ai

Microsoft has denied it is using content from Word and Excel documents to train artificial intelligence models without permission. While there's some fear mongering, the problem seems to be a blanket declaration in its company-wide privacy ... statement. The controversy involves Connected Experiences, a long-standing Office feature that connects to the Internet for added functionality. This includes tools such as grammar checking, translation and audio transcription. It also allows downloads of templates and images, for example, to put into a PowerPoint presentation. The feature came to sudden ... (view more)

As Microsoft celebrates its 50th anniversary, the tech giant finds itself at a pivotal moment in history. For decades, Microsoft's Windows operating system was the backbone of personal computing, driving the company to become one of the most ... valuable entities in the world. But as technology has evolved, so too has the company's role. (Source: wired.com ) Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI), a field where Microsoft is making its most significant strides, with the potential to reshape how users interact with their PCs and redefine their relationship with the company. The Evolution of Microsoft: ... (view more)

Google has revealed a series of measures aimed to better inform US voters while reducing the risk of malicious misinformation. It includes restrictions on its AI tools and better protection against cyber attacks for election and campaign officials. ... The measures broadly break down into three categories. The first is better information for users who are trying to find out more about elections. For example, users who search YouTube for the name of an election candidate will get an information panel detailing official website and video channel links for the candidate. (Source: engadget.com ) ... (view more)

Microsoft has backtracked on a new Windows 11 feature that screenshots a computer every few seconds. "Recall" will now be an opt-in tool that doesn't work by default. The theory behind the tool is that it would be helpful for users to be able to ... find information from something they'd used or been work on, even if they couldn't remember precisely when and where. That's inherently difficult to do through ordinary file or web searches, particularly if it involves an image. Searching the contents of different file types can be slow, while searching for something that isn't text can be difficult. ... (view more)

Google is reportedly considering charging users to get AI-based search results. It would be the first time the company had a fee for using its search tools. The plans were revealed by the Financial Times, which says it got details from "three people ... with knowledge of [Google's] plans." The technology for the charging is already in development and it's now simply a case of deciding whether to go ahead with the plan. (Source: ft.com ) There's no suggestion whatsoever that Google will start charging for its core search engine results. Instead a subscription fee would apply to extra results ... (view more)

Recently, Google has started baking artificial intelligence (AI) into its standard search results. However, the new AI-powered responses have been criticized for giving credibility to scams, including leading users to malicious sites where their ... systems could be compromised by ransomware and similar. Although the baked-in artificial intelligence results have already been available for people who have intentionally asked to try it, what's important to note is that Google is now rolling it out for some ordinary users when they carry out a search. The idea of the new tool is to better handle ... (view more)

YouTube says video creators must reveal when they have used artificial intelligence tools. However, the rules only apply in specific circumstances. According to YouTube, creators using AI is not a problem in itself. Instead it wants viewers to be ... better informed about "whether the content they're seeing is altered or synthetic." The new requirement only applies when people use such tools create "realistic content", which YouTube defines as "content a viewer could easily mistake for a real person, place, scene or event." (Source: blog.youtube ) Animation OK There's no need to label AI-based ... (view more)

35 years after conceiving the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee has shared his predictions for its future. The boldest is the possibility of a major tech company being broken up. Berners-Lee also believes artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual ... reality could be harnessed for positive changes to our daily lives. Although the Internet dates back in some ways to the US military in the late 1960's and in others to the adoption of a common inter-network communication standard in 1983, it had some major use limitations. That changed with Berners-Lee coming up with the idea of the World Wide Web, a ... (view more)

Google says it has significantly upgraded Gmail's spam filter to overcome a common scam tactic. It's now using AI to detect images that aren't technically text characters but are still readable by humans. It also says the new system will reduce the ... number of false positives: legitimate emails mistakenly flagged as spam. That's certainly felt like an increasing problem over the past year or so. The scammer tactic tackled with the update is called adversarial text manipulation. That takes account of the fact that a key part of spam filtering involves analyzing the text in an email and looking ... (view more)

Google is adding new tools to make it easier to check if an image is credible and as it appears. But the move has highlighted the irony of Google's own involvement in "generative" artificial intelligence. The tools include several additions to ... Google's own search results, along with a dedicated tool for checking any image found online. The search tools have been in testing and are now rolling out to all users, starting with English language searches in the US. They are wrapped up in a featured called "About this image". This will accompany images with information including if and when they ... (view more)