From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

Perplexity has launched a major upgrade to its Pro Search AI tool, which it says “understands when a question requires planning, works through goals step-by-step, and synthesizes in-depth answers with greater efficiency.”

Examples on Perplexity’s website of what Pro Search can do include a query asking the best time to see the northern lights in Iceland or Finland. It breaks down its research process into three searches: the best times to see the northern lights in Iceland and Finland; the top viewing locations in Iceland; and the top viewing locations in Finland. It then provides a detailed answer addressing all aspects of the question, including when to view the northern lights in either country and where.

Figma’s new tool Make Designs lets users quickly mock up apps using generative AI. Now, it’s been pulled after the tool drafted designs that looked strikingly similar to Apple’s iOS weather app. Figma CEO Dylan Field posted a thread on X early Tuesday morning detailing the removal, putting the blame on himself for pushing the team to meet a deadline, and defending the company’s approach to developing its AI tools.

In posts on X, Andy Allen, CEO of Not Boring Software, showed just how closely Figma’s Make Designs tool made near-replicas of Apple’s weather app. “Just a heads up to any designers using the new Make Designs feature that you may want to thoroughly check existing apps or modify the results heavily so that you don’t unknowingly land yourself in legal trouble,” Allen wrote.

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have ballooned, according to the company’s latest environmental report, showing how much harder it’ll be for the company to meet its climate goals as it prioritizes AI.

Google has a goal of cutting its planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. But its total greenhouse gas emissions have actually grown by 48 percent since 2019. Last year alone, it produced 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution — a 13 percent year-over-year increase from the year before and roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 that 38 gas-fired power plants might release annually.

On Monday, Meta announced that it is “updating the ‘Made with AI’ label to ‘AI info’ across our apps, which people can click for more information,” after people complained that their pictures had the tag applied incorrectly. Former White House photographer Pete Souza pointed out the tag popping up on an upload of a photo originally taken on film during a basketball game 40 years ago, speculating that using Adobe’s cropping tool and flattening images might have triggered it.

“As we’ve said from the beginning, we’re consistently improving our AI products, and we are working closely with our industry partners on our approach to AI labeling,” said Meta spokesperson Kate McLaughlin. The new label is supposed to more accurately represent that the content may simply be modified rather than making it seem like it is entirely AI-generated.

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), the nonprofit that produces Mother Jones and Reveal, announced on Thursday that it’s suing Microsoft and OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement, following similar actions by The New York Times and several other media outlets.

“OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material,” Monika Bauerlein, CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, said in a statement. “This free rider behavior is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright. The work of journalists, at CIR and everywhere, is valuable, and OpenAI and Microsoft know it.” 

Udio and Suno are not, despite their names, the hottest new restaurants on the Lower East Side. They’re AI startups that let people generate impressively real-sounding songs — complete with instrumentation and vocal performances — from prompts. And on Monday, a group of major record labels sued them, alleging copyright infringement “on an almost unimaginable scale,” claiming that the companies can only do this because they illegally ingested huge amounts of copyrighted music to train their AI models. 

These two lawsuits contribute to a mounting pile of legal headaches for the AI industry. Some of the most successful firms in the space have trained their models with data acquired via the unsanctioned scraping of massive amounts of information from the internet. ChatGPT, for example, was initially trained on millions of documents collected from links posted to Reddit.

The advanced voice mode for ChatGPT that sparked a tussle with Scarlett Johansson was an important element of OpenAI’s Spring Update event, where it also revealed a desktop app for ChatGPT.

Now, OpenAI says it will “need one more month to reach our bar to launch” an alpha version of the new voice mode to a small group of ChatGPT Plus subscribers, with plans to allow access for all Plus customers in the fall. One specific area that OpenAI says it’s improving is the ability to “detect and refuse certain content.”

OpenAI has acquired Rockset, an enterprise analytics startup, to “power our retrieval infrastructure across products,” according to a Friday blog post.

This acquisition is OpenAI’s first where the company will integrate both a company’s technology and its team, a spokesperson tells Bloomberg. The two companies didn’t share the terms of the acquisition. Rockset has raised $105 million in funding to date.

Last week, AI startup Luma posted a series of videos created using its new video-generating tool Dream Machine, which the company describes as a “highly scalable and efficient transformer model trained directly on videos.”

The only problem? At about 57 seconds in, the Dream Machine-generated trailer for Monster Camp — an animated story about furry creatures journeying to a sleepaway camp — features a slightly AI-smudged but still recognizable Mike Wazowski from Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. Many people noticed that multiple characters and its overall aesthetic look borrowed from the franchise, and the questions quickly started pouring in.

So far, generative AI has been mostly confined to chatbots like ChatGPT. Startups like Character.AI and Replika are seeing early traction by making chatbots more like companions. But what happens when you dump a bunch of AI characters into something that looks like Instagram and let them talk to each other?

That’s the idea behind Butterflies, one of the most provocative — and, at times, unsettling — takes on social media that I’ve seen in quite a while. After a private beta period with tens of thousands of users, the app is now available for free in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. There’s no short-term pressure on Butterflies to make money; the six-month-old startup just raised $4.8 million from tech investors Coatue, SV Angel, and others.

You may remember we all had a fun little laugh at Google’s AI search results telling us to put glue in our pizza. Internet legend Katie Notopoulos made and ate a glue pizza. A good time was had by all! Except, whoopsie, Google’s AI is training on our good time.

I will grant the query “how much glue to add to pizza” is an unusual one — but not that unusual given the recent uproar around glue pizza. As spotted by Colin McMillen on Bluesky, if you ask Google how much glue to add to your pizza, the right answer — none! — does not appear. Instead, it cites our girl Katie suggesting you add an eighth of a cup. Whoops!

Google’s latest feature drop for Pixel devices is a big one for people who want to run its AI tech on cheaper phones, folks who constantly misplace their phones, and photographers who want a little more control.

The latest update, which starts rolling out today, will make the mobile-ready Gemini Nano model that was already available to Pixel 8 Pro owners available as an option on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8A phones, too. Apple just announced a slew of new AI features for its platforms, but similar to Google’s initial announcement that it eventually walked back, Apple has restricted Apple Intelligence to people with the latest iPhone 15 Pro.

Even Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t sure the company can fully stop AI hallucinations. In an interview with The Washington Post, Cook said he would “never claim” that its new Apple Intelligence system won’t generate false or misleading information with 100 percent confidence.

“I think we have done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we’re using it in,” Cook says. “So I am confident it will be very high quality. But I’d say in all honesty that’s short of 100 percent. I would never claim that it’s 100 percent.”

Apple is gearing up to reveal a new AI system on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac next week at WWDC 2024 — and it will be called Apple Intelligence, according to a report from Bloomberg. In addition to providing new “beta” AI features across Apple’s platforms and apps, it will reportedly offer access to a new ChatGPT-like chatbot powered by OpenAI.

Apple reportedly won’t focus on buzzy AI features like image or video generation and will instead focus on adding AI-powered summarizations, reply suggestions, and an AI overhaul for Siri that could give it more control over apps while chasing applications with “broad appeal.”

ElevenLabs already offers AI-generated versions of human voices and music. Now, it will let people create sound effects for podcasts, movies, or games, too. The new Sound Effects tool can generate up to 22 seconds of sounds based on user prompts that can be combined with the company’s voice and music platform, and it gives users at least four downloadable audio clip options.

The company says it worked with the stock media platform Shutterstock to build a library and train its model on its audio clips. Shutterstock has licensed its content libraries to many AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Google.