EU sticks with timeline for AI rules
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"I've seen, indeed, a lot of reporting, a lot of letters and a lot of things being said on the AI Act. Let me be as clear as possible, there is no stop the clock. There is no grace period. There is no pause," Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told a press conference.
"We have legal deadlines established in a legal text. The provisions kicked in February, general purpose AI model obligations will begin in August, and next year, we have the obligations for high risk models that will kick in in August 2026," he said. ...
See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/artificial-intelligence-rules-go-ahead-no-pause-eu-commission-says-2025-07-04/
Kaleidoscope Vision: Seeing the Multifaceted Future of AI
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The Caltech team designed an experimental method specifically to avoid these issues. Rather than testing algorithms using images of real people collected from random sources, the researchers used AI to generate a dataset of realistic human face images that were systematically varied across age, gender, race, facial expression, lighting, and pose. They also created a dataset of text prompts that described social perception based on findings from psychological research (e.g., “a photo of a friendly person,” and “a photo of dishonest person.”)
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Alvarez also serves as co-director of Caltech’s Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP) along with Professor of Philosophy Frederick Eberhardt. One of the center’s functions is to connect efforts across the Institute that aim to understand and steer the responsible implementation of AI. The LCSSP also provides scientific expertise to inform policy on pressing societal issues such as the implications of biotechnology as well as climate change and sustainability.
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“We’re at this tipping point,” Alvarez adds. “If attitudes become polarized along partisan lines, it makes it very, very difficult for policymakers to effectively deal with AI.” Eberhardt says the LCSSP aims to build a bridge between Caltech researchers and policymakers “that will ensure a more secure integration of these two communities.”
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“I am a Russianist, and I often raise with students this question about the development of AI technologies that enable autocratic regimes to track and persecute political dissidents,” Dennison says. “I point out to them how important it is to acknowledge the dark side of this advancement and encourage them to be clear about the larger implications of what they want to work on. It’s fine to argue that the positives outweigh the negatives. But, as with nuclear technology in the 20th century, there are important debates around these questions. It can be an uncomfortable conversation, but it is necessary.”
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While the ethical debates, regulatory landscapes, and shifting social realities of AI may be complex, Perona says Caltech students and scientists are well equipped to work through them together while also continuing to tackle the hardest scientific questions. “There are questions that the AI industry is not interested in because there is no market,” he says. “We can work on them here at Caltech. In fact, this is probably the best place on Earth to do it.”
See the full story here: https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/kaleidoscope-vision?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=magazine-spring25&utm_source=weekly-newsletter&utm_content=&utm_term=
A movement is needed to ensure AI serves humanity and democracy
Five years ago, I witnessed Beijing’s crackdowns devastate my hometown of Hong Kong. We lost free speech, political rights and freedom from fear. Friends were jailed for years because of peaceful advocacy and I fled to Britain as a political refugee.
I learned a valuable lesson: When power is concentrated and unchecked, democracy dies. Power takes different forms – some exercised by governments within national remits, others by corporations whose influence expands across jurisdictions and scales infinitely. We should be concerned about both, especially the latter, as corporate power is more subtle, yet equally influential. ...
Ample research has shown the dangers of letting our future depend on the goodwill of a few companies – it’s time for advocacy. Democratic activists, free speech advocates, campaigners for environmental and racial justice, AI safety researchers and many others should unite and raise our concerns with one voice. ...
See the full story here: https://www.democracywithoutborders.org/37130/a-movement-is-needed-to-ensure-ai-serves-humanity-and-democracy/
Inside Wikipedia’s AI Revolt
Before generative AI, if you wanted an inexpensive way to build out lots of content, you launched a wiki.
You’d spin up a site—broad or niche—and throw the doors open for anyone to edit. ... The catch with wikis is that when you hand the reins to the crowd, keeping quality consistent becomes a serious challenge. In Wikipedia’s case, that’s meant taking stewardship to heart, relying on a small army of editors—mostly volunteers—to manage millions of community-driven pages. ...
The newsrooms getting this right—Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post—deploy AI thoughtfully and deliberately: team by team, sometimes even user by user, doing the hard work of winning people over before introducing new experiences. ...
