From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

Meta has a suggestion for folks like me who forgot to go outside and look at the Northern Lights on Thursday night: just use AI to fake it! But Threads users who replied to Meta’s idea, posted along with three AI-generated images of the Aurora Borealis Meta last night, seem to disagree.

Here’s Meta’s post:

Humans have automated tasks for centuries. Now, AI companies see a path to profit in harnessing our love of efficiency, and they’ve got a name for their solution: agents. 

AI agents are autonomous programs that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with environments with little human input, and they’re the focus of every major company working on AI today. Microsoft has “Copilots” designed to help businesses automate things like customer service and administrative tasks. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian recently outlined a pitch for six different AI productivity agents, and Google DeepMind just poached OpenAI’s co-lead on its AI video product, Sora, to work on developing a simulation for training AI agents. Anthropic released a feature for its AI chatbot, Claude, that will let anyone create their own “AI assistant.” OpenAI includes agents as level 2 in its 5-level approach to reach AGI, or human-level artificial intelligence.

Google initially rolled out Gemini Live, its conversational AI voice chat, in just one language: English. Today, the company is expanding the service to a handful of other languages, starting with French, German, Portuguese, Hindi, and Spanish. And while support for these languages does appear to be imminent for a lot of people, the company is still couching promises of other Gemini features with fuzzy “coming weeks” timelines.

Google expects that the languages starting to roll out today will be available to all users “in a couple of weeks.” As for other languages, Google says it will have more than 40 languages over “the coming weeks,” which is harder to pin down. Still, Google’s timeline from announcement to full rollout for Gemini Live has been unusually swift: it was revealed with the Pixel 9 series in mid-August as a subscriber-only feature. Just a month later, the company opened it up as a free feature for all Android users.

Dozens of X posts containing images of Mario, including ones generated by xAI’s Grok AI tool, were removed due to a takedown notice filed by a company called Tracer. The company apparently used AI to identify the images and serve takedown notices on behalf of Nintendo, hitting AI-generated images as well as some fan art.

The Verge’s Tom Warren received an X notice that some content from his account was removed following a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint issued by a “customer success manager” at Tracer. Tracer offers AI-powered services to companies, purporting to identify trademark and copyright violations online. The image in question, shown above, was a Grok-generated picture of Mario smoking a cigarette and drinking an oddly steaming beer.

If you’re on LinkedIn, then you should know that the social network has, without asking, opted accounts into training generative AI models. 404Media reports that LinkedIn introduced the new privacy setting and opt-out form before rolling out an updated privacy policy saying that data from the platform is being used to train AI models. As TechCrunch notes, it has since updated the policy.

LinkedIn writes on a help page that it uses generative AI for purposes like writing assistant features. You can revoke permission by heading to the Data privacy tab in your account settings and clicking on “Data for Generative AI Improvement” to find the toggle. Turn it to “off” to opt-out.

Google is rolling out its Gemini Live voice chat mode to all Android users for free. You can access the conversational AI chatbot on Android through the Gemini app or its overlay.

Google first announced Gemini Live during its Pixel 9 launch event last month, but it has only been available to Gemini Advanced subscribers until now. Similar to ChatGPT’s voice chat feature, you can ask Gemini Live questions aloud and even interrupt it mid-sentence. There are also several different voices you can choose from.

OpenAI is releasing a new model called o1, the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have been trained to answer more complex questions, faster than a human can. It’s being released alongside o1-mini, a smaller, cheaper version. And yes, if you’re steeped in AI rumors: this is, in fact, the extremely hyped Strawberry model.

For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a “preview” to emphasize how nascent it is.

Google has unlisted an impressive Gemini demo video it posted last December that seemed remarkably conversational. BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD), an ad industry watchdog, inquired whether the video “accurately depicts the performance of Gemini in responding to user voice and video prompts.”

Google chose to end the inquiry by ending its promotion of the video that showed Gemini quickly responding to various spoken prompts, such as identifying parts of drawings and creating a geography game on the fly.

This weekend, ESPN began publishing AI-generated recaps of women’s soccer games, with more sports to come. It’s using Microsoft AI to write each story, with humans only involved in reviewing each recap for “quality and accuracy.” ESPN says these stories will “augment,” rather than detract from, its other content — but needless to say, people have feelings about it.

It’s not that ESPN is masquerading AI work as that of humans. In fact, each story advertises that it’s written by “ESPN Generative AI Services,” and ESPN includes a note at the bottom of each article about how the recap is based on a transcript from the sporting event.

Microsoft is holding a OneDrive digital event on October 8th that will cover the “latest innovations in AI across Microsoft 365 and OneDrive.” It’s the second annual event after Microsoft held a similar stream last year to introduce a big new design update for the cloud storage service, AI Copilot integration, and lots more.

This year, Microsoft is promising to announce “what’s coming for Copilot in OneDrive,” alongside enhancements to the OneDrive mobile app and an “improved photos experience.” The event will also cover OneDrive features across work and personal accounts.

Volkswagen has announced it’s rolling out its improved in-car AI voice assistant, IDA, with both locally processed and cloud-based responses from ChatGPT and other models, starting on September 6th. The first cars getting the feature will be the 2025 Jetta and Jetta GLI and the 82kWh battery version of the 2024 ID.4, with other cars getting it later this year.

Drivers in cars that support ChatGPT will need to be subscribed to VW’s Plus Speech with AI service to get it. Down the line, the company says most of its 2025 models will get the new AI voice assistance features, including the ID.4 and ID Buzz (which will both get it free for three years) and the GTI, Golf R, and Tiguan (free for one year). Jetta, Jetta GLI, and Taos owners will need to subscribe on their own. Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport models won’t get ChatGPT until 2026, Volkswagen says.

OpenAI says that more than 200 million people use ChatGPT each week, as first reported by Axios. OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson confirmed the number to The Verge, which is now double the 100 million weekly active users OpenAI reported last November.

Additionally, Christianson says that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI’s products, while API usage has doubled following the release of the company’s cheaper and smarter model GPT-4o Mini.