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This week, Figma CEO Dylan Field said the company would temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature after criticism that the company had “overtrained” its tools on existing apps. The feature, which was unveiled at the company’s annual Config conference, was aimed at kickstarting the design process by generating UI layouts and components from text prompts, but was criticized for appearing to mimic the layout of Apple’s Weather app.
YouTube quietly announced a policy change this week that will allow people to request the removal of AI-generated or other synthetic content that mimics faces or voices. The move signals a shift in YouTube’s stance toward deepfakes as a privacy issue rather than a simple content moderation issue.
Fisker has asked the Delaware Bankruptcy Court judge overseeing the Chapter 11 case to approve the sale of its remaining fleet of electric Ocean SUVs. If approved, the company would be able to sell the finished EVs to a New York-based car leasing company for about $14,000 per vehicle, a significant drop from the $70,000 starting price some companies once demanded.
News
Twitter Meets Myspace for GenZ: Aiming to make “social” “social media” again, a new app called noplace has launched. It’s a modern-day MySpace with colorful, customizable profiles, and it’s hit #1 on the App Store. Read more
How to avoid AI-based fraud: Generative AI has made online fraud easier, cheaper, and more convincing. We’ve put together a helpful guide on what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones. Read more
Turn off stupid video call reactions. If you’ve ever seen thumbs up and confetti flying around your screen during a video call, you’re not alone. Here’s how to turn this setting off on your Apple device. Read more
Amazon is discontinuing Astro for Business. Amazon has decided to discontinue production of its Astro for Business security robot just seven months after its launch, shifting its focus to a home version of Astro. Read more
Natural 1 for security: Popular online tabletop and role-playing game platform Roll20 has suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of some of its users. The platform is now notifying its users of the breach. Read more
Cloudflare Takes on AI Bots The publicly traded cloud service provider has launched a new free tool to prevent bots from scraping data from websites hosted on its platform to train AI models. Read more
Is Gemini as good as Google claims?: Google claims its AI models can perform previously impossible tasks, like summarizing hundreds of pages of documents. But new research suggests the models aren't as good as the company says. Read more
There are over a billion records stolen and counting. This year has seen some of the biggest and most devastating data breaches in recent history. From AT&T to Ticketmaster, these are the biggest data breaches of 2024 so far. Read more
analyze
A year of threads: Threads, the Meta alternative to Twitter, just celebrated its first birthday. The social network has reached 175 million monthly active users, but it’s still trying to find its own voice. Threads isn’t as new as X, and it’s not as open as Mastodon or Bluesky. At least for now. Ivan Mehta looks back at the app’s first year and what it can learn from other social networks. Read more
The Supreme Court has declared an open period for regulators. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court reversed the 1984 case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, making what may be one of the most significant decisions ever made in the context of the technology industry. On paper, wetlands and the EPA seem to have little to do with technology, but as Devin Coldewey writes, the ruling leaves regulators open to endless interference. Read more
