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AI

The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet Sue OpenAI and Microsoft (theverge.com) 58

The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet have filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement and the removal of copyright information while training AI models. The Verge reports: The publications said ChatGPT "at least some of the time" reproduces "verbatim or nearly verbatim copyright-protected works of journalism without providing author, title, copyright or terms of use information contained in those works." According to the plaintiffs, if ChatGPT trained on material that included copyright information, the chatbot "would have learned to communicate that information when providing responses."

Raw Story and AlterNet's lawsuit goes further (PDF), saying OpenAI and Microsoft "had reason to know that ChatGPT would be less popular and generate less revenue if users believed that ChatGPT responses violated third-party copyrights." Both Microsoft and OpenAI offer legal cover to paying customers in case they get sued for violating copyright for using Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise. The lawsuits say that OpenAI and Microsoft are aware of potential copyright infringement. As evidence, the publications point to how OpenAI offers an opt-out system so website owners can block content from its web crawlers.
The New York Times also filed a lawsuit in December against OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT faithfully reproduces journalistic work. OpenAI claims the publication exploited a bug on the chatbot to regurgitate its articles.
Windows

Windows Security Updates Could Come With Fewer Reboots Beginning Later This Year 72

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is already testing Windows 11 24H2, this fall's big new Windows release. The company has already demonstrated a few new features, like 80Gbps USB4 support and Sudo for Windows, and the new version could also give a significant refresh to the Windows installer for the first time since the Windows Vista days. But there's one big update you might not notice at all. Late last week, Microsoft released "servicing updates" with no new features to Windows Insiders in the Dev and Canary channels. The updates were "designed to test [Microsoft's] servicing pipeline for Windows 11." It's pretty common for Insiders to get these kinds of updates-that-exist-only-to-test-the-update-process, but the twist here is that PCs with Virtualization Based Security (VBS) enabled could apply the update without rebooting.

Sources speaking to Windows Central say this isn't a fluke -- Microsoft reportedly intends to use a Windows Server feature called hotpatching to deliver more Windows 11 security updates without requiring a reboot, making it easier to stay up to date without disrupting whatever you're doing. You'll still need to reboot "every few months" -- Microsoft's documentation says a reboot is needed roughly once every three months, though it can happen more often than that for unanticipated zero-day patches and others that can't be fixed via hotpatching. The Arm versions of Windows 11 also won't get the feature for another year or so, according to Windows Central.
AI

OpenAI Says New York Times 'Hacked' ChatGPT To Build Copyright Lawsuit (reuters.com) 32

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss parts of the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against it, arguing that the newspaper "hacked" its chatbot ChatGPT and other AI systems to generate misleading evidence for the case. From a report: OpenAI said in a filing in Manhattan federal court on Monday that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through "deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI's terms of use."

"The allegations in the Times's complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards," OpenAI said. "The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI's products." OpenAI did not name the "hired gun" who it said the Times used to manipulate its systems and did not accuse the newspaper of breaking any anti-hacking laws.

Cloud

Google Steps Up Microsoft Criticism, Warns of Rival's Monopoly in Cloud (reuters.com) 110

Alphabet's Google Cloud on Monday ramped up its criticism of Microsoft's cloud computing practices, saying its rival is seeking a monopoly that would harm the development of emerging technologies such as generative AI. From a report: "We worry about Microsoft wanting to flex their decade-long practices where they had a lot of monopoly on the on-premise software before and now they are trying to push that into cloud now," Google Cloud Vice President Amit Zavery said in an interview. "So they are creating this whole walled garden, which is completely controlled and owned by Microsoft, and customers who want to do any of this stuff, you have to go to Microsoft only," he said.

"If Microsoft cloud doesn't remain open, we will have issues and long-term problems, even in next generation technologies like AI as well, because Microsoft is forcing customers to go to Azure in many ways," Zavery said, referring to Microsoft's cloud computing platform. He urged antitrust regulators to act. "I think regulators need to provide some kind of guidance as well as maybe regulations which prevent the way Microsoft is building the Azure cloud business, not allow your on-premise monopoly to bring it into the cloud monopoly," Zavery said.

