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California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sent a cease and desist letter to xAI, days after his office launched an official investigation into the company over reports that Grok was generating nonconsensual
If you'll recall, xAI and Grok have been under fire for taking images of real individuals and putting them in revealing clothing like bikinis upon random users' requests.
Bonta's office demands that xAI immediately cease and desist from creating "digitized sexually explicit material" when the depicted individual didn't consent to it or if the individual is a minor. It also demanded that xAI stop "facilitating or aiding and abetting the creation… or publication of digitized sexually explicit material" of nonconsenting individuals and persons under 18 years of age.
X changed its policies after the issue broke out and prevented the Grok account from being able to edit images of real people into revealing clothing. xAI also moved Grok's image-generating features behind a paywall and geoblocked paying users' ability to edit images of real people into bikinis, but only in regions where it's illegal.
In his announcement, Bonta said xAI developed a "spicy mode" for Grok to generate explicit content and used it as a marketing point. The California AG also said that Grok-generated sexual images are being used to harass both public figures and ordinary users. "Most alarmingly, news reports hav
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In another attempt to reduce our attention spans to mush, TikTok has released the PineDrama app, which offers serialized drama series that are roughly a minute per episode. As first spotted by Business Insider, the app is designed exactly like TikTok, but instead of trendy dance videos, you can scroll through and watch "micro dramas."
For those new to the category, micro dramas are bite-sized TV shows shot in vertical video and available in minute-long episodes. Don't expect any nominations for Best Original Screenplay with series like The Officer Fell For Me or Married to my past life's nemesis, since they typically offer soap opera vibes with cliffhangers that keep users scrolling to the next episode. The app is designed to keep people on it with a Discover tab, a place to save favorites and the ability to react in real time alongside other viewers.
Right now, the micro dramas on PineDrama are all free to watch and don't have any ads. It's unclear if TikTok will introduce any costs or ads to the app, since other micro drama options like DramaBox or ReelShort have a paid structure. Late last year, TikTok also introduced a way to watch micro dramas within its own app, with a section called
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 Apple recently announced that its environmental chief Lisa Jackson would be retiring this month, and today she was removed from the company's leadership page.
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 OpenAI plans to start testing ads inside of ChatGPT "in the coming weeks." In a blog post published Friday, the company said adult users in the US of its free and Go tiers (more on the latter in a moment) would start seeing sponsored products and services appear below their conversations with its chatbot. "Ads will be clearly labeled and separated from the organic answer," OpenAI said, adding any sponsored spots would not influence the answers ChatGPT generates. "Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you."
OpenAI says people won't see ads appear when they're talking to ChatGPT about sensitive subjects like their health, mental state of mind or current politics. The company also won't show ads to teens under the age of 18. As for privacy, OpenAI states it won't share or sell your data with advertisers. The company will also give users the option to disable ad personalization and clear the data it uses to generate sponsored responses. "We'll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that's ad-free," OpenAI adds. Users can dismiss ads, at which point they'll be asked to explain why they didn't engage with it.
Users will be able to ask follow-up questions about sponsored content. OpenAI"Given what AI can do, we're excited to develop new experiences over time that people find more helpful and relevant than any other ads. Conversational interfaces create p
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OpenAI says that it won't serve ads based on sensitive topics like mental health or politics.
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 X seems to be working again after struggling with an outage that took the service offline and made it slow to load for much of the morning. According to X's developer platform page, there is an ongoing incident related to streaming endpoints that's caused increased errors. The incident started at 7:39AM PT, according to the page.
That roughly coincides with a spike in reports at Down Detector. The issues seemed to be somewhat intermittent. At some points, X's website loaded partially and only showed older posts. At other times, the app and website failed to load at all.
As of 9:30AM PT, X's Explore and trending pages were loading, but the "following" tab wasn't showing posts and instead suggested users "find some people and topic to follow" (as shown in the screenshot below).
Posts aren't loading.XAs of 11:15AM PT, X's developer site was still indicating ongoing issues, so there may still be some lingering problems even though the website seems to be functioning normally again. Reports on Down Detector have also dropped off considerably.
X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the outage. As TechCrunch
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