Thomson Reuters scores early win in AI copyright battles in the US
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The media and technology company filed a lawsuit against Ross Intelligence — a now-defunct legal research firm — in 2020, arguing they had used materials from Thomson Reuters’ own legal platform Westlaw to train an AI model without permission.
Judge Stephanos Bibas of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision Tuesday that affirmed Ross Intelligence was not permitted under U.S. copyright law to use the company’s content in order to build a competing platform. ...
In his summary judgment, Bibas said that “none of Ross’s possible defenses holds water” and ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters on the issue of “fair use.” ...
See the full story here: https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-reuters-4a127c5b7e8bb76c84499fe12ad643c8
Is AI Making Us Dumber?
A new study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University suggests that over-reliance on generative AI may erode critical thinking skills. In other words: if you don’t use it, you lose it.
Researchers surveyed 319 knowledge workers across 936 AI-assisted tasks and found a troubling trend: the more users trusted AI-generated outputs, the less cognitive effort they applied. Said differently, confidence in AI correlates with diminished analytical engagement.
This is a textbook example of the automation paradox—offloading cognitive tasks to AI can make humans worse at them. Participants who blindly accepted AI’s suggestions reported weaker critical thinking skills, while skeptics remained more analytical, actively refining AI-generated content.
Another key finding: AI-assisted work tends to be more homogenous. Instead of injecting personal insight, many users defaulted to AI-generated solutions, especially under time pressure. Workers in high-stakes roles were more likely to scrutinize AI output, but those facing tight deadlines let AI take the wheel. This is one of my biggest concerns—AI-driven homogeneity could fast-track us to monoculture. ...
Shelly Palmer's 2/11/25 post.
This Is What Big Tech Was Trying to Do to Us at the Super Bowl
... AI, as expressed here, is all about making you feel good. ...
The ads came in a long tradition of what might be called the Super Bowl’s tech-normalization movement, in which frontiers foreign or fraught are made safe by companies introducing them to us at our most guard-down moment: while we snack on chips hanging with friends. From using a Mac in 1984 to shopping online in 2000 to investing in crypto in 2022, our screens on this day are filled with what Silicon Valley wants us to embrace next.
In 2025 that something is AI, and the message came in emotional packaging that emphasized the utility while downplaying the hazards. It was, to be generous, a mixed bag. ...
See the full story with embedded video of the ads here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/super-bowl-2025-commercials-ai-artificial-intelligence-technology-1236131819/
Trump’s AI ambition and China’s DeepSeek overshadow an AI summit in Paris
... The event aims to address how to harness artificial intelligence’s potential so that it benefits everyone, while containing the technology’s myriad risks. ...
What’s at stake?
More than two years after ChatGPT ‘s debut, generative AI continues to make astounding advances at breakneck speed. The technology that powers all-purpose chatbots is transforming many aspects of life with its ability to spit out high-quality text, images or video, or carry out complex tasks.
The 2023 summit in the U.K. resulted in a non-binding pledge by 28 nations to tackle AI risks. A follow-up meeting hosted by South Korea last year secured another pledge to set up a network of public AI safety institutes to advance research and testing. ...
But this time organizers are expanding the discussion to more countries, and widening the debate to a range of other AI-related topics. Like previous editions, this summit won’t produce any binding regulation. ...
A public-interest partnership named “Current AI” is to be launched with an initial $400 million investment. The initiative aims at raising $2.5 billion over the next five years for the public-private partnership involving governments, businesses and philanthropic groups that will provide open-source access to databases, software and other tools for “trusted” AI actors, according to Macron’s office. ...
“Trump is against the very idea of global governance,” Reiners said. “It’s one thing to get countries to agree that AI should have guardrails and that AI safety is something worth caring about. But they’ve widened the scope to talk about the future of work and the environment and inclusivity and so on — a whole range of concepts. So it’s hard to imagine getting a widespread agreement on such a broad range of subjects.”
See the full story here: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-france-ai-trump-deepseek-86109ba21f9e3ccc744f23cc74ff8a17#
(MIT Student Profile) Aligning AI with human values
... An MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) scholar, Lorvo looks closely at how AI might automate AI research and development processes and practices. A member of the Big Data research group, she’s investigating the social and economic implications associated with AI’s potential to accelerate research on itself and how to effectively communicate these ideas and potential impacts to general audiences including legislators, strategic advisors, and others. ...
According to Lorvo, companies on AI’s frontier continue to push boundaries, which means we’ll need to implement effective policies that prioritize human safety without impeding research. ...
Lorvo invests her time outside the classroom in creating memorable experiences and fostering relationships with her classmates. “I’m fortunate that there’s space to balance my coursework, research, and club commitments with other activities, like weightlifting and off-campus initiatives,” she says. “There are always so many clubs and events available across the Institute.” ...