AI

'Every PC Is Going To Be an AI PC' 102

During a briefing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Meghana Patwardhan, VP of Commercial Mobility at Dell Technology, told The Register that while the immediate future would consist of two worlds -- one with AI hardware and one without -- "every PC is going to be an AI PC in the longer term." From the report: In terms of new hardware, Dell used the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona to show off new versions of its Surface-baiting Latitude 7350 convertible -- "the world's most serviceable commercial detachable," according to the company -- and its workstation-class Precision 3680 tower. Other devices in the Precision range include mobile workstations and the 3280 Compact Form Factor PC. Dell was also determined to present itself as a leader in hybrid working with the Premier Wireless ANC headset, replete with AI-based noise cancellation.

Duringt our talk, AI was never far from the lips of Dell's spokespeople as the company talked up the energy efficiency and future-proofing it saw in dedicated AI hardware, such as Neural Processing Units (NPUs) that are increasingly cropping up in CPUs. To illustrate the point, Dell boatsed about how much more efficient background blurring is on video calls when AI hardware is running compared to when it isn't. Hopefully, Microsoft will soon deliver a version of Windows capable of demonstrating a use for AI hardware that is more than hiding distractions in the background.
Further reading: AI PCs To Account for Nearly 60% of All PC Shipments by 2027, IDC Says
Google

Google Says Microsoft Offered To Sell Bing To Apple in 2018, But Search-quality Issues Got in the Way (cnbc.com) 21

Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018, Google said in a court filing earlier this month. The document, from Google's antitrust case against the U.S. Justice Department, was unsealed on Friday. From a report: In the filing earlier this month, Google argued that Microsoft pitched Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 about making Bing the default in Apple's Safari web browser, but each time, Apple said no, citing quality issues with Bing. "In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition," Google wrote in the filing.

The Justice Department said in its own newly unsealed filing that Microsoft has spent almost $100 billion on Bing over 20 years. The Windows and Office software maker launched Bing in 2009, following search efforts under the MSN and Windows Live brands. Today Bing has 3% global market share, according to StatCounter. In the fourth quarter, Microsoft generated $3.2 billion from search and news advertising, while Google search and other revenue totaled $48 billion. Google said in its filing that when Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, emphasizing gains in Bing's quality, Microsoft offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.

Microsoft

Microsoft Strikes Deal With Mistral in Push Beyond OpenAI (ft.com) 13

Microsoft has struck a deal with French AI startup Mistral as it seeks to broaden its involvement in the fast-growing industry beyond OpenAI. From a report: The US tech giant will provide the 10-month-old Paris-based company with help in bringing its AI models to market. Microsoft will also take a minor stake in Mistral, although the financial details have not been disclosed. The partnership makes Mistral the second company to provide commercial language models available on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. Microsoft has already invested about $13 billion in San Francisco-based OpenAI, an alliance that is being reviewed by competition watchdogs in the US, EU and UK. Other Big Tech rivals, such as Google and Amazon, are also investing heavily in building generative AI -- software that can produce text, images and code in seconds -- which analysts believe has the capacity to shake up industries across the world. WSJ adds: On Monday, Mistral plans to announce a new AI model, called Mistral Large, that Mensch said can perform some reasoning tasks comparably with GPT-4, OpenAI's most advanced language model to date, and Gemini Ultra, Google's new model. Mensch said his new model cost less than 20 million euros, the equivalent of roughly $22 million, to train. By contrast OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said last year after the release of GPT-4 that training his company's biggest models cost "much more than" $50 million to $100 million.
Robotics

Bezos, Nvidia Join OpenAI in Funding Humanoid Robot Startup (msn.com) 11

OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos are all part of a pack of investors in a business "developing human-like robots," reports Bloomberg, "according to people with knowledge of the situation..."

At the startup — which is named "Figure" — engineers "are working on a robot that looks and moves like a human. The company has said it hopes its machine, called Figure 01, will be able to perform dangerous jobs that are unsuitable for people and that its technology will help alleviate labor shortages." Figure is raising about $675 million in a funding round that carries a pre-money valuation of roughly $2 billion, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Through his firm Explore Investments LLC, Bezos has committed $100 million. Microsoft is investing $95 million, while Nvidia and an Amazon.com Inc.-affiliated fund are each providing $50 million... Other technology companies are involved as well. Intel Corp.'s venture capital arm is pouring in $25 million, and LG Innotek is providing $8.5 million. Samsung's investment group, meanwhile, committed $5 million. Backers also include venture firms Parkway Venture Capital, which is investing $100 million, and Align Ventures, which is providing $90 million...

