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Some also formed ethical AI teams and invested in oversight groups. And Facebook-parent Meta suggested that it might cut staff working in non-technical roles as part of its latest round of layoffs. “With that outsourcing, I feel like they had this comfort level that they could cut some of the trust and safety team, but Twitch is very unique,” the former employee said. It invested heavily in content moderation, public policy and an oversight board to weigh in on tricky content issues to address rising concerns about its platform. Tech leaders may also be grappling with the fact that even as they built up their trust and safety teams in recent years, their reputation problems haven’t really abated.
New York CNN —A group of Twitter vendors on Tuesday filed a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the company has failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in overdue bills. The company alleged that it began contacting Twitter in November about overdue and pending invoices for services rendered under a contract signed in March 2022. Twitter owes the captioning company around $42,000, according to the complaint. YES Consulting, which said it provided leadership training to Twitter employees per an agreement signed in March 2022, alleges that Twitter owes it approximately $49,000 for services provided between August and November last year. The vendors are seeking damages in the amount each company is allegedly owed by Twitter, as well as interest.
New York CNN —Some VIP Twitter users woke up on Saturday expecting to have lost their coveted blue verification check marks in a previously announced purge by Elon Musk. But one high-profile account did lose its blue check over the weekend: the main account for the New York Times, which had previously told CNN it would not pay for verification. Although the New York Times’ main account lost its blue check, its other accounts, such as those for its arts, travel and books content, remained verified. Musk has been threatening to take away “legacy” blue check marks from users verified under Twitter’s old system since shortly after he bought Twitter last fall. In early November, Twitter launched the option for people paying for its Twitter Blue subscription service to receive blue checks.
Welcome to the era of viral AI generated 'news' images
  + stars: | 2023-04-02 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com   time to read: +8 min
None of these things actually happened, but AI-generated images depicting them did go viral online over the past week. The images ranged from obviously fake to, in some cases, compellingly real, and they fooled some social media users. There are also concerns that AI-generated images could be used for harassment, or to further drive divided internet users apart. Eliot Higgins, founder and creative director of the investigative group Bellingcat, posted fake images of former President Donald Trump to Twitter last week. Many of the recent viral AI-generated images were created by a tool called Midjourney, a less than year-old platform that allows users to create images based on short text prompts.
None of these things actually happened, but AI-generated images depicting them did go viral online over the past week. The images ranged from obviously fake to, in some cases, compellingly real, and they fooled some social media users. There are also concerns that AI-generated images could be used for harassment, or to further drive divided internet users apart. Eliot Higgins, founder and creative director of the investigative group Bellingcat, posted fake images of former President Donald Trump to Twitter last week. Many of the recent viral AI-generated images were created by a tool called Midjourney, a less than year-old platform that allows users to create images based on short text prompts.
Google (GOOGL), which for years ranked as the top company to work for in the United States, laid off thousands of workers by e-mail. During her early years there, she worked in marketing and became known as the “The Bard of Google” for the internal emails she sent celebrating the company’s culture. Google employee affected by January layoffs“The problem was, suddenly, you didn’t work for a company that was sending stuff to space or building autonomous cars,” Rout said. Hundreds of Google employees in Switzerland staged a walkout last week to protest layoffs, partly out of frustration with the lack of transparency. About a month before the January layoffs, one former employee said Google painted “You Belong” on one of the walls in their working area.
New York CNN —YouTube on Friday said it would restore former President Donald Trump’s channel, more than two years after suspending it following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. YouTube initially suspended Trump’s channel after the Capitol riot, saying a video on the channel had violated its policy against inciting violence. YouTube had also disabled comments underneath videos on Trump’s channel, which appear to have been restored on Friday. As more platforms restore Trump’s account, some are also stressing he continues to face restrictions on what he can post, with the potential to be suspended again. YouTube said in its statement that Trump’s “channel will continue to be subject to our policies, just like any other channel on YouTube.” YouTube operates a strike policy under which users can receive escalating suspensions based on the number and severity of their violations.
