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Category Archives: Search Engines

AI mishaps are surging and now they’re being tracked like software bugs

The Register speaks to the folks behind the AI Incident Database: “Interview – False images of Donald Trump supported by made-up Black voters, middle-schoolers creating pornographic deepfakes of their female classmates, and Google’s Gemini chatbot failing to generate pictures of White people accurately. These are some of the latest disasters listed on the AI Incident… Continue Reading

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

MIT Technology Review – And that’s a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models…The biggest models are now so complex that researchers are studying them as if they were strange natural phenomena, carrying out experiments and trying to… Continue Reading

The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like

Open Culture: “Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week,… Continue Reading

6 updates to Waze to help you get around safely and conveniently

Waze Blog: “Whether it’s highlighting crash-prone roads along a route, displaying road hazards like potholes or showing the closest electric vehicle charging stations, Waze helps drivers navigate more safely and conveniently. Today, we have even more updates to help make your trips safer and more predictable. Thanks to insights from local Waze drivers, community members… Continue Reading

Everything you need to know to prepare for the EU’s AI Act

sifted: “EU lawmakers finally came to an agreement on the AI Act at the end of 2023 — a piece of legislation that had been in the works for years to regulate artificial intelligence and prevent misuses of the technology. Now the text is going through a series of votes before it becomes EU law… Continue Reading

Digital archives: a time machine for the web

Internet Archive Blogs: “In the summer of 2023, the New York Times ran an article titled “Ways You Can Still Cancel Your Federal Student Loan Debt.” The article outlined six ways to cancel student debt, with the final being: “Death This is not something that most people would choose as a solution to their debt burden.”… Continue Reading

Axel Springer vs. Google

Fortune: “Axel Springer is at Google’s throat again. The German news-publishing giant (for which I worked in my days at Politico) has a long history of battling Google over the issue of so-called ancillary copyright fees—payments for carrying snippets of text and thumbnail images in search results. But now it’s waging war on another front:… Continue Reading

10 Reasons You Should Switch From Chrome to Firefox

How To Geek: “Key Takeaways Firefox provides many advantages over Chrome, including being more efficient, so your laptop battery lasts longer. Firefox doesn’t track your internet activity for advertising purposes. Firefox has better privacy controls, including container functionality and VPN, enhancing your privacy and security online. Google Chrome is the most popular web browser by… Continue Reading

Google Chrome’s new AI can finish your sentences for you

The Verge: “Google has started rolling out “Help me write” — an experimental Gemini-powered generative AI feature for its Chrome browser that aims to help users write or refine text based on webpage content. Following the stable release of Chrome M122 on Tuesday, the new writing assistant is now available to try out on Mac… Continue Reading

How Google is killing independent sites like ours

And why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google. “Google regularly launches updates to its algorithm to continuously improve search results quality. Think of these updates as a refresh of the system where rankings change: some websites see an improvement while others see a decline. At HouseFresh,… Continue Reading