The AI robotics industry has been busy lately. Earlier this year, OpenAI-backed Norwegian robotics startup 1X Technologies AS raised $100 million. Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI is developing a humanoid robot called Phoenix. And Tesla Inc. is working on a robot called Optimus, with Elon Musk calling it one of his most important projects. Agility Robotics, which Amazon backed in 2022, has bots in testing at one of the retailer's warehouses.
Bloomberg calls the investments in Figure "part of a scramble to find new applications for artificial intelligence."
Unix

Remembering How Plan 9 Evolved at Bell Labs (theregister.com) 36

jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The Register has been running a series of articles about the evolution of Unix, from humble beginnings to the transition to Plan9. There is a short discussion of why Plan9 and its successors never really took off (despite being vastly superior to microkernels), along with the ongoing development of 9Front.
From the article: Plan 9 was in some way a second implementation of the core concepts of Unix and C, but reconsidered for a world of networked graphical workstations. It took many of the trendy ideas of late-1980s computing, both of academic theories and of the computer industry of the time, and it reinterpreted them through the jaded eyes of two great gurus, Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and their students) — arguably, design geniuses who saw their previous good ideas misunderstood and misinterpreted.

In Plan 9, networking is front and center. There are good reasons why this wasn't the case with Unix — it was being designed and built at the same time as local area networking was being invented. UNIX Fourth Edition, the first version written in C, was released in 1973 — the same year as the first version of Ethernet.

Plan 9 puts networking right into the heart of the design. While Unix was later used as the most common OS for standalone workstations, Plan 9 was designed for clusters of computers, some being graphical desktops and some shared servers...

Because everything really is a file, displaying a window on another machine can be as simple as making a directory and populating it with some files. You can start programs on other computers, but display the results on yours — all without any need for X11 or any visible networking at all.

This means all the Unixy stuff about telnet and rsh and ssh and X forwarding and so on just goes away. It makes X11 look very overcomplicated, and it makes Wayland look like it was invented by Microsoft.

Education

New York Will Start Requiring Credentials for All CS Teachers (govtech.com) 48

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In 2012, Microsoft President Brad Smith unveiled Microsoft's National Talent Strategy, which called for K-12 Computer Science education for U.S. schoolchildren to address a "talent crisis [that] endangers long-term growth and prosperity". The following year, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org burst onto the scene to deliver that education to schoolchildren, with Smith and execs from tech giants Google and Amazon on its Board of Directors (and Code.org donors Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as lead K-12 CS instructors).

Using a mix of paid individuals, universities and other organizations that it helped to fund, along with online self-paced courses, Code.org boasts it quickly "prepared more than 106,000 new teachers to teach CS across grades K-12" through its professional learning programs. "No computer science experience required," Code.org teases prospective K-12 teachers (as does Code.org partner Amazon Future Engineer). Code.org organized K-12 CS teacher workforce expansion workshops.

However, at least one state is taking steps to put an end to the practice of rebranding individuals as K-12 CS teachers in as little as a day, albeit with a generous 10-year loophole for currently uncertified K-12 CS teachers. "At the start of the 2024-2025 academic year," reports GovTech, "the New York State Education Department (NYSED) is honing its credential requirements for computer science teachers, though the state has yet to join the growing list of those mandating computer science instruction for high school graduation. According to the department's website, as of Sept. 1, 2024, educators who teach computer science will need either a Computer Science Certificate issued by the state Board of Regents or a Computer Science Statement of Continued Eligibility (SOCE), which may be given to instructors who don't have the specific certificate but have nonetheless taught computer science since Sept. 1, 2017....

"The NYSED website says the SOCE is a temporary measure that will be phased out after 10 years, at which point all computer science instructors will need a Computer Science Certificate."

Windows

Windows 11 Users Herded Toward 23H2 Via Automatic Upgrade (theregister.com) 87

Windows 11 users still clinging to the past are to be dragged into a bright, 23H2-shaped future by Microsoft, whether they want to or not. From a report: Microsoft has added a notification to its Release Health dashboard warning Windows 11 users that it is time for the beatings automatic upgrades to begin. "We are starting to update eligible Windows 11 devices automatically to version 23H2."

