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Ethics

AI news about bias, fairness and the effects of AI on society.

9 stories in the last 3 days

Today

5 stories
  1. Worth knowing TechCrunch

    I tried Apple’s Siri Recaps. They’re surprisingly useful — and a little unsettling

    Apple integrating continuous ambient audio summarization into the Apple Watch brings always-listening AI wearables into the mainstream while testing consumer comfort with automated surveillance.

    TechCrunch reviews Apple's new Siri Recaps feature in the watchOS 27.3 developer beta, which uses on-device AI to continuously listen to and summarize real-world conversations on the Apple Watch Series 12. While the tool effectively captures fast-paced details from daily interactions, it also records mundane personal chatter, raising questions about the normalization of always-on listening technology.

    2 sources
  2. Worth knowing Hacker News

    Tell HN: Gemini trains on chat history, even for subscribers (personal accounts)

    This highlights an important data privacy caveat for paying consumers of AI products who may assume a paid subscription protects their inputs from model training and human review.

    A Hacker News post highlights that Google's personal AI subscriptions use saved Gemini chat histories to train generative AI models and allow human reviewers to read a subset of transcripts. Users cannot opt out of training without turning off their chat history entirely, and chats selected for human review are retained for up to three years even if deleted by the user.

    1 source
  3. Worth knowing Platformer

    The frontier labs launch election war rooms

    How frontier AI labs monitor and mitigate political deepfakes during major elections is a central test of their safety and misuse prevention strategies.

    Leading AI laboratories have established election war rooms to monitor and respond to deepfakes during the midterm elections. The piece examines whether this traditional social media strategy is effective at countering AI-generated election misinformation.

    1 source

Yesterday

2 stories
  1. Worth knowing Wired

    Here's Why You Shouldn't Use AI to Vote

    As voters increasingly turn to consumer AI chatbots for election information, persistent hallucinations and reliance on partisan sources highlight ongoing reliability and misinformation challenges for leading AI models.

    Ahead of the US midterm elections, studies by Forum AI and NewsGuard reveal that mainstream AI chatbots frequently provide inaccurate voting information and cite partisan "pink slime" websites. Nearly 40 percent of election-related answers from tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini contained factual errors, while ChatGPT cited partisan sites masquerading as news in over 70 percent of tested searches.

    1 source
  2. Worth knowing 404 Media

    World of Warcraft: Forever Is Already Overrun with AI Slop

    This illustrates how AI coding tools are flooding niche software ecosystems with derivative, commercialized applications, straining free APIs and pushing open-source developers to close their code.

    The World of Warcraft community is experiencing an influx of AI-generated game addons and analysis tools ahead of the release of World of Warcraft: Forever. Consequently, data provider Warcraft Logs is restricting its free API and introducing paid commercial keys to manage the surge of low-effort apps, while longtime developers are making their GitHub repositories private to prevent AI-assisted plagiarism.

    1 source

Mon, Nov 2

2 stories
  1. Worth knowing Wired

    Hundreds of Mundane AI Apps Are Hiding Sexually Abusive Deepfake Features

    This investigation exposes how organized commercial networks easily bypass the safety and moderation guardrails of major tech platforms like Apple, Google, and Meta to distribute non-consensual AI deepfake and CSAM tools at scale.

    A Wired investigation revealed a network of over 400 seemingly mundane mobile apps and domains, linked to Hong Kong-registered KeLing Technology Limited, that covertly load web interfaces for generating sexually explicit AI deepfakes. These apps bypassed Apple and Google app store reviews using bait-and-switch tactics and were heavily promoted through thousands of explicit ads on Meta's platforms.

    1 source
  2. Worth knowing Hacker News

    AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture

    This highlights the dual threat generative AI poses to the open web, as automated content farms degrade search quality while aggressive data scrapers drive up hosting costs for human-maintained community resources.

    AI-generated gaming wikis filled with fabricated and irrelevant information are flooding search engine results, particularly targeting smaller indie games to capture ad traffic or spread malware. Simultaneously, legitimate volunteer-run wikis are struggling with soaring server costs caused by aggressive scraping from AI crawlers like Meta's.

    1 source