Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court ruled Oct. 15 that Meta cannot reduce the distribution of political content, restrict…
Our take When a company's AI sits inside WhatsApp days before a runoff, a glitch is not just a glitch. The court asked for equal rules and an explanation of the criteria. That disclosure should be standard wherever Meta AI runs during an election, not something a campaign has to sue for.
The Authors Guild published best practices for publishers on Oct. 13 saying no publisher, agent or other person should rely solely on an AI detector to…
Our take An AI detector gives a guess with a confidence score, and a writer's career shouldn't hang on a guess. The Guild's ask is modest: written rules, disclosure, and consent before a manuscript goes into someone else's system. Publishers that want honesty from authors can start by offering it.
Scripps News published instructions for keeping chatbot conversations out of AI training after OpenAI said its AI agents had posted 53 images uploaded by…
Our take Opt-out by default is consent in reverse: the company takes, and you have to find the switch to make it stop. The switches exist, and anyone who types something private into a chatbot should flip them. With no federal right to opt out, the settings page is the only protection most people get.
The Japan Actors Union, a cooperative of actors and voice actors, released guidelines on Oct. 15 requiring prior consent, with the purpose disclosed…
Our take Consent at every step, pay for every use: Japan's performers have written down what AI developers should have asked first. Guidelines are a floor, not a law, and the government is right to look at closing that gap so a performer's voice stops being free raw material.
Internal Amazon documents disclosed in a legal challenge by the Canadian union Unifor describe Atlas, an in-house AI forecasting tool that draws on…
Our take Amazon says it measures sites, not people. A tool that ranks workplaces by how close workers are to organizing is still aimed at the organizing. If the right to join a union is real, workers deserve to know what is being counted against them, and regulators should be the ones asking.
Meta now lets smart-glasses users opt out of having "visual data" from camera-based Meta AI interactions used to train its AI models, and says opted-out…
Our take An opt-out is a door, not a default. Meta deserves credit for building one, but it covers what the camera sees, not what the wearer says, and it has to be flipped pair by pair. Every maker of AI wearables should copy the switch and go further: ask before training, and cover voice too.
Meta revised the web-scraping clause in its upcoming commercial terms for business accounts after Nieman Lab reported Thursday that the terms would permit…
Our take Deleting a word is not the same as giving up a right. A publisher that needs a Meta business account to reach readers should not have to let Meta crawl its whole site on terms it cannot refuse. Consent to scraping should be asked for plainly, with a way to say no, not folded into ad terms.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom approved AB 1979 on Sept. 30, per the Legislature's bill record; the law requires health facilities, clinics and physician…
Our take The rule is simple and right: AI can advise, a licensed human decides. The gap is the veto. A nurse who overrides a bad algorithm still has no shield, the nurses' association says, so judgment protected on paper can still cost a job. Hospitals elsewhere should adopt the rule now, and lawmakers should finish the job.
YouTube began rolling out labels in YouTube Music on Oct. 14 for songs it says were created primarily with generative AI, such as tracks whose composition…
Our take A label is disclosure, not protection, and listeners are owed at least that. Labels that rest on partners' own declarations could miss the uploaders with most to hide, so YouTube's detection signals are the part to watch. Every streaming service should label this way.
The Center for Democracy & Technology published a report Oct. 15 on how Anthropic, Google, Meta, Midjourney, OpenAI, Stability AI and xAI address…
Our take A safeguard nobody tests is a promise, not a protection. The cost of that gap falls on people whose faces end up in someone else's prompt. A shared testing standard, as CDT urges, should come before the next model ships, not after the next victim.