ByteDance has developed a generative model that can use a single photo to generate photorealistic video of humans in motion. Called OmniHuman-1, the multimodal system supports various visual and audio styles and can generate people doing things like singing, dancing, speaking and moving in a natural fashion. ByteDance says its new technology clears hurdles that hinder existing human-generators — obstacles like short play times and over-reliance on high-quality training data. The diffusion transformer-based OmniHuman addressed those challenges by mixing motion-related conditions into the training phase, a solution ByteDance researchers claim is new. Read more

Adobe has added intelligent contract capabilities to the Acrobat AI Assistant, which can now help interpret agreements for businesses and consumers. Adobe’s smart contract reader can help people understand those lengthy click-to-agree terms of service treatises that precede vendor websites and service agreements. “Customers open billions of contracts in Adobe Acrobat each month and AI can be a game changer in helping simplify their experience,” Adobe Document Cloud SVP Abhigyan Modi said in an announcement. For business users, Acrobat AI Assistant can identify key dates, prepare or review new agreements, and highlight changes. Read more

Anthropic has created a method to defend AI models against “jailbreaks” — unauthorized workarounds to get an AI model to do things it was trained not to do, like providing instructions for building chemical weapons. Called Constitutional Classifiers, the system was 95 percent effective in identifying and preventing jailbreaks of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet in a test environment. In an effort to drum up real-world red-teaming, the company offered cash prizes of up to $15,000 to anyone who could jailbreak its Sonnet AI model. After some 3,000 hours of attempts by 185 participants, none claimed an award. Now the company is offering additional incentives. Read more

Cloudflare is making it easier to assess the authenticity of online images by adopting the Content Credentials system advanced by Adobe and embraced by many others. Images hosted using Cloudflare now integrate Content Credentials, ensuring metadata remains intact. The platform tracks ownership and subsequent modifications, including whether artificial intelligence was used to edit the images. With touchpoints to an estimated 20 percent of Internet traffic, connectivity firm Cloudflare substantively expands the reach of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), founded in 2019. Read more

Google is batting back against malware and backdoor computer infection by adding VPN app verification at the Google Play Store that includes a badge for trusted downloads. Google has indicated that simply selecting reputable brand-name VPNs (virtual private networks) is no longer an effective way of avoiding trouble, as nefarious actors have found ways to infect legitimate VPN apps with malware. Last month, the Google Managed Defense team warned that malware known as Playfulghost had reportedly infected some popular VPNs, using them to inject malware and remotely control infected devices. Read more