the vast majority of which is nonconsensual porn of women. But despite how pervasive the issue is, Kaylee Williams, a researcher at Columbia University who has been tracking nonconsensual deepfake legislation, says she…
In 2012, Amazon quietly acquired a robotics startup called Kiva Systems, a move that dramatically improved the efficiency of its ecommerce operations and kickstarted a wider revolution in warehouse automation. Last week, the ecommerce giant announced another deal that could prove similarly profound, agreeing to hire the founders of Covariant, a startup that has been…