Facebook bans deceptive deepfakes and some misleadingly modified media
Facebook wants to be the arbiter of truth after all. At least when it comes to intentionally misleading deepfakes and heavily manipulated and/or synthesized media content, such as AI-generated photorealistic…
Snapchat quietly acquired AI Factory, the company behind its new Cameos feature, for $166M
After acquiring Ukraine startup Looksery in 2015 to supercharge animated selfie lenses in Snapchat — arguably changing the filters game for all social video and photo apps — Snap has…
ByteDance & TikTok have secretly built a Deepfakes maker
TikTok parent company ByteDance has teamed up with one of the most controversial apps to let you insert your face into videos starring someone else. TechCrunch has learned that ByteDance…
New tweet generator mocks venture capitalists
“Airbnb’s unit economics are quite legendary — the S-1 is going to be MOST disrupted FASTEST in the next 3 YEARS? Caps for effect.” Who tweeted that? Initialized Capital’s Garry…
Brexit ad blitz data firm paid by Vote Leave broke privacy laws, watchdogs find
A joint investigation by watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia has found that Cambridge Analytica-linked data firm, Aggregate IQ, broke privacy laws in Facebook ad-targeting work it undertook for the official…
Inside the Instagram AI that fills Explore with fresh, juicy content
Instagram has posted an article describing the behind-the-scenes machinery that fills the Explore tab in Instagram with new, interesting stuff every time you open it. It’s a bit technical, so…
Watch Sacha Baron Cohen skewer Zuckerberg’s ‘twisted logic’ on hate speech and fakes
Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has waded into the debate about social media regulation. In an award-acceptance speech to the Anti-Defamation League yesterday, the creator of Ali G and Borat delivered…
John Carmack steps down at Oculus to pursue AI passion project ‘before I get too old’
Legendary coder John Carmack is leaving Facebook’s Oculus after 6 years to focus on a personal project — no less than the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, or “Strong AI.”…
Facebook machine learning aims to modify faces, hands and… outfits
The latest research out of Facebook sets machine learning models to tasks that, to us, seem rather ordinary — but for a computer are still monstrously difficult. These projects aim…
Legislators from ten parliaments put the squeeze on Facebook
The third meeting of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’, a multi-nation body comprised of global legislators with concerns about the societal impacts of social media giants,…