James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Microsoft’s AI travel writer advises foodies visiting Canada to fill up at Ottawa’s food bank
Microsoft Corp. has bet big in artificial intelligence, but it may have to spend a little more on human editors to expunge embarrassing and insulting generative AI goofs. Today a user on X, formerly Twitter — and most likely a lot more people — spotted a Microsoft Travel story on its Microsoft Network website titled ...
New York City bans TikTok on government devices over security concerns
New York City today joined a number of states and government agencies in the U.S. by putting its foot down and banning the popular Chinese-owned video app TikTok. Starting today, employees of the city are asked to delete the app and not use it. All agencies are required to have removed it within the next ...
Elon Musk accused of throttling links to competing apps and news sites
X Corp., formerly known as Twitter Inc., reportedly throttled links to websites and applications for which X owner Elon Musk has a particular distaste. The issue has now been resolved, but for a while, when an X user clicked on a link to Meta Platforms Inc.-owned Threads, Facebook or Instagram, there was a five-second delay. ...
X Corp. hit with fine for not turning over data on Donald Trump
X Corp., formerly Twitter Inc., has just been fined $350,000 for contempt of court after the social media giant refused to hand over Donald Trump’s Twitter data to a special counsel investigation. Trump (pictured), who was something of a Twitter addict during his presidency, with a massive following, was banned from the platform after being ...
AI-generated deepfake books were just sold on Amazon under a real author’s name
In what is surely a sign of things to come, an author this week talked about her struggle to get Amazon.com Inc. to take down books that had been written with generative artificial intelligence but were being sold under her name. Right now, the generative AI systems available from companies such as Open AI LC ...
Detroit police in deep water after using erroneous facial recognition to arrest pregnant black woman
A Detroit woman who was falsely arrested for carjacking after police used faulty facial recognition technology is now suing the city, it was reported today. This is the third case in Detroit in which an African-American has been falsely arrested after police used the highly controversial technology. Although all the cases expose a serious flaw ...
The company formerly known as Twitter will now allow people to hide their blue checkmarks
X Corp., formerly Twitter Inc., announced today that if users so choose, they can hide what they might now feel are their embarrassing checkmarks. Twitter Blue, which was originally launched before Elon Musk took over Twitter as an ad-free service with some other paid-for inducements, supplanted Twitter’s verification badge altogether once Musk got his feet ...
Want advice from Abraham Lincoln? Meet Meta’s new multi-persona AI chatbots
Meta Platforms Inc. is on the verge of releasing a tribe of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots that each have an individual persona, and if today’s report in the Financial Times is correct, one of those personas will sound something like Abraham Lincoln. FT said it spoke to three people who have seen what’s going on inside ...
X is going after an anti-hate speech organization over ‘baseless’ claims
Twitter Inc., recently renamed to X Corp., is threatening to take legal action against a British anti-hate speech and misinformation nonprofit organization for allegedly making untrue claims that hurt the company’s business. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, which has offices in London and Washington D.C., today posted screenshots of a letter showing ...
Study: Facebook might not be as politically polarizing as we think
A series of studies published today tells us that Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms do not explicitly divide people politically, and tweaking the algorithms won’t change someone’s political attitudes. The four studies, two of which were published in the science journals Nature and Science, address the concern regarding so-called “echo chambers” on social media platforms dividing ...