Five Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg

Plus: Meta officially kills encrypted Instagram DMs, the Trump administration targets “violent left wing extremists,” leaked documents reveal Russia's school for elite hackers, and more.

As it adapts to the artificial intelligence era, the company is pushing many of its 78,000 workers to use the technology, and preparing to lay some of them off.

The tech giant still dominates online advertising, but its aggressive AI push has transformed Google into a sprawling company with competing identities.

Meta has commenced a long, slow slide into irrelevance.

AI is capable of mimicking a real person. It’s clear this capability exists, and the ethics of using AI for this purpose are often very clear. But increasingly, new applications are leading to ethically murky results.  The good For example, the CEO of a company, or a politician, could choose to create a clone using AI tools, creating a chatbot plus an avatar — a digital twin — that can interact with people on their behalf. Silicon Valley is big on the idea: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are working on, or have already created, digital twins of themselves.  Cloned politicians include Pakistan’s Imran Khan, who used an authorized voice clone to campaign from prison, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who used voice-cloned robocalls to speak with constituents in languages like Mandarin and Yiddish. This kind of use case is probably ethical — as long as the people interacting know that they’re dealing with a digital clone and not a real person.  The bad The f

If you bought an iPhone 15 or 16 in the US, you could be set to pocket up to $95 per device as Apple settles class-action lawsuit.

Meta has launched an AI system that analyzes visual cues in photos and videos — including height and bone structure — to identify users potentially under 13 and remove them from Facebook and Instagram. The company clarified the tool does not constitute facial recognition, as it assesses general physical characteristics rather than identifying specific individuals. The system combines visual […]

Settlement, which includes no admission of wrongdoing, covers roughly 36m eligible devices in class-action lawsuit Apple on Tuesday agreed to pay $250m to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing it of misleading millions of iPhone buyers by falsely touting artificial intelligence capabilities for its Siri voice assistant in late 2024. Plaintiffs accused the California tech giant of having “promoted AI capabilities that did not exist at the time, do not exist now, and will not exist for two or more years” in order to boost iPhone sales, according to the suit. Apple’s more “personalized” version of Siri still has not been fully released despite its announcement nearly two years ago. Continue reading...