See the full story here: https://news.mit.edu/2025/audrey-lorvo-aligning-ai-human-values-0204
Anthropic Challenges Hackers to Jailbreak Its AI Model
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During internal testing, the classifier successfully blocked 95% of 10,000 synthetic jailbreak attempts, compared to just 14% for an unprotected Claude model. However, the system carries a 23.7% computational overhead, increasing costs and energy consumption. It also mistakenly rejects 0.38% of safe queries, a tradeoff Anthropic deems acceptable.
Despite these advancements, Anthropic acknowledges that no AI safety system is foolproof. The company expects new jailbreak methods to emerge but claims its classifier can quickly adapt to novel threats.
From now until February 10, Anthropic is inviting the public to test its defenses by attempting to bypass the class prompt Claude into generating restricted content on chemical weapons. Successful jailbreaks will be disclosed at the end of the test. ...
See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/02/anthropic-challenges-hackers-to-jailbreak-its-ai-model/
Why Is This C.E.O. Bragging About Replacing Humans With A.I.?
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According to Klarna, the company has saved the equivalent of $10 million annually using A.I. for its marketing needs, partly by reducing its reliance on human artists to generate images for advertising. The company said that using A.I. tools had cut back on the time that its in-house lawyers spend generating standard contracts — to about 10 minutes from an hour — and that its communications staff uses the technology to classify press coverage as positive or negative. Klarna has said that the company’s chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents and that the bot resolves cases an average of nine minutes faster than humans (under two minutes versus 11).
Mr. Siemiatkowski and his team went so far as to rig up an A.I. version of him to announce the company’s third-quarter results last year — to show that even the C.E.O.’s job isn’t safe from automation.
In interviews, Mr. Siemiatkowski has made clear he doesn’t believe the technology will simply free up workers to focus on more interesting tasks. “People say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, there’s going to be new jobs,’” he said on a podcast last summer, before citing the thousands of professional translators whom A.I. is rapidly making superfluous. “I don’t think it’s easy to say to a 55-year-old translator, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to become a YouTube influencer.’” ...
See the full, lengthy story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/business/klarna-ceo-ai.html
The Rise of Digital Icons: Are We Witnessing the Future of Influence?
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Market Insights and Trends
Virtual influencers are at the forefront of several key trends in digital marketing:
1. Personalized Storytelling: These digital beings are becoming vehicles for complex narratives, allowing brands to craft stories that can deeply resonate with specific audience segments.
2. Cross-Platform Engagement: Virtual influencers are not limited to a single platform. Their presence spans social media, gaming, and even virtual reality environments, offering brands multiple touchpoints for engagement.
3. Hybrid Influencers: Some brands are experimenting with hybrid models that blend human and virtual elements to create influencers that offer the authenticity of real people with the control of digital avatars.
4. Sustainability and Ethics: As digital entities, virtual influencers have a reduced environmental impact compared to traditional influencer campaigns, aligning with growing consumer concerns about sustainability.
...
Security Aspects
With the rise of virtual influencers, security remains a critical consideration. Protecting the digital assets and intellectual property of virtual personas is essential to prevent unauthorized use or data breaches.
See the full story here: https://be3.sk/uncategorized-en/the-rise-of-digital-icons-are-we-witnessing-the-future-of-influence/64624/
What Makes Or Breaks A Blockchain: Gavin Wood’s 5 Criteria
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Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, the visionary who coined the very term "Web3" and later built Polkadot, lays out his five key criteria for evaluating a blockchain. ...
Gavin Wood’s 5 Blockchain Criteria
There are hundreds of blockchains in existence, each with its own (more or less) unique technology, use cases, and adoption levels. To cut through the noise, Gavin Wood outlines five fundamental criteria for evaluating a blockchain’s potential:
- Resilience. The backbone of Web3, resilience combines cryptography, decentralization, and game theory to safeguard a blockchain against attacks and ensure long-term stability.
- Performance. More than just scalability, performance measures how efficiently a network processes and finalizes tasks.
- Generality. A blockchain’s capacity to support diverse applications and programmability.
- Accessibility. The ease with which users, developers, applications, and bots can interact with the network.
- Coherence. A system’s ability to maintain fast and consistent communication across its network.
See the full article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/01/31/what-makes-or-breaks-a-blockchain-gavin-woods-5-criteria/
Apple Scraps Work on Mac-Connected Augmented Reality Glasses
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The now-canceled product would have looked like normal glasses but include built-in displays and require a connection to a Mac, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work wasn’t public. An Apple representative declined to comment.
The project had been seen as a potential way forward after the weak introduction of the Apple Vision Pro, a $3,499 model that was too cumbersome and pricey to catch on with consumers. ...
The company had initially wanted the glasses to pair with an iPhone, but it ran into problems over how much processing power the handset could provide. It also affected the iPhone’s battery life. So the company shifted to an approach that required linking up with a Mac computer, which has faster processors and bigger batteries.
But the Mac-connected product performed poorly during reviews with executives, and the desired features continued to change. ...
See the full story here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-scraps-mac-connected-augmented-192513263.html
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