As for what eligible means, according to Microsoft, this is "Windows 11 devices that have reached or are approaching end of servicing." Support for Windows 11 21H2 came to an end last year on October 10, 2023, and version 22H2 is due to end on October 8, 2024. Win 11 23H2 itself will endure until November 11, 2025, or just after the plug gets pulled on Windows 10. The update comes shortly after Microsoft quashed the last of its compatibility holds in Windows 11 23H2, which affected customers attempting to use the Co-pilot preview with multiple monitors. Icons tended to move unexpectedly between monitors.

XBox (Games)

Microsoft's Gaming CEO Says Xbox Won't Go All-Digital Just Yet (pcmag.com) 78

It's no surprise that the broader tech industry has largely moved away from physical disks to digital subscription-based models. But Microsoft's Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says Xbox isn't trying to do away with disks just yet -- even though making disk slots could become challenging in the future. From a report: "Our strategy does not hinge on people moving all-digital," Spencer said in a recent interview with Game File. "Getting rid of physical, that's not a strategic thing for us." While Spencer implied that disk slots have become somewhat old-school at this point, Xbox consoles will continue to offer both disk-compatible and diskless options if gamers still want to choose. Xbox hasn't confirmed yet whether the previously leaked diskless Xbox refresh of the Series X console is still coming, though.

"Gaming consoles themselves have kind of become the last consumer electronic device that has a drive," Spencer conceded, calling it a "real issue." Because so few manufacturers are still making physical disk slots, it's possible making consoles with them could become cost prohibitive in the future. "When you think about cogs that we're going to go put in a console -- and as you have fewer suppliers and fewer buyers -- the cost of the drive does have an impact," Spencer said.

Intel

Microsoft Will Use Intel To Manufacture Home-Grown Processor (yahoo.com) 30

Intel has landed Microsoft as a customer for its made-to-order chip business, marking a key win for an ambitious turnaround effort under Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger. From a report: Microsoft plans to use Intel's 18A manufacturing technology to make a forthcoming chip that the software maker designed in-house, the two companies said at an event Wednesday. They didn't identify the product, but Microsoft recently announced plans for two homegrown chips: a computer processor and an artificial intelligence accelerator.

Intel has been seeking to prove it can compete in the foundry market, where companies produce custom chips for clients. It's a major shift for the semiconductor pioneer, which once had the world's most advanced chipmaking facilities and kept them to itself. These days, Intel is racing to catch up with companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which leads the foundry industry. Microsoft, meanwhile, is looking to secure a steady supply of semiconductors to power its data-center operations -- especially as demand for AI grows. Designing its own chips also lets Microsoft fine-tune the products to its specific needs. "We need a reliable supply of the most advanced, high-performance and high-quality semiconductors," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. âoeThat's why we are so excited to work with Intel."

Microsoft

Microsoft Publisher Books Its Retirement Party for 2026 (theregister.com) 26

Microsoft is confirming plans to deprecate its Publisher application in 2026. From a report: This writer has fond memories of Microsoft Publisher, which started life in 1991 as a desktop publisher for Windows 3.0. While alternatives existed in the form of Ventura Publisher, Timeworks, and later QuarkXPress, Microsoft Publisher was a useful tool to write newsletters. Unlike Word, Publisher was focused on layout and page design. Though it lacked many of the features of its competitors, it was responsible for some genuinely horrendous designs, and was popular due to its cheap price.

Despite not finding much favor with professionals, Microsoft Publisher continued to be updated over the years. Microsoft Publisher 97 was the first to turn up in the Microsoft Office suite, and the most recent edition, released in 2021, is available as part of Microsoft 365. However, all good things -- and Publisher -- must come to an end. Microsoft has warned that the end is nigh for its venerable designer. "In October 2026, Microsoft Publisher will reach its end of life," the company said. "After that time, it will no longer be included in Microsoft 365, and existing on-premises suites will no longer be supported. Until then, support for Publisher will continue, and users can expect the same experience as today."