See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91360473/wikipedia-ai-revolt-media
AI Wars Hit Film School: Profs Teach It, Students Rage. ‘What About Our Jobs?’
At USC, Dodge and other top programs, the next generation fears being left in the dust, alarming the elders: 'Participate in the revolution or sit it out' ...
... In Siegel’s experience, “people within the industry” or “people who have established careers,” she says, “tend to be a lot more interested in AI.” Siegel adds: “They feel a lot more secure in their positions and see AI as a tool that they can use to then move forward.”
Her peers, however, are a different story. In the wake of her short film being announced in the fall, about 30 of her classmates “said really nasty things to my face,” Siegel says. Then, in April, she posted her thesis on Instagram, setting off another wave of peers and strangers who commented or DM’d hateful epithets. ...
Siegel grew up in both New York and Los Angeles — her father worked in cybersecurity and early AI development, while her mother was a writer who later earned a master’s degree in AI ethics. During her time at Chapman, Siegel worked for two different AI startups in entertainment and acted as a freelance AI consultant, helping the likes of an Emmy-winning director and a three-time Tony Award-winning producer sharpen their pitch decks. ...
For this piece, I spoke with the people training Hollywood’s next generation in their roles also teaching classes at top schools ... as well as students caught in the middle, to find out what AI is really doing to entry-level jobs, who’s adapting, and who’s getting left behind. ...
See the full story here: https://theankler.com/p/ai-wars-hit-film-school-profs-teach
Suspected AI band Velvet Sundown hits 550K Spotify listeners in weeks
On Spotify, all songwriting and production credits go solely to the band, a rare practice in today’s collaborative industry. There is no producer. There are no tour dates. There is no record label. ...
“The Velvet Sundown aren’t trying to revive the past,” the band’s “verified artist” profile reads on Spotify. “They’re rewriting it. They sound like the memory of a time that never actually happened.” ...
Photos of the band are bathed in amber light and have an almost airbrushed, artificial quality. But what stands out even more is the vacant, lifeless expression on each musician’s face. ...
See the full story here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/velvet-sundown-ai-band-spotify-500k-listeners-20400778.php
Meta restructures its AI unit under ‘Superintelligence Labs’
... Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI, will lead the group as chief AI officer. He’ll partner with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who will oversee Meta’s AI products and applied research, per Bloomberg. ...
In addition, Zuckerberg has also been able to lure 11 new AI researchers from competitors, according to the report, including some previously unreported hires such as Google DeepMind principal researcher Pei Sun and Anthropic engineer Joel Pobar.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/30/meta-restructures-its-ai-unit-under-superintelligence-labs/
As nations build ‘sovereign AI,’ open-source models and cloud computing can help, experts say
- Open-source AI models and cloud computing are helping to democratize the AI world, panelists at CNBC’s East Tech West 2025 in Thailand said.
- This will allow nations to build “sovereign AI,” which refers to a nation’s ability to control its own AI technologies, data, and related infrastructure, ensuring it matches its unique needs.
See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/01/nations-build-sovereign-ai-open-source-models-cloud-computing.html
Cloudflare blocks AI scrapers by default
The rules of AI training have just changed. By default, Cloudflare will now block AI scrapers across the millions of websites it protects (roughly 24% of all sites on the internet). Any AI company seeking to crawl a Cloudflare-hosted site will have to obtain explicit permission from the content owner. This is the first infrastructure-level defense of its kind. ...
Cloudflare’s Chief Strategy Officer, Stephanie Cohen, framed the new policy as a way to restore balance to the internet economy. The company reports more than one million domains already opted in before the default block was enacted. ...
See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/07/cloudflare-blocks-ai-scrapers-by-default-launches-paywall-for-bots/
Every AI enhancement revealed by Prime Video
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Here's the full list of everything AI-powered that Prime Video reportedly showed off at the Prime Engage event:
- Broadcast enhancements
- Recaps of live events
- AI-suggested search topics
- Language dubbing
- AI-powered overlays for particular sporting events
- AI-enhanced content resolution and picture quality
- AI-curated ads
See the full story here: https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/prime-video/prime-video-just-revealed-several-generative-ai-features-including-one-i-dont-like
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