Latest Tech News

Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more

Filtered by: generate Clear Filter

Google adds AI-generated summaries to Discover

Google is bringing AI‑generated summaries to Discover, the personalized stream of articles and videos found in the Google app curated based on a user's interests. The search giant remains undeterred by the imperfect nature of AI Overviews, or what it might mean for publishers whose content largely makes up Google's search results. TechCrunch has reported that some Android and iOS users in the US are seeing cards containing AI‑generated summaries on their Discover page. These cards appear with n

Gemini can now transform your boring stills into lifelike videos

TL;DR Gemini will now let you generate videos from existing images using its Veo3 model. Google says you can also use actual photos to transform them into videos. Veo3 will limit the output to eight-second clips in 720p resolution. If you’ve recently come across any realistic-looking videos with bizarre tropes, chances are they were generated using Google’s Veo3 AI video generation in Gemini. Its outstanding continuity of video frames, the ability to automatically generate audio, and seamless

YouTube ‘clarifies’ its plan to demonetize spammy AI slop

YouTube is trying to soothe concerns about an incoming update to its monetization policies following backlash from online creators. An announcement that YouTube would be updating restrictions around “inauthentic” content under the YouTube Partner Program guidelines was interpreted by some to mean the platform was planning to demonetize a wider variety of videos, including those using AI-generated content, clips, and reactions. Now, YouTube is seeking to clarify the situation. “YouTube has alway

"Indie Band" Says Claims Their Music Is AI-Generated Is a Hoax, Then Admits It's Actually AI-Generated

"Indie Band" Says Claims Their Music Is AI-Generated Is a Hoax, Then Admits It's Actually AI-Generated The point is to "provoke" artists. Hoax Squared The jig is officially up. After an "indie rock band" called The Velvet Sundown refused to admit last week that its output was a lazy amalgamation of AI-generated slop, the outfit is now singing a dramatically different tune. As Rolling Stone reports, the band's Spotify bio has been revised to clarify that it's a "synthetic music project" and

From Sensual Butt Songs to Santa’s Alleged Coke Habit: AI Slop Music Is Getting Harder to Avoid

AI slop is flooding every single digital platform, and music streaming services are no exception—so much so, even someone who generally avoids AI might find themselves unknowingly listening to a robot hornily singing about butts. Take the sordid saga of “Make Love to My Shitter,” an AI-generated track from an artist called BannedVinylCollection. Brace Belden, a host of the popular politics podcast TrueAnon, says that Spotify recently queued up the bawdy song after he’d finished listening to alt

Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck

For years, I’ve felt that writing lines of code was never the bottleneck in software engineering. The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication. All of this wrapped inside the labyrinth of tickets, planning meetings, and agile rituals. These processes, meant to drive quality, often slow us down more than the act of writing code itself because they require t

AI virtual personality YouTubers, or ‘VTubers,’ are earning millions

One of the most popular gaming YouTubers is named Bloo, and has bright blue wavy hair and dark blue eyes. But he isn't a human — he's a fully virtual personality powered by artificial intelligence. "I'm here to keep my millions of viewers worldwide entertained and coming back for more," said Bloo in an interview with CNBC. "I'm all about good vibes and engaging content. I'm built by humans, but boosted by AI." Bloo is a virtual YouTuber, or VTuber, who has built a massive following of 2.5 millio

X is piloting a program that lets AI chatbots generate Community Notes

The social platform X will pilot a feature that allows AI chatbots to generate Community Notes. Community Notes is a Twitter-era feature that Elon Musk has expanded under his ownership of the service, now called X. Users who are part of this fact-checking program can contribute comments that add context to certain posts, which are then checked by other users before they appear attached to a post. A Community Note may appear, for example, on a post of an AI-generated video that is not clear abou

I Helped 4 Local Businesses Use Adobe Express' AI Features

Over the past few years, I've found tremendous joy in helping local businesses here in Worcester, MA learn more about technology and AI. It's the same work I do in my full-time job as a content creator, but I love the in-person collaborative aspect. I started my business Feisworld Media first as a podcaster, then later I produced a documentary on Amazon Prime and then launched a YouTube channel in 2019. But it's still the in-person sharing that gets me excited about helping others. Since Adobe

"Indie Rock Band" That's Clearly Using AI Claims That "We Never Use AI"

An "indie rock band" called The Velvet Sundown, which is marketing its music with AI-generated pictures of members that don't appear to exist, is now claiming that "we never use AI." After being publicly accused of being the fabrication of AI, an "official" X account for the band is now seemingly attempting to control the narrative, or at least to gin up a few more streams. "Absolutely crazy that so-called 'journalists' keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is 'AI-gene

Poll: Do you like AI music?

Like a modern version of the tree-falling-in-the-woods conundrum, AI is giving us new philosophical questions. For example, if AI music sounds genuine, is it okay to enjoy it? This debate has gained momentum recently, as a new band called The Velvet Sundown just reached over 500,000 listens on Spotify. The problem is that they don’t actually exist. Everything about them — from their echoey, classic rock-inspired tracks to their Instagram pictures — appears to be AI-generated. I’ve been listeni

One UI 8’s Now Brief will make sure you don’t miss a birthday again

Joe Maring / Android Authority TL;DR Now Brief in the latest One UI 8 beta displays birthday reminders and also lets you create an AI-generated birthday card. The birthday card is generated with a prompt and can be created in one of six art styles. This is the latest addition to Now Brief, and we’re expecting plenty more by the time stable One UI 8 is released. Samsung’s Now Brief feature gives users a summary of relevant information several times a day. We know Samsung is working on more ty

