James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Google employees say Bard AI was pushed out despite ethical flaws
A group of Google LLC employees working on Bard says the company rushed to release the chatbot in spite of obvious ethical issues, according to a report today by Bloomberg. Google may have been slow out of the blocks in terms of what has been an explosion of generative artificial intelligence trained on large language ...
Reddit to charge for access to its API to counter free data scraping by AI companies
As big tech races to develop the most advanced generative artificial intelligence chatbots, Reddit Inc. today announced its treasure trove of data will no longer come free. The company said it will now start charging for access to its application programming interface, an API that has been used by AI companies such as Microsoft Corp.’s ...
Twitter will start labeling tweets that have been restricted for hateful speech
Twitter Inc. announced today that it will now effectively let people know their tweet has been “shadowbanned” when it has violated the company’s Hateful Conduct policy. In a blog post, Twitter said that under Twitter 2.0, it wants the platform to remain safe but not to be a hive of censorship. The company said it ...
In surprise interview with BBC, Elon Musk says owning Twitter at times has been ‘painful’
Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk sat with the BBC on Tuesday night at the company’s offices in San Francisco in what turned out to be a fairly candid interview. In the 90 minutes that the BBC spoke to Musk, just about all of the hot topics were covered. He talked about the massive layoffs at ...
Substack releases a platform that looks a whole lot like Twitter
Substack Inc. today launched Notes, a platform where Substack creators can interact with subscribers and where the entire experience looks very much like Twitter. The differences are only in the language. Users don’t post tweets; they post notes. There’s no such thing as a retweet, but there is a restack. Everything else looks like a ...
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says chat AI is coming to search… at some point
Conversational artificial intelligence is coming to the world’s largest search engine, according to the Google LLC boss, but when that happens, he’s not prepared to say. In an interview published by the Wall Street Journal today, Pichai allayed fears that large language model AI, known as LLMs, such as the very popular ChatGPT, will put much ...
NPR hits back as Twitter hands it a ‘state-affiliated media’ label
The National Public Radio media service hit back at Twitter Inc. today after the social media platform made the surprise move of labeling it as state-affiliated media. NPR, which is headquartered in Washington D.C., has more than 1,000 public radio stations in the U.S. It was established as an act of Congress and does get ...
TikTok fined in UK for misusing data of minors
Britain’s data protection authority today hit the beleaguered Chinese social media company TikTok with a $15.9 million (£12.7m) fine, accusing the app of breaching data protection rules. The Information Commissioner’s Office, or ICO, said TikTok had allowed about 1.4 million children under the age of 13 to use the app. The firm was said to ...
In GQ interview, Apple’s Tim Cook talks about a mixed reality future while warning of tech addiction
In a lengthy profile interview with GQ, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook talks about everything from his day-to-day work life at Apple Park to his company’s big plans for augmented reality to why he thinks parents should keep a keen eye on how their children use digital technology. In what is a sometimes personal, ...
BuzzFeed’s new AI-generated travel articles are a dystopian bad dream
BuzzFeed Inc. this week started publishing travel guides that were written with the help of artificial intelligence, and the results weren’t exactly mind-blowing. It comes as no surprise that the internet media company is pushing AI-generated content. In January, BuzzFeed announced that this would be the case. After stating it would explore the possibility of ...