Meet Meena, Google’s new chatbot powered by a neural network. According to the tech giant, Meena was trained on 341 gigabytes of public social-media chatter (8.5 times as much data as OpenAI’s GPT-2) and can talk about anything and even make jokes. With Meena, Google hopes to have made a chatbot that feels more human, always a challenge for AI-enabled media, whether it’s a chatbot or a character in a video game. To do so, Google created the Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA) as a metric for natural conversations. Continue reading Google Debuts Chatbot with Natural Conversational Ability

Facebook’s revenue rose 25 percent to $2.11 billion for the quarter, beating analysts’ expectations of $20.9 billion. Its 2019 revenue rose almost 27 percent, with Q4 profits a 7 percent lift to $7.35 billion. The company reported that, even as expenses grew, its user base grew 9 percent from a year earlier to 1.66 billion, topping FactSet’s prediction of almost 1.65 billion. Not all is rosy, however: Facebook agreed to pay $550 million to settle an Illinois class-action lawsuit over use of its facial recognition technology. Continue reading Facebook Revenue Strong, Despite Facial Recognition Suit

In Snapchat’s animated series Bitmoji TV, which launches February 1, the user’s avatar stars — and the last person he Snapchatted co-stars — in various TV scenarios, including sitcoms, soap operas and reality competitions. This first season will debut 10 three-to-four-minute episodes, unveiled on Saturday mornings. As Bitmoji founder/chief executive Ba Blackstock puts it, “we’re bringing back Saturday morning cartoons.” The series takes off from Bitmoji Stories, which stars the user’s avatar in funny situations. Continue reading Snap’s Bitmoji TV Features Users’ Avatars in Short Videos

Facebook’s Oversight Board, comprised of people from outside the company, will determine if specific user posts violate its rules. But the company just divulged that it expects the board to “come to a case decision, and for Facebook to have acted on that decision, in approximately 90 days,” a lengthy period of time that makes it unlikely the board will be able to block misinformation from spreading virally. The board may play a role, however, in changing the company’s policy on paid political ads. Continue reading Facebook Reveals More Details About Its Oversight Board

Byte, a video-sharing app created by Dom Hofmann, debuted Friday and hit No. 1 for free iOS apps in Apple’s U.S. App Store. Byte, which targets rival ByteDance’s TikTok, is a reboot of the former Vine video-sharing service Hofmann co-founded in 2012 and sold to Twitter that year. Twitter couldn’t find a way to make Vine profitable and shuttered it in 2016. In its short life, Vine became a “cultural touchpoint” as users took on the creative challenge of the six-second format. Byte is also the top free iOS app in Canada. Continue reading Free Video-Sharing App Byte Aims to Compete with TikTok

Clearview AI has scraped over three billion photos from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Venmo and hundreds of other websites to create a facial recognition database now used by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and over 600 law enforcement agencies. Twitter just sent a cease-and-decease letter to the startup demanding that it stop taking photos and other data from its site and to delete any data it has already collected. Twitter accused Clearview AI of violating its policies. Continue reading Twitter Warns Clearview to Stop Scraping its Users’ Photos

Instagram has removed the IGTV button from the main screen of its app because so few people use it, instead “finding IGTV content through previews in Feed, the IGTV channel in Explore, creators’ profiles, and the standalone app,” according to the company. Instagram, which launched IGTV in 2018 as a way to post long-form video, has not stated whether it will replace the icon with another. IGTV allows video uploads of up to one hour for celebrities and influencers and 10 minutes for everyone else. Continue reading Instagram Removes the IGTV Button From Its Main Screen

A panel of six undergraduates from the USC Iovine and Young Academy and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences spent an hour answering questions about their media habits. The questions were asked by ETC member company executives at the December 12, 2019 All Members Meeting held in Burbank at Disney. Where do students get their media recommendations? What’s a good length for a viewing experience? What do they think about having their personal data gathered, and about data analytics in general? What do they pay to subscribe to? Watch this 9-minute highlight video to find out. Continue reading USC Students Respond to Media Questions at ETC Meeting

During CES in Las Vegas, Samsung introduced its new Sero TV, which is designed to rotate 90 degrees in order to display vertical video content — the portrait mode that is commonly recorded via today’s mobile phones. The format is increasingly popular on social media platforms (such as Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube), and will soon become a focus of Quibi, the short-form streaming video service from Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. The 43-inch 4K Sero TV — “designed for the mobile generation” — has the ability to sync with Samsung smartphones and can automatically rotate based on the content being viewed. Continue reading CES: Samsung Engineers Sero TV to Display Vertical Video

A panel of six undergraduates from the USC Iovine and Young Academy and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences spent an hour answering questions about their media habits. The questions were asked by ETC member company executives at the December 12, 2019 All Members Meeting held in Burbank at Disney. Where do students get their media recommendations? What’s a good length for a viewing experience? What do they think about having their personal data gathered, and about data analytics in general? What do they pay to subscribe to? Watch this 9-minute highlight video to find out. Continue reading USC Students Respond to Media Questions at ETC Meeting

In the aftermath of a deadly shooting at a Naval air station in Pensacola, Florida that was later declared an act of terrorism, Attorney General William Barr requested that Apple provide access to the two iPhones used by the killer. He later complained that Apple has thus far provided no “substantive assistance.” The Saudi Arabian assassin, Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, was training with the U.S. military but had earlier posted anti-American, anti-Israeli and jihadist screeds on social media. Continue reading Terrorist Act Revives Clash Between Government and Apple

Facebook discovered and removed hundreds of fake accounts with AI-generated profile photos tied to Epoch Media Group, the parent company of news outlet The Epoch Times and other Falun Gong-related publications. The use of artificial intelligence to generate fake photos has long been a concern among computer scientists. Although these fake photos were not the level of those created at Big Tech companies, their widespread appearance on Facebook marks another way that disinformation can invade social media platforms. Continue reading Fake Facebook Accounts Used AI-Generated Profile Photos

Netflix, which makes almost $16 billion in annual revenue from its 158 million global subscribers, prides itself on being free of advertising. But the company also is $12 billion in debt and facing increasing competition in the streaming video sector from rivals including Apple and The Walt Disney Company. According to eMarketer, Netflix’s “days at the top may be numbered,” and many experts believe that Netflix will eventually have to turn to advertising. Even without ads, however, Netflix is increasing brand engagement. Continue reading Netflix Still Avoids Ads, But Heats Up Its Brand Partnerships

Facebook has been under fire for abuse on its platform, although chief executive Mark Zuckerberg often said that its AI tools have been successful at diminishing such problems. It turns out that he’s right: Facebook’s recent Community Standards Enforcement Report revealed that it removed 32+ billion fake accounts between April and September, compared to “just over 1.5 billion” during the same period last year. Largely responsible for the improvement is deep entity classification (DEC), a machine learning framework. Continue reading Facebook’s AI Technique Deletes 32 Billion Fake Accounts

TikTok has exceeded 1.5 billion downloads — half of them in the past year — and, in the process, has become a genuine competitor of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Chinese AI firm ByteDance, owner of TikTok, is valued at $75 billion, one of the world’s most valuable startups. The company is reportedly looking into an IPO in Hong Kong in 2020. Now that it has commanded widespread attention, ByteDance is also under scrutiny over how it stores personal data and if it follows orders from the Chinese government to censor content. Continue reading TikTok Catapults to Level of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube