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☆ John Carmack: Virtual reality titan is leaving Meta
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-18 | by ( Ramishah Maruf | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

New York CNN —Video game pioneer John Carmack is resigning from his consulting position at Meta with “mixed feelings” about the “end of his decade in VR,” he announced in a Facebook post Friday. Carmack stuck around through the company’s more than $10 billion investment into virtual reality technology. He was an early advocate for virtual reality, thought it was not uncommon for him to criticize Meta. Meta bought Oculus VR in 2014 for $2 billion, and now sells the Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets. “I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover,” Carmack said.

☆ Is AI art really art? This California gallery says yes
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-20 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

CNN Business —As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly popular for generating images, a question has roiled the art world: Can AI create art? August Kamp's 2022 digital image "new experimental version, state of the art" is part of the exhibit "Artificial Imagination" at bitforms gallery in San Francisco. The exhibit features art made with and inspired by OpenAI's AI image generation system DALL-E. For Sacks, generative AI systems like DALL-E are “just another tool”, he said, noting that throughout history artists have used past work to create new work in various ways. Marina Zurkow used DALL-E to help create her 2022 piece "A Questionable Tale (#1)".

☆ Elizabeth Holmes scheduled to be sentenced on Friday
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

CNN —Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos who was convicted of fraud earlier this year, is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday morning by a judge in court in San Jose, California. The list includes Holmes’ partner, Billy Evans, many members of Holmes’ and Evans’ families, early Theranos investor Tim Draper, and Sen. Cory Booker. Elizabeth Holmes (L), founder of Theranos, and her partner, Billy Evans (R), leave the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building and US Courthouse in San Jose, California, on October 17, 2022. “The effects of Holmes and Balwani’s fraudulent conduct were far-reaching and severe,” federal prosecutors wrote in a November court filing regarding Holmes’ sentencing. “Elizabeth Holmes is never going to run a big company again,” he said.

☆ Elon Musk is planning a subtle change to Twitter that could make it harder to stop the bots
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

CNN Business —Elon Musk has been saying for months that he wants to stamp out spam and fake accounts on Twitter, but a subtle change he’s planning to make to the platform could complicate that goal. In a tweet this week, Musk said Twitter will stop showing notations such as “Twitter for iPhone” and “Twitter Web App” at the bottom of tweets, which are intended to indicate where users’ messages originate. He said researchers can consider it along with other factors, such as the specific tweets accounts post, the time frames in which the posts went up, and the sources they quote. Many academic researchers use Twitter’s API to study bots and misinformation on the social network. If a tweet was marked “Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter”, for instance, it would be clear that the post had been published both on Twitter and social network Mastodon.

☆ Twitter battles wave of impersonators after launching new paid verification system
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-09 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

CNN Business —Twitter appears to be battling a wave of celebrity and corporate impersonators on its platform who have quickly gamed the company’s new paid verification system, hours after its launch. CNN has confirmed multiple verified Twitter accounts have been suspended by the platform after other users posted screenshots showing misleading content from the accounts. The fake verified accounts had posed as former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Nintendo of America, the basketball player LeBron James, the software company Valve and others. Before being suspended, the impostor Nintendo account tweeted an image of the video game character Mario giving the viewer the middle finger. In an interview with CNN, Whelan said he managed to impersonate Trump by repurposing an old, spare account.

☆ What to know about Mastodon, the Twitter alternative
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-08 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

I am one of these Mastodon newcomers, trying it out of curiosity and because Twitter has felt increasingly toxic over time. Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/ShutterstockBut while it can be exciting to seek out a new social network, it can be tricky, too. Mastodon and Twitter have some similarities, yet they’re quite different — both in how they work and how they’re operated. I have mostly taken the more manual route by searching on Twitter for the word “Mastodon” to pull up people I follow who have added Mastodon usernames to their Twitter profile names. There also isn’t a Mastodon equivalent to Twitter’s quote-tweet feature, where you can repost another user’s post and append your own thoughts to it.

☆ With Twitter in chaos, Mastodon is on fire
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-05 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

CNN Business —In the week since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the number of people signing up for a small social network called Mastodon has surged. Ascannio/Adobe StockRochko said in an interview Thursday that Mastodon gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Musk took control of Twitter. And she pointed out that Twitter users may migrate to Mastodon in particular because its user experience is pretty similar to Twitter’s. But unlike on Twitter, where I can easily interact with a large audience, my Mastodon network is less than 100 followers. A social-media escape hatchI’m not quite ready to close my Twitter account, though; for me, Mastodon is a sort of social-media escape hatch in case Twitter becomes unbearable.

One year and billions of dollars later, the so-called metaverse still feels years away, if it ever manifests at all. And Meta’s flagship social VR app Horizon Worlds can feel like a ghost town (albeit a ghost town with laser tag). Meta’s latest headset, the Quest Pro, is its first effort at combining the immersiveness of VR with the real world. The VR headset market is still tiny compared to, say, an established gadget market like console video games. A visitor to the 2022 Tokyo Game Show tests the Meta Quest 2 VR headset.

☆ These artists found out their work was used to train AI. Now they’re furious
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-21 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +13 min

AI Image/Stable DiffusionHanson, who’s based in McMinnville, Oregon, is one of many professional artists whose work was included in the data set used to train Stable Diffusion, which was released in August by London-based Stability AI. Once available only to a select group of tech insiders, text-to-image AI systems are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. A piece by illustrator Daniel Danger that was included in the training data behind the Stable Diffusion AI image generator. But removing pictures of an artist’s work from a dataset wouldn’t stop Stable Diffusion from being able to generate images in that artist’s style. Hanson, for her part, has no problem with her art being used for training AI, but she wants to be paid.

☆ Texas sues Google over alleged ‘indiscriminate’ biometric data collection
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-20 | by ( Brian Fung | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

CNN Business —Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Google on Thursday, alleging the tech giant had violated the state’s biometric privacy law by “indiscriminately” collecting voiceprints and facial recognition data from users and non-users of the company’s products without their consent. “Of course, this is only visible to you and you can easily turn off this feature if you choose and we do not use photos or videos in Google Photos for advertising purposes. The company has also allegedly listened in on Texans “without regard to whether a speaker has consented to Google’s indiscriminate voice printing,” according to the complaint. In February, the state claimed a now-shuttered Facebook photo-tagging tool — which was the subject of a $650 million biometric privacy settlement in Illinois last year — had also been a violation of the Texas biometric law. Texas has multiple lawsuits ongoing against Google, including two other consumer protection cases and an antitrust case targeting Google’s dominance in digital advertising.

☆ Meta’s newest VR headset is impressive. Here’s why you probably won’t buy it
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-11 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +10 min

CNN Business —Meta’s newest virtual-reality headset, the Meta Quest Pro, is a slick, powerful device. Buyers can pre-order the Quest Pro as of Tuesday, and it will ship out on October 25. Meta's latest VR headset, the Quest Pro, is aimed at business users and costs $1500. Updated hand controllersThe headset is also more of a mixed-reality headset than a VR headset, as it isn’t meant to block out all ambient light all the time. The Quest Pro headset has sensors that can track your eyes and facial expressions.

☆ Meta’s headset makeover yields a $1,500 toy in search of a purpose
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-11 | by ( Allison Morrow | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

On Tuesday, Meta unveiled its latest effort in that mission, the Meta Quest Pro headset. But it costs $1,500 — nearly four times that of the company’s cheapest Quest 2 headset. Wages are up an estimated 5% this year in manufacturing — that’s not keeping up with inflation, but it is in line with the national average. “But by and large our manufacturing jobs today are high tech.”Bottom line: The labor story in America remains one where the narrative of recent history doesn’t quite hold. In most downturns, we’ve seen manufacturing decline, giving it a bad rap as a job that’s going extinct.

☆ Meta is using AI to generate videos from just a few words
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-29 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

Now, Meta researchers are taking AI a step further: they’re using it to concoct videos from a text prompt. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook on Thursday about the research, called Make-A-Video, with a 20-second clip that compiled several text prompts that Meta researchers used and the resulting (very short) videos. Even so, it demonstrates a fresh direction AI research is taking as systems become increasingly good at generating images from words. If the technology is eventually released widely, though, it will raise many of the same concerns sparked by text-to-image systems, such as that it could be used to spread misinformation via video. As with massive, popular AI systems that generate images from text, the researchers pointed out that their text-to-image AI model was trained on internet data — which means it learned “and likely exaggerated social biases, including harmful ones,” the researches wrote.