The concept is similar to Reddit or Discord, but a departure from how Meta’s other platforms function. If Meta’s new platform were decentralized, it could allow third parties to build apps and features into the platform, potentially giving users experiences beyond what Meta itself might build. Meta declined to comment beyond its statement, including in response to questions about the new platform’s potential features or a timeline for launch. Many of them had an early jump in users following Musk’s takeover at Twitter, but have since struggled to gain widespread adoption. But its growth has slowed in recent months, in part as users struggle with the somewhat less straightforward and user-friendly nature of a decentralized platform.
Entities connected to Elon Musk and his companies have reportedly been acquiring thousands of acres of land in Texas with the hope of starting a town where his employees could live and work, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal Thursday. (CNN has not reviewed all of the land and other records cited in the Journal report.) By building out a company town of his own, Musk could take that approach even further. Incorporating a town might also give Musk, who has been known to clash with state and federal regulators, more say over how things are run. The Journal reported that Musk’s team has discussed incorporating the town in Bastrop County.
New York CNN —Elon Musk publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. Haraldur Thorleifsson, an Iceland-based Twitter senior director, tweeted at Musk that access to his computer had been cut off nine days earlier, when Twitter reportedly laid off some 200 employees. It’s not the first time Musk, one of the richest men in the world, has publicly mocked employees at Twitter, the company he bought for $44 billion last year. Hundreds of former Twitter employees are now taking legal action against the company, alleging broken severance promises and, in some cases, discrimination, including against disabled employees. Following the exchange with Musk, Thorleifsson said in a tweet that Twitter’s HR head had confirmed he is no longer employed at the company.
In an interview with CNN, Facebook head Tom Alison said the platform is testing bringing messaging capabilities back to the Facebook app so users can more easily share content without having to use the Messenger app. The test comes as Facebook looks to beat back competition from TikTok by bolstering its position both as a platform to discover new content and discuss it. The goal was clear: to keep users engaged longer and help the platform better compete with TikTok and its steady stream of recommended content. The platform last month reported that it hit 2 billion daily active users in the December quarter. For some creators, for example, Facebook has become a place to create groups of fans and hold conversations beyond the content they share to Instagram and TikTok, Alison said.
Outage tracker site DownDetector showed more than 8,000 Twitter outage reports around noon on Monday. For users who were able to access the platform, “Twitter API” was trending as people tweeted about the issues. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.”In a separate tweet on Monday, Musk said: “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Other users were met with a “Welcome to Twitter!” message as if they had just joined the platform. Three weeks ago, Twitter users encountered various issues with the platform, including the inability to tweet, send direct messages or follow new accounts.
Twitter now reportedly has fewer than 2,000 employees following more cuts late last month, down from around 7,500 before Musk took over. CNN“We were on the Twitter-coaster, the Elon Musk chapter, for seven months,” Ali said. De Caires is one of the former Twitter employees taking legal action against the company following mass layoffs after Musk took over. Jeff Chiu/APInstead, Twitter employees say they heard very little from their new leader in the days immediately after his takeover. Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan is representing around 1,500 former Twitter employees taking legal action against the company following Musk's takeover.
Meta’s Oversight Board said in the wake of the report that Facebook had failed to provide it with crucial details about the system. The board — an entity financed by Meta but which says it operates independently — urged the company to “radically increase transparency” about the cross-check system and how it works. On Friday, Meta said it would implement in part or in full many of the more than two dozen recommendations the Oversight Board made for improving the program. Meta will also refine its process for temporarily removing or hiding potentially harmful content while it’s pending additional review. Meta’s Oversight Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Meta’s planned policy changes.
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Hyosub Shin/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution/ZUMA Press WireFacebook-parent Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Snap have each shuttered offices or announced plans to cut back on real estate, according to recent corporate announcements, filings and local news reports. But residents also had cautious optimism about the benefits Microsoft promised to the community, according to Hope. Hope’s community isn’t alone in confronting the whiplash of Silicon Valley’s real estate pullback. An office sits vacant on October 27, 2022 in San Francisco, California. The US Census Bureau reports an estimated 35% of employees in San Francisco and San Jose continue to work from home.
