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Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.

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OpenAI admits to German wiki ‘incident’

The company pledged to overhaul their agent ‘misalignment incident’ reporting.

Robert Hart
Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip

Rather than fully polished tracks, the plugin is supposed to act as a creative spark.

Terrence O'Brien

Latest In AI

TC Sottek
TC Sottek
GPT-6 Astra is now (actually) available.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman apologized earlier today for a “messy” rollout of GPT-6 Astra that left paying users locked out of the new model. Altman says the tool is now available to “all Pro, Enterprise, and Business Premium users.”

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Watch GPT-6 Astra use your computer for you.

That seems to be the pitch behind OpenAI’s promo reel for the new AI model, putting people on a set to talk at their computer about doing things like putting together a presentation for their next season of fashion designs with instructions like “make it high end” and “make it fun,” or creating an eBay listing for a dented table they want to sell.

Welcome to the AGI era?

Instagram’s AI detection is a mess (again)

Meta is back to adding AI labels on original photos, while not tagging AI images it should.

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Google Photos is coming to Gemini Spark.

The update is rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US over the next few weeks. When it arrives, Spark users can ask the AI agent to automatically search, organize, and curate photos and videos, and extract information from them to use elsewhere.

Why AI food looks like that

Worms, holes, and cracks reveal the technical weaknesses of image generators.

Robert Hart
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Suno yanks ad showing supposed endorsement from Mary J. Blige.

An ad for the AI music generator Suno showed Blige interacting with an AI song that seemed to use her own voice, while calling the output “dope.” The singer received backlash for the ad online, and now a Suno spokesperson tells Variety that the company canceled the campaign because it didn’t get proper approval:

We entered into a business deal with someone who presented themselves as Ms. Blige’s official representative. As soon as we learned this was not the case, and that Ms. Blige was uncomfortable, we terminated the advertising campaign.

Lauren Feiner
Lauren Feiner
Los Angeles is the next major city to ban AI for students.

The announcement comes one day after New York City, the nation’s largest school system, unveiled similar restrictions. But LA’s goes even further, imposing the one-year restrictions on high schoolers, too.

OpenAI’s next big AI model has ‘entered the AGI era’

It emphasized stronger guardrails for GPT-6 Astra after the company’s models hacked Hugging Face.

Hayden Field
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Adobe’s Photoshop, Premiere, and AI tools are now in Slack.

Adobe for Slack is available starting today for Slack Business Plus and Enterprise Plus teams, allowing users to make or edit images, videos, and documents directly in Slack. It works like Adobe’s chatbot — describe the outcome you want to Slackbot, and it’ll call on more than 70 tools from Creative Cloud apps and Firefly to complete the task.

Adobe for Slack example image.
The new Slack integration is designed for conversational design prompts, and projects can be continued in Adobe’s apps if you need more creative control.
Image: Adobe
Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Jason Isbell sues Suno, but not for copyright infringement.

He filed the suit alongside Guy Forsyth, Eduardo Calle, and Camper Van Beethoven’s David Lowery. Interestingly, rather than filing a straightforward copyright case, the plaintiffs claim Suno imitates their voices and styles without permission. After a long intro that involves the Borg for some reason, the complaint says:

16. Suno claims users are blocked from using a specific name as a prompt, but that claim is false. In reality, Suno not only accepts names but also responds to the name with an output based on that musician’s identity. When Jason Isbell, the six-time Grammy-winning singer, including for Best Americana Album, was entered into v5 (as “jason isbell”’), Suno produced an Americana song called “Paper Bell,” imitating Isbell’s characteristic clear ma le vocals and country twang.’* Suno described it as “contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with fingerpicked acoustic guitar” and provided an image of a paper bell with a church and trees in the background, evoking a country scene.
Screenshot: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Perplexity’s “Hybrid Compute” splits work between local and cloud-based AI.

The feature, which is rolling out to Perplexity Computer on Mac, uses a “privacy gate” to control which information leaves the device. While cloud-based AI models will handle reasoning, web search, and planning, an on-device model will work with tasks involving sensitive information and private files.

Marina Galperina
Marina Galperina
Here’s the first look at Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman.

Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial stars Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as he’s fired and rehired by the company over the course of five days in 2023. Variety announced that Artificial will have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5th.

The film was dropped by Amazon MGM following Amazon’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI and acquired by Neon earlier this year.

Still from Artificial which premieres at the NYFF
Image: Neon
Robert Hart
Robert Hart
The US military gets custom ChatGPT and Grok chatbots “tailored to warfighter needs.”

The Department of Defense said it has added the AI tools for unclassified military use via its GenAI.mil platform. The generative AI portal launched last year with Google’s Gemini and has already onboarded more than 1.7 million of the department’s 3 million personnel, the Pentagon said.

Robert Hart
Robert Hart
AI errors sabotage challenge to Mississippi’s anti-DEI school laws.

State officials have asked an appeals court to overturn a decision blocking restrictions on school DEI programs on account of an “error-plagued” ruling drafted with the help of AI tool Perplexity. The dispute is the latest example of AI derailing court proceedings with made up citations, bogus quotations, and dubious research

Tom Warren
Tom Warren
Even Microsoft’s Office and LinkedIn chief is tired of AI slop.

It feels like Microsoft adds AI features to Office on a weekly basis, and now one of the company’s main executives in charge of those efforts is getting tired of AI slop generated at work. Ryan Roslansky, who took over leading the Office org at Microsoft last year, posted a warning on LinkedIn last week about AI slop “happening in the day to day of work,” after he received a fully AI-generated document from a colleague. Roslansky also oversees the group responsible for LinkedIn, which recently added an AI slop reporting button that’s proving to be rather popular.