Microsoft

Microsoft Develops AI Server Gear To Lessen Reliance on Nvidia (reuters.com) 3

Microsoft is developing a new network card that could improve the performance of its Maia AI server chip and potentially reduce the company's reliance on chip designer Nvidia, The Information reported on Tuesday. Reuters: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tapped Pradeep Sindhu, who co-founded networking gear developer Juniper Networks, to spearhead the network card effort, the report said citing a person with knowledge of the matter. Microsoft acquired Sindhu's server chip startup, Fungible, last year. The new network card is similar to Nvidia's ConnectX-7 card, which the chip developer sells alongside its graphic processor units (GPUs), the report added. The equipment could take more than a year to develop and, if successful, could lessen the time it takes for OpenAI to train its models on Microsoft servers as well as make the process less expensive, according to the report.
AI

AI Not Hyped Enough, Says Microsoft Exec (indiatimes.com) 133

Puneet Chandok, Microsoft India and South Asia head, at an event this week: "People say AI is overhyped, but I think it's not hyped enough. The next generation who will use this in the next few years will have a much higher bar on what technology can do for them. So how you build it for that generation, how you build it for that future will be really interesting to see. AI is truly a general purpose technology, which can change everything that we do," he added.
Microsoft

Microsoft Fixes Edge Browser Bug That Was Stealing Chrome Tabs and Data 49

An anonymous reader shared an news report: Microsoft has fixed an issue where its Edge browser was again misbehaving, this time by automatically importing browsing data and tabs from Chrome without consent. I personally experienced the bug last month, after I rebooted my PC for a regular Windows update and Microsoft Edge automatically opened with the Chrome tabs I was working on before the update. I asked Microsoft repeatedly to explain why this behavior had occurred for myself and many other Windows users, but the company refused to comment. Microsoft has now quietly issued a fix in the latest Microsoft Edge update.

Here's how Microsoft describes the fix: "Edge has a feature that provides an option to import browser data on each launch from other browsers with user consent. This feature's state might not have been syncing and displaying correctly across multiple devices. This is fixed."
Biotech

What Happens After Throughput to DNA Storage Drives Surpasses 2 Gbps? (ieee.org) 35

High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019.

Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. "Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data," while "funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices." The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way... For a DNA drive to compete with today's archival tape drives, it must be able to write about 2 gigabits per second, which at demonstrated DNA data storage densities is about 2 billion bases per second. To put that in context, I estimate that the total global market for synthetic DNA today is no more than about 10 terabases per year, which is the equivalent of about 300,000 bases per second over a year. The entire DNA synthesis industry would need to grow by approximately 4 orders of magnitude just to compete with a single tape drive. Keeping up with the total global demand for storage would require another 8 orders of magnitude of improvement by 2030. But humans have done this kind of scaling up before. Exponential growth in silicon-based technology is how we wound up producing so much data. Similar exponential growth will be fundamental in the transition to DNA storage...

Companies like DNA Script and Molecular Assemblies are commercializing automated systems that use enzymes to synthesize DNA. These techniques are replacing traditional chemical DNA synthesis for some applications in the biotechnology industry... [I]t won't be long before we can combine the two technologies into one functional device: a semiconductor chip that converts digital signals into chemical states (for example, changes in pH), and an enzymatic system that responds to those chemical states by adding specific, individual bases to build a strand of synthetic DNA. The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device... The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money...

At the same time, advances in DNA synthesis for DNA storage will increase access to DNA for other uses, notably in the biotechnology industry, and will thereby expand capabilities to reprogram life. Somewhere down the road, when a DNA drive achieves a throughput of 2 gigabases per second (or 120 gigabases per minute), this box could synthesize the equivalent of about 20 complete human genomes per minute. And when humans combine our improving knowledge of how to construct a genome with access to effectively free synthetic DNA, we will enter a very different world... We'll be able to design microbes to produce chemicals and drugs, as well as plants that can fend off pests or sequester minerals from the environment, such as arsenic, carbon, or gold. At 2 gigabases per second, constructing biological countermeasures against novel pathogens will take a matter of minutes. But so too will constructing the genomes of novel pathogens. Indeed, this flow of information back and forth between the digital and the biological will mean that every security concern from the world of IT will also be introduced into the world of biology...

The future will be built not from DNA as we find it, but from DNA as we will write it.

The article makes an interesting point — that biology labs around the world already order chemically-synthesized ssDNA, "delivered in lengths of up to several hundred bases," and sequence DNA molecules up to thousands of bases in length.

