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07 Jun

Popular AI apps get caught in the crosshairs of Anthropic and OpenAI

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Battlelines are being drawn between the major AI labs and the popular applications that rely on them. This week, both Anthropic and OpenAI took shots at two leading AI apps: Windsurf, one of the most popular vibe coding tools, and Granola, a buzzy AI app for taking meeting notes. "With less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models," Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan wrote on X this week, noting that "we wanted to pay them for the full capacity." An additional statement on Windsurf's website said: "We…

01 Jun

Why do lawyers keep using ChatGPT?

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Every few weeks, it seems like there's a new headline about a lawyer getting in trouble for submitting filings containing, in the words of one judge, "bogus AI-generated research." The details vary, but the throughline is the same: an attorney turns to a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to help them with legal research (or worse, writing), the LLM hallucinates cases that don't exist, and the lawyer is none the wiser until the judge or opposing counsel points out their mistake. In some cases, including an aviation lawsuit from 2023, attorneys have had to pay fines for submitting filings…

30 May

OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be a ‘super assistant’ for every part of your life

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Thanks to the legal discovery process, Google's antitrust trial with the Department of Justice has provided a fascinating glimpse into the future of ChatGPT. An internal OpenAI strategy document titled "ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy" describes the company's aspiration to build an "AI super assistant that deeply understands you and is your interface to the internet." Although the document is heavily redacted in parts, it reveals that OpenAI aims for ChatGPT to soon develop into much more than a chatbot. "In the first half of next year, we'll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you…

22 May

Tech CEOs are using AI to replace themselves

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An image of Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s AI-generated avatar. Tech company CEOs aren’t just making their companies AI-first: this week, they’re using AI avatars to replace themselves in earnings calls. Buy-now-pay-later company Klarna featured the AI version of CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski in an 83-second video about its Q1 2025 results, as reported by TechCrunch. The video’s description says that his “AI avatar” is presenting the results, and the AI avatar kicks off the video by saying that “it’s me, or rather, my AI avatar.” Klarna has already been vocal about how it uses AI in its business, with…

21 May

Are Character AI’s chatbots protected speech? One court isn’t sure

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A lawsuit against Google and companion chatbot service Character AI — which is accused of contributing to the death of a teenager — can move forward, ruled a Florida judge. In a decision filed today, Judge Anne Conway said that an attempted First Amendment defense wasn’t enough to get the lawsuit thrown out. Conway determined that, despite some similarities to videogames and other expressive mediums, she is “not prepared to hold that Character AI’s output is speech.” The ruling is a relatively early indicator of the kinds of treatment that AI language models could receive in court. It stems from…

20 May

Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle

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The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist. Alongside actual books like Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, a summer reading list features fake titles by real authors. Min Jin Lee is a real, lauded novelist — but “Nightshade Market,” “a riveting tale set in Seoul’s underground economy,” isn’t one of her works. Rebecca Makkai, a Chicago local, is credited…

13 May

Judge slams lawyers for ‘bogus AI-generated research’

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A California judge slammed a pair of law firms for the undisclosed use of AI after he received a supplemental brief with “numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations.” In a ruling submitted last week, Judge Michael Wilner imposed $31,000 in sanctions against the law firms involved, saying “no reasonably competent attorney should out-source research and writing” to AI, as pointed out by law professors Eric Goldman and Blake Reid on Bluesky. “I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them…

11 May

Trump fires head of Copyright Office two days following report that AI training may not be fair use

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The Trump administration has reportedly fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who leads the US Copyright Office, following the office’s choice to release a pre-publication version of its opinion on the fair use status of AI training data that’s made up of copyrighted information. Representative Joe Morelle, the ranking Democrat of the Committee on House Administration, called her firing an “unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” linking the firing directly to her report, which he says amounted to her refusing “to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.” Among the report’s conclusions…

10 May

Pope Leo XIV names AI one of the reasons for his papal name

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Pope Leo XIV speaking to the College of Cardinals on May 10th. | Photo by Simone Risoluti – Vatican Media via Vatican Pool / Getty Images As Pope Leo XIV laid out his vision for the papacy in an address to the College of Cardinals, he also explained why he picked his papal name. Incredibly, artificial intelligence played a big part. In the Vatican’s translation of his speech, Pope Leo XIV explained that his name references Pope Leo XII, who presided over the church at the dawn of the industrial revolution. …I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There…

10 May

SoundCloud says it isn’t using your music to train generative AI tools

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The music-sharing platform SoundCloud quietly updated its terms of use in February last year, adding language that lets it train AI models on its users’ content, as TechCrunch reported. And while the company says it hasn’t used user-created content for model training, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that it will in the future. Marni Greenberg, SVP and head of communications at SoundCloud, provided the following in a statement emailed to The Verge. SoundCloud has never used artist content to train AI models, nor do we develop AI tools or allow third parties to scrape or use SoundCloud content from…