CNN —Microsoft’s public demo last week of an AI-powered revamp of Bing appears to have included several factual errors, highlighting the risk the company and its rivals face when incorporating this new technology into search engines. At the Bing demo at Microsoft headquarters, the company showed off how integrating artificial intelligence features from the company behind ChatGPT would empower the search engine to provide more conversational and complex search results. When asked, “What were Meta’s fourth quarter results?” the Bing AI feature gave a response that said, “according to the press release,” and then listed bullet points appearing to state Meta’s results. But Bing stated information that appeared to be attributed to the article that was, in fact, not actually there. For example, Bing said one crib had a “water-resistant mattress pad,” but that information was listed nowhere in the article.
Some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January, according to estimates from Pathmatics, based on data running through January 25. As a result of the pullback, monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through January 25, from around $127 million to just over $48 million, according to the data. After initially clashing with advertisers, Musk now appears to be trying to woo them back to the platform. Some advertisers also complained that the Twitter employees they previously worked with had been terminated by Musk, causing confusion. Even among the top advertisers that remain, many have dramatically reduced their ad spending on the platform, according to Pathmatics data.
CNN Business —An entire generation of internet users has approached search engines the same way for decades: enter a few words into a search box and wait for a page of relevant results to emerge. Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries. “We have even more exciting, AI-enabled innovations in the works that will change the way people search, work and play. These models are trained on vast troves of online data in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. Microsoft and Google executives have acknowledged some of the potential issues with the new AI tools.
This is going to be the year of “generative AI” the way 2012 was the year of Instagram. (Yes, Bing still exists and Microsoft hopes AI can make it relevant again for the first time ever.) Generative AI is the technology that underpins ChatGPT, the chatbot that’s gotten everyone in the content-generation biz (hello!) But Google, Microsoft and their rivals are still bullish. “We have even more exciting, AI-enabled innovations in the works that will change the way people search, work and play.”
Twitter users briefly unable to tweet, send messages
  + stars: | 2023-02-08 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com   time to read: 1 min
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Seattle CNN Business —Microsoft’s Bing search engine has never made much of a dent in Google’s dominance in the more than 13 years since it launched. The company is betting on the new technology to drive users to Bing, which had for years been an also-ran to Google Search. Google on Monday unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to keep pace with Microsoft and the success of ChatGPT. I took Bing for a spin at a press event at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters Tuesday. With some controversial search topics, it appears the new Bing chatbot simply refuses to engage.
Seattle CNN —Microsoft on Tuesday is set to hold a mystery event at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, weeks after it confirmed plans to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Microsoft (MSFT) has not announced the topic of the event, which kicks off at 1 p.m. Excited for the event tomorrow.”On Monday, Microsoft publicly confirmed the event shortly after its online search rival Google (GOOGL) announced plans to roll out its own artificial intelligence tool similar to ChatGPT in the coming weeks. Many have speculated the AI technology behind ChatGPT could cause a massive shake-up in the online search industry. On Monday, Google unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.
But it’s premature to say that Covid is no longer an economic issue when long Covid has such a significant effect on America’s workforce, economists and health care officials say. Long Covid, which stems from a Covid-19 infection, is considered a chronic illness that is sometimes debilitating. As many as 30% of Americans, about 23 million people, develop long Covid after a Covid infection, said the US Department of Health and Human Services in November. “Long Covid has harmed the workforce,” said the report, compiled by the New York State Insurance Fund. Caregiving for those suffering from Covid or long Covid is also affecting the labor imbalance, said Giacomo Santangelo, an economics professor at Fordham University.
New York CNN —A California jury on Friday began deliberations in a trial over whether Elon Musk is liable for losses experienced by Tesla shareholders following his controversial “funding secured” tweet from 2018. Musk had spoken to executives of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund about the funding he would need to take Tesla private. Tesla (TSLA) shares initially climbed 11% on the day of Musk’s original “funding secured” tweet, but they never reached that promised $420 level, reaching a high that day of $387.46. Elon Musk waiting for Court to begin in a California courtroom during the Tesla shareholder lawsuit trial on February 3. The lead plaintiff in the shareholder lawsuit, Glen Littleton, testified last month that he lost more than 75% of his investments following Musk’s “funding secured” tweet.
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