A bipartisan Congressional group has reintroduced the NO FAKES Act, a bicameral bill that aims to protect creative rights by safeguarding artist voices and likenesses from unauthorized use by AI and other digital replication. The announcement culminated the Recording Academy’s Grammys on the Hill Advocacy Day with a Wednesday press conference led by Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) and Chris Coons (D-Delaware) and Representatives Madeleine Dean (D-Pennsylvania) and Maria Salazar (R-Florida). Simultaneously, the TAKE IT DOWN Act — which aims to tackle unauthorized images of people — moved with Senate support to near approval in the House. Continue reading Proposed Federal Bills Aim to Curb Unauthorized Replication

Popular social media platform Pinterest is now labeling generative AI content. The app, which earned a reputation as fertile ground for design inspiration related to hand-crafted goods and human artistry, has recently been plagued by an onslaught of “AI slop,” something its regular users have been complaining of on Reddit and to Pinterest directly. The GenAI content was often used to redirect people to spammy sites, according to a recent report. Pinterest’s labeling news coincides with an earnings report of $1.15 billion in Q4 revenue, marking an 18 percent increase year-over-year. Continue reading Pinterest AI Labeling Policy Unveiled as Q4 Earnings Top $1B

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. Continue reading ByteDance’s AI Model Can Generate Video from Single Image

YouTube has partnered with Creative Artists Agency to develop technology that will help celebrities identify and remove deepfake videos created by AI to exploit their images. YouTube announced the tech in September and has now gained CAA’s support in the form of “critical feedback to help us build our detection systems and refine the controls.” In exchange, “several of the world’s most influential figures will have access to early-stage technology designed to identify and manage AI-generated content that features their likeness, including their face, on YouTube at scale,” the streamer announced. CAA’s clients includes celebrity talent spanning acting, music and sports. Continue reading CAA to Help YouTube Develop an AI Deepfake Removal Tool

Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team has unveiled recent work in areas ranging from transparency and safety to agents, and architectures for machine learning. The projects include Meta Motivo, a foundation model for controlling the behavior of virtual embodied agents, and Video Seal, an open-source model for video watermarking. All were developed in the unit’s pursuit of advanced machine intelligence, helping “models to learn new information more effectively and scale beyond current limits.” Meta announced it is sharing the new FAIR research, code, models and datasets so the research community can build upon its work. Continue reading Meta Rolls Out Watermarking, Behavioral and Concept Models

DeepL, a German company that gained a profile with online text translation, has released DeepL Voice, a B2B tool that translates to captions in real time. DeepL Voice debuts in two iterations: DeepL Voice for Meetings, which allows participants to speak in their preferred language while serving colleagues with captions, and DeepL Voice for Conversations, which works on mobile devices, facilitating in-person, one-on-one conversations “with customers, colleagues or anyone else, in the language that works best for them,” the company explains, noting that real-time voice translation offers specific challenges. Continue reading DeepL Voice Translates 33 Languages to Captions in Real Time

Yahoo News has signed up to use San Jose-based cybersecurity company McAfee’s deepfake image detection technology. The scalable McAfee system can “quickly identify images that may have been produced or modified using AI, including deepfake images,” flagging them for the Yahoo News editorial standards team for human review. The standards team then “determines whether the flagged images meet the platform’s editorial guidelines.” The partnership provides news aggregator Yahoo with an extra layer of protection as it deals with a large network of global publishers in addition to policing its original content. Continue reading Yahoo Using McAfee’s Modified Image Detector to Flag Fakes

Midjourney is turning heads with its new image editor, which lets users upload images and then make adjustments. The company’s models — most recently Midjourney 6.1 — accept uploaded images as a reference to use for generative results. Now the Midjourney image editor allows precise adjustments to aspects of the frame. An “image retexturing mode” is also being introduced, as is v2 of its “AI moderator.” The new features are only available to users with yearly memberships, monthly memberships for the past 12 months, or those who have generated at least 10,000 Midjourney images. Continue reading Midjourney Makes Powerful AI Image Editor Available in Alpha

The Federal Trade Commission rule targeting fake reviews and paid testimonials went into effect this week. The rule bans the creation, purchase or sale of reviews and opinion pieces attributed to fictional customers, or real ones who are financially compensated without plainly disclosing the transactional nature of the relationship. The rule, which subjects offenders to civil penalties, also takes aim at businesses who use threats or coercion to thwart the publication of negative reviews that are genuine. The new FTC rule was approved by unanimous vote in August. Continue reading FTC Rule Prohibiting Fake and Paid Reviews Goes into Effect

YouTube has added new features to its apps for mobile, Web and TV, including expanded controls for playback speeds, badges, a miniplayer redesign, and the ability to create collaborative playlists. The company is also debuting an authenticity tool. By affixing a “captured with a camera” label, creators can indicate their work is shot with an actual camera, with unaltered visual and audio. Among the general platform improvements that YouTube implements annually, users can now share playlists via link or QR code, and create custom thumbnails for those lists, either by uploading an image or generating one with AI. Continue reading YouTube Expands Features and Adds an Authentication Tool

The theme of Zoomtopia 2024 was “an AI-first work platform for human connection,” with the release of the custom Zoom AI Companion 2.0 for Zoom Workplace, an AI assistant that costs $12 per month that starting next year will have the ability to create custom AI avatars. Initially available for short video presentations to share with internal teams, the eventual goal is to have a “digital twin” that can participate in meetings and calls. The avatars will “save time and production costs” with segments that work with Zoom Clips for internal circulation in brief messages to colleagues. Continue reading Zoom Updates Its AI Assistant and Previews Custom Avatars

The European Commission has released a list of more than 100 companies that have become signatories to the EU’s AI Pact. While Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are among them, Apple and Meta are not. The voluntary AI Pact is aimed at eliciting policies on AI deployment during the period before the legally binding AI Act takes full effect. The EU AI Pact focuses on transparency in three core areas: internal AI governance, high-risk AI systems mapping and promoting AI literacy and awareness among staff to support ethical development. It is aimed at “relevant stakeholders,” across industry, civil society and academia. Continue reading Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI Join the EU’s AI Pact

YouTube is introducing AI detection tools designed to allow people to learn when their face and/or voice are copied and used in third-party videos. As part of the effort, YouTube’s existing Content ID program that protects copyrighted music will expand to include more broad-based voice simulation detection technology. The new tools aim to protect “people from a variety of industries — from creators and actors to musicians and athletes,” according to the company. The Google-owned platform is also coming up with a way to address unauthorized use of its content for training AI models. Continue reading YouTube Adding Tools to Protect Against Unauthorized AI Use

Google is giving Gemini Advanced, Enterprise and Business subscribers the ability to create personalized AI assistants, which the company calls “Gems.” “Create your own personal AI experts on any topic you want,” the Alphabet company says. The search giant is also reintroducing Gemini’s image generation capabilities with its latest Imagen 3 model, which will be available to everyone. Gemini, which is Google’s ChatGPT competitor, will again have the ability to generate images of people, something Google disabled in February after controversy over some of the images. The company announced it has implemented new guardrails. Continue reading Gemini Gets Custom Gems AI Assistants and Adds Imagen 3

Adobe, OpenAI and Microsoft are among the major firms backing a California bill that would require tech companies to label AI-generated content with watermarks embedded in the metadata. Such data is easily accessible via browser for material circulated on the Internet, and the initiative would likely involve a campaign to educate the general public on how to find it. The proposed law encompasses video and audio as well as images. The three companies currently supporting the bill initially opposed it, using terms like “unworkable” and “overly burdensome.” Continue reading Bill Mandating GenAI Watermarks Gains Support in California