☆ Amazon’s $999 dog-like robot is getting smarter
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-28 | by ( Samantha Murphy Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

And Astro will now work with a real-time subscription service from Amazon’s smart-doorbell company, Ring, to provide security monitoring to small and medium-sized businesses. Smarter TVsAmazon unveiled a new series of Fire TV Omni QLED models – the first Fire TV to ship with Dolby Vision IQ. Kindle ScribeFifteen years after launching the Kindle, Amazon is introducing a higher-end version that also serves as a writing device. Its Echo Auto device ($54.99) is now smaller, sleeker and can be more easily mounted in a vehicle. A smarter Echo Show 15Amazon also announced a number of software updates coming to its existing Echo Show 15, a device the company said is especially popular in the kitchen.

☆ This guy is using AI to make a movie — and you can help decide what happens next
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-25 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

“Salt” is the brainchild of Fabian Stelzer. He makes voices mostly using AI voice generation tools such as Synthesia or Murf. Many of Stelzer's "Salt" images use terms like "35mm" and "sci-fi." Just as AI image generators have already unnerved some artists, Stelzer’s experiment offers an early example of how disruptive AI systems could be to moviemaking. Released in 2016 and starring “Silicon Valley” actor Thomas Middleditch, it’s thought to be the first film that used AI to write its script.

☆ AI won an art contest, and artists are furious
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-03 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

CNN Business —Jason M. Allen was almost too nervous to enter his first art competition. Courtesy Jason M. AllenAllen’s winning image looks like a bright, surreal cross between a Renaissance and steampunk painting. Midjourney is one of a growing number of such AI image generators — others include Google Research’s Imagen and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. “This is the literal definition of ‘pressed a few buttons to make a digital art piece’,” another Tweeted. Allen is glad the debate over whether AI can be used to make art is capturing so much attention.

☆ Meta's problem is that the metaverse is supremely uncool
▼ + stars: | 2022-08-25 | by ( Allison Morrow | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

The biggest problem: It just doesn’t look cool. To get into the metaverse in the first place, you first have to strap on a bulky headset like Meta’s $400 Quest device. VR avatars also need to respond in real time to the ways we move our faces and bodies, which requires powerful computing and graphics processing. Still, FedEx Ground is refusing to offer the kind of across-the-board financial relief to its contractors that Patton and others are seeking. “We recognize that current economic conditions are posing new challenges,” FedEx Ground said in a statement.

☆ AI made these stunning images. Here’s why experts are worried
▼ + stars: | 2022-06-30 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +11 min

OpenAI and Google have pointed to a few ways the technology might be commercialized, such as for editing images or creating stock images. An image created by an AI system called Imagen, built by Google Research. GoogleThe bias in these AI systems presents a serious issue, experts told CNN Business. It’s not what we see in the movies.”An image created by an AI system called DALL-E 2, built by OpenAI. Some researchers are thinking about how it might be possible to reduce bias in these types of AI systems, but still use them to create impressive images.

☆ Harassment is a problem in VR, and it’s likely to get worse
▼ + stars: | 2022-05-05 | by ( Rachel Metz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +12 min

But there’s already one problem that some users have reported cropping up in the nascent space: harassment and other unwanted behavior, particularly in social VR apps and games, including in Horizon Worlds. It’s hard to tell how widespread VR harassment is, but a December report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate gives a sense of its prevalence in VRChat. In hopes of stopping and preventing bad behavior, social VR apps tend to offer a number of common tools that people can use. There aren’t established normsAn overarching challenge in addressing VR harassment is the lack of agreement over what even counts as harassment in a virtual space versus a physical one. “Because it’s immersive, the embodied feature of social VR, those behaviors kind of feel realistic, which means it could feel damaging because it feels physical, the threat,” Freeman said.

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