11 Bit Studios clarifies its AI use in The Alters after player outcry

11 Bit Studios has drawn the ire of players for the undisclosed use of artificial intelligence in its recent release, The Alters. The new project from the team behind Frostpunk and This War of Mine is a narratively and thematically interesting take on a science fiction survival game. The project contains a lot of dialogue and written text, and some players discovered in-game copy that appeared to be generated by a large language model. The Steam storefront requires that games disclose when they

Google rolls out Veo 3 video generator, try it for free using credits

Google is rolling out Veo 3 to everyone using Vertex AI, which is an ML-testing platform provided by Google Cloud. Unlike Sora and other generative video AI models, Veo 3 is a state-of-the-art video generator trained on millions of YouTube videos, and it can generate realistic videos, but great quality comes at a high cost. Veo 3 isn't free, but since it's part of Google Cloud, you can use it for free by subscribing to the $300 trial offered by Google. To get started, you can sign up for a Go

AI is ruining houseplant communities online

“Maybe you could organize your plants like this,” my friend’s text message said, with an attached photo of white pots of plants floating midair in front of a huge, sunny window. As a newbie plant collector, I do need to organize my growing collection of flora, but not like this — the photo was AI-generated and the plants depicted were not real. Even as a beginner, I was able to identify issues with the photo. Obviously, my plants cannot physically defy gravity, but most egregiously, the organiz

Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?

Any ideas for how we can keep the web (or at least part of it) human? It feels like every time I do a web search, more and more of the results are AI generated nonsense. I'm worried that it's going to become much more difficult to find the human-generated content. How can we keep a part of the web human? Any ideas? (I'm not keen on Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning Orb being the "solution.")

Midjourney adds AI video generation

AI company Midjourney has released its first video model. This initial take on AI-generated video will allow users to animate their images, either ones made in Midjourney or uploaded from a different source. The initial results will be five-second clips that a user can opt to extend by four seconds up to four times. Videos can be generated on web only for now and require at least a $10 a month subscription to access. Introducing our V1 Video Model. It's fun, easy, and beautiful. Available at 10

Fang, the CLI Starter Kit

Fang The CLI starter kit. A small, experimental library for batteries-included Cobra applications. Features Fancy output : fully styled help and usage pages : fully styled help and usage pages Fancy errors : fully styled errors : fully styled errors Automatic --version : set it to the build info, or a version of your choice : set it to the build info, or a version of your choice Manpages : Adds a hidden man command to generate manpages using mango 1 : Adds a hidden command to generate man

Deezer says 70% of AI music streams on its service are fake

In brief: The problem of AI-generated music on streaming platforms being "listened" to by AI is so bad on Deezer, up to seven out of every 10 streams of AI tracks are fraudulent, according to the company. The practice can be a lucrative one: in 2024, a man was arrested over claims that he conned music services out of $12 million using this method. The French streaming giant said that AI-generated music accounts for just 0.5% of streams on the platform. However, its own analysis shows that 70% o

Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we’re hoarding pre-AI content

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. "The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content," Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI medi

Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel, and now we’re hoarding pre-AI content

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. "The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content," Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI medi

Scientists Discover the Key to Axolotls’ Ability to Regenerate Limbs

The axolotl seems like something out of science fiction. This perpetually youthful-looking Mexican salamander possesses a superpower that defies biology as we know it: the ability to regenerate entire limbs, parts of its heart, and even its spinal cord. But how does an amputated limb know whether to regenerate an entire arm from the shoulder down or just a hand from the wrist? This mystery of “positional identity” has fascinated scientists for decades. A team at Northeastern University, led by

Google’s test turns search results into an AI-generated podcast

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Google is rolling out a test that puts its AI-powered Audio Overviews on the first page of search results on mobile. The experiment, which you can enable in Labs, will let you generate an AI podcast-style discussion for certain queries. If you search for something like, “How do noise cancellation headphones work?”, Google will display a button bene

Here’s the $2,000 fully AI-generated ad that aired during the NBA Finals

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. If you’ve been on social media lately, you might’ve seen the unsettling AI slop videos showing AI-generated people in wild scenarios or just speaking a bunch of nonsense. On Wednesday night, the betting platform Kalshi decided to take this trend outside the social sphere by putting a nonsensical AI-generated ad in front of the millions of viewers wa

Wikipedia pauses AI-generated summaries pilot after editors protest

In Brief Wikipedia has reportedly paused an experiment that used AI to summarize articles on its platform after editors pushed back. Wikipedia announced earlier this month it was going to run the experiment for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed and chose to opt in, according to 404 Media. AI-generated summaries appeared at the top of every Wikipedia article with a yellow “unverified” label. Users had to click to expand and read them. Editors almost immediately criticize

US government’s vaccine website defaced with AI-generated content

In Brief A U.S. government website designed to inform the public about vaccines has been defaced and now hosts apparently AI-generated spam. The domain, which belongs to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), appears to have been hosting the same kind of content — mostly gay-themed and LGBTQ+ posts — since at least May 12, according to an archived version of the site. It’s unclear who is responsible for it, or what is the purpose of this defacement other than pushing AI-gener

A password generator inspired by the Xkcd password spec

Introduction This python script implements the xkcd password spec. Install This package requires the pip Python package manager for installation. pip installation instructions. Then: pip install xkpa Usage % xkpa -h usage: xkpa.py [-h] [-n] [-d DICT_PATH] [-x] [-i] [-s SEPARATOR] [-l LENGTH] [-c COUNT] [-v] [w] Generate an xkcd style password. positional arguments: w The number of words in the password. Defaults to 4. optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -n Disab