"In other words, we already convert digital information to and from DNA, but generally using only sequences that make sense in terms of biology."
AI

Can Robots.txt Files Really Stop AI Crawlers? (theverge.com) 97

In the high-stakes world of AI, "The fundamental agreement behind robots.txt [files], and the web as a whole — which for so long amounted to 'everybody just be cool' — may not be able to keep up..." argues the Verge: For many publishers and platforms, having their data crawled for training data felt less like trading and more like stealing. "What we found pretty quickly with the AI companies," says Medium CEO Tony Stubblebin, "is not only was it not an exchange of value, we're getting nothing in return. Literally zero." When Stubblebine announced last fall that Medium would be blocking AI crawlers, he wrote that "AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers."

Over the last year, a large chunk of the media industry has echoed Stubblebine's sentiment. "We do not believe the current 'scraping' of BBC data without our permission in order to train Gen AI models is in the public interest," BBC director of nations Rhodri Talfan Davies wrote last fall, announcing that the BBC would also be blocking OpenAI's crawler. The New York Times blocked GPTBot as well, months before launching a suit against OpenAI alleging that OpenAI's models "were built by copying and using millions of The Times's copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more." A study by Ben Welsh, the news applications editor at Reuters, found that 606 of 1,156 surveyed publishers had blocked GPTBot in their robots.txt file.

It's not just publishers, either. Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, WikiHow, WebMD, and many other platforms explicitly block GPTBot from accessing some or all of their websites.

On most of these robots.txt pages, OpenAI's GPTBot is the only crawler explicitly and completely disallowed. But there are plenty of other AI-specific bots beginning to crawl the web, like Anthropic's anthropic-ai and Google's new Google-Extended. According to a study from last fall by Originality.AI, 306 of the top 1,000 sites on the web blocked GPTBot, but only 85 blocked Google-Extended and 28 blocked anthropic-ai. There are also crawlers used for both web search and AI. CCBot, which is run by the organization Common Crawl, scours the web for search engine purposes, but its data is also used by OpenAI, Google, and others to train their models. Microsoft's Bingbot is both a search crawler and an AI crawler. And those are just the crawlers that identify themselves — many others attempt to operate in relative secrecy, making it hard to stop or even find them in a sea of other web traffic.

For any sufficiently popular website, finding a sneaky crawler is needle-in-haystack stuff.

In addition, the article points out, a robots.txt file "is not a legal document — and 30 years after its creation, it still relies on the good will of all parties involved.

"Disallowing a bot on your robots.txt page is like putting up a 'No Girls Allowed' sign on your treehouse — it sends a message, but it's not going to stand up in court."
AI

Microsoft President: 'You Can't Believe Every Video You See or Audio You Hear' (microsoft.com) 67

"We're currently witnessing a rapid expansion in the abuse of these new AI tools by bad actors," writes Microsoft VP Brad Smith, "including through deepfakes based on AI-generated video, audio, and images.

"This trend poses new threats for elections, financial fraud, harassment through nonconsensual pornography, and the next generation of cyber bullying." Microsoft found its own tools being used in a recently-publicized episode, and the VP writes that "We need to act with urgency to combat all these problems."

Microsoft's blog post says they're "committed as a company to a robust and comprehensive approach," citing six different areas of focus:
  • A strong safety architecture. This includes "ongoing red team analysis, preemptive classifiers, the blocking of abusive prompts, automated testing, and rapid bans of users who abuse the system... based on strong and broad-based data analysis."
  • Durable media provenance and watermarking. ("Last year at our Build 2023 conference, we announced media provenance capabilities that use cryptographic methods to mark and sign AI-generated content with metadata about its source and history.")
  • Safeguarding our services from abusive content and conduct. ("We are committed to identifying and removing deceptive and abusive content" hosted on services including LinkedIn and Microsoft's Gaming network.)
  • Robust collaboration across industry and with governments and civil society. This includes "others in the tech sector" and "proactive efforts" with both civil society groups and "appropriate collaboration with governments."
  • Modernized legislation to protect people from the abuse of technology. "We look forward to contributing ideas and supporting new initiatives by governments around the world."
  • Public awareness and education. "We need to help people learn how to spot the differences between legitimate and fake content, including with watermarking. This will require new public education tools and programs, including in close collaboration with civil society and leaders across society."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article


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