Artificial Intelligence

If you thought standard-issue ad tech was a little weird and creepy, get ready for the future: platforms letting marketers use all their data to make an infinite number of AI-generated ads specifically targeted to individual viewers. Digiday reports on TikTok’s Smart+, which competes with similar offerings from Meta and Google:

Marketers can let TikTok’s AI handle the heavy lifting — building and delivering ads to drive conversions, leads, or app downloads. […] The pitch is all about simplicity and speed — no more weeks of guesswork and endless A/B testing, according to Adolfo Fernandez, TikTok’s director, global head of product strategy and operations, commerce.

Super normal, everyone! No potential issues here!

Some turned out great, but others highlight just how messy this technology is, according to Pitchfork. From Shaad D’Souza’s review:

AI is simply another tool that will sometimes be used badly and sometimes be used well, and on Honey I think it’s used well—to complicate and expand the abilities of an artist well into his career, whose creative impulses can no longer be entirely satiated through the means previously available to him. There is one exception: The rap verse on “Campfire” is also Snaith, and it edges toward racial ambiguity in a way that feels queasy. At best, it’s a misguided experiment; at worst, outright minstrelsy.

I’m coming to you live from my hot-as-hell apartment here in San Francisco. We’re facing a historic heat wave and none of us have apartment air conditioning.

Even funnier, the AC at OpenAI HQ is broken, according to an employee. The office is based in the Mission district, which tends to get hotter than the rest of the city. (One Google DeepMind staffer flaunted his working AC in reply: “We’re hiring!”)

That’s straight from Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu, who took great exception to our story from September 25th, which was sourced to a Fast Company article about his comments at one of their events. Jesse told me the actual daily user number was around 20,000, spiking up to 34,000 the day the company’s new LAM Playgrounds were launched, and that his actual comment was that 5,000 of those people were using the Rabbit at any given time. For context, Jesse also told me Rabbit has sold 100,000 R1s so far.

Fast Company has corrected its story, and we’ve updated our story as well. You can hear the whole conversation on Decoder.

With several media companies striking AI training deals with OpenAI, the number of websites blocking GPTBot has taken a big dip, according to data seen by Wired:

At its peak, the high was just over a third of the websites; it has now dropped down closer to a quarter. Within a smaller pool of the most prominent news outlets, the block rate is still above 50 percent, but it’s down from heights earlier this year of almost 90 percent.

As a reminder that AI image generators’ training data tends to include peoples’ regular smartphone photos, try entering an iPhone-like picture file name into the prompt field for Flux1.1 Pro, as this person did.

I got some similar results when I tried prompts like “IMG_4001.JPG” with its predecessor, Flux.1, a model that drives xAI’s Grok-2 image generation.

If you signed up for Google’s waitlisted feature that lets you ask Gemini questions to surface photos and videos, you might be getting it soon, as 9to5Google reports that the feature seems to be going live for some who’ve joined the list.

If you’re not already on the waitlist, you can jump in the queue by signing up on Google’s site.

From Bloomberg:

At an all-hands meeting last week, Altman told employees the company is not looking to replace [Mira] Murati in the CTO role for now, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mira Murati announced last week that she was leaving OpenAI.

Google rolled out ads in its AI-powered search overviews today, but it doesn’t appear the system is any better at understanding what it’s actually saying. As flagged on Threads, it suggests turning off the forward collision-avoidance feature on the Kia Telluride by disabling electronic stability control, which is a dangerous idea for most drivers. (I did the same search and got a similar AI search summary.)

The AI overview appears to be getting this idea from a caution notice in the Kia EV6 manual, which, well, there’s a reason I asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai if he thought language was the same as intelligence the last time he was on Decoder.

This obviously digitally altered photo of Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), posted the morning after the vice presidential debate, is supposed to signify... masculinity? Strength? I don’t know, honestly.

It’d be a little more convincing if we hadn’t spent two hours looking at the man’s face — and listening to his lies — last night.

Unless Microsoft’s chatbot knows something we don’t, David Attenborough, Ian McKellen, Michael Caine, and Julie Andrews are definitely not dead.

And neither is Star Trek actor William Shatner, for that matter. Perhaps the Copilot overhaul announced yesterday will be better informed.

As part of the big overhaul of Copilot today, Microsoft quietly announced it’s bringing the chatbot to WhatsApp. Intrigued, I gave it a go and asked it a really basic question. The result was all a bit Dutch. I’m now looking forward to it teaching me how to play darts.

If you open up Copilot today on the web you’ll find a teaser for an “updated Copilot” that Microsoft says will be faster, simpler, and more personalized. I exclusively revealed last week in my Notepad newsletter that Microsoft is getting ready to launch a completely redesigned Copilot that will even read you the daily news headlines. Microsoft has also teased that it has some “exciting announcements” coming today.

Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, is teasing some “exciting announcements” from the company today. Microsoft last held a “special event” in New York City in September 2023 that focused on Copilot and Surface hardware. The software giant hasn’t announced a similar event for this year, but something is clearly happening today 👀

The online education platform gave teachers until September 12th to withdraw their consent from the program, which will train AI on their classes. But many didn’t see the notice until it was too late, 404 Media reports:

Instructors are now seeing a grayed-out option in their settings if they didn’t know about the window or would like to opt-out now.

Udemy will offer “annual periods” where teachers will get another chance to opt out, but it’s unclear when it will take place.