Notices by Kashmir Hill (kashhill@mastodon.social)

The artist revolt against AI-powered art generators is in full swing. Artists have filed a class-action lawsuit in California against Stability AI and Midjourney. They've raised money for a D.C. lobbyist. And soon they will have a technological countermeasure, a tool designed by U of Chicago computer scientists that will "cloak" art posted online so that it won't be "feeding this monster that becomes more and more like them." My latest: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/technology/ai-art-generator-lensa-stable-diffusion.html

After I did the story about the dad whose Google account was closed and deleted for taking a photo of his naked toddler for the doctor, I heard from a distraught mother in Colorado who was going through the same thing and didn't know why. Her Google account was disabled, taking with it her wedding photos, videos of her 9yo son growing up, tax documents, email and everything else. And she had no idea why. She was in tears. "It feels like my house burned down," she told me: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/technology/google-appeals-change.html

A tech company source used to make me turn off my phone before meetings because of concern that his employer would check to see if our phones were near each other. This was not a crazy concern it turns out! TikTok tried something like this to hunt down leakers: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/byte-dance-tik-tok-internal-investigation.html