The Technology Partener
OpenAI’s ChatGPT may be the world’s most popular chatbot app. But rival services are gaining, according to data from analytics firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower. Similarweb, which estimates traffic to websites, including chatbot web apps, has recorded healthy recent upticks in usage across bots like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Copilot. Gemini’s web traffic grew…
Some users on Elon Musk’s X are turning to Musk’s AI bot Grok for fact-checking, raising concerns among human fact-checkers that this could fuel misinformation. Earlier this month, X enabled users to call out xAI’s Grok and ask questions on different things. The move was similar to Perplexity, which has been running an automated account…
The Federal Trade Commission published a new report about social media platforms and video streaming services’ data collection policies, and the results are damning if not unexpected. The report, which was released on September 19th, found that these platforms not only surveil consumers but often retain vast troves of data indefinitely about users and non-users…
Meta has confirmed that it’s restarting efforts to train its AI systems using public Facebook and Instagram posts from its U.K. userbase. The company claims it has “incorporated regulatory feedback” into a revised “opt-out” approach to ensure that it’s “even more transparent,” as its blog post spins it. It is also seeking to paint the move as…
No one likes standing in line. I was reminded of just how awful the experience can be last Saturday, while being herded like cattle through a two-hour queue for a nightclub in unseasonably cold weather. I’d not soon repeat the experience. Fortunately, there’s a startup for that. LineLeap, backed by Y Combinator, lets people pay…
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, has been targeted with a series of privacy complaints after it helped itself to the data of users in the European Union for training AI models without asking people’s consent. Late last month an eagle-eyed social media user spotted a setting indicating that X had quietly…
Meta has confirmed that it will pause plans to start training its AI systems using data from its users in the European Union and U.K. The move follows pushback from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Meta’s lead regulator in the EU, which is acting on behalf of several data protection authorities across the bloc….
Large language model-based chatbots have the potential to promote healthy changes in behavior. But researchers from the ACTION Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have found that the artificial intelligence tools don’t effectively recognize certain motivational states of users and therefore don’t provide them with appropriate information. Michelle Bak, a doctoral student in information…
Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts. Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to…
