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Mashable

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The US Capitol building.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) might be stepping up the country's AI enforcement mechanisms, as the organization explores new rules for disclosing the use of AI in political ads.

According to a new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking released this week, the commission is beginning initial investigations into nationwide requirements for labeling AI used in political advertising on TV and



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Tech Insider

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A tapestry featuring a portrait of Carlo Acutis at the St. Francis Basilica during the beatification ceremony of Carlo Acutis, on October 10, 2020.
A tapestry featuring a portrait of Carlo Acutis at the St. Francis Basilica during his beatification ceremony, on October 10, 2020.
  • Pope Francis has attributed a second miracle to teenage website developer Carlo Acutis.
  • This paves the way for Acutis, who was born in 1991, to become the first millennial saint.
  • The tech whizz, sometimes called 'God's influencer,' died of



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The Verge

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Logo for the Intellivision video game company.
Image: Atari

Imagine if Nintendo woke up one day and decided to buy Sega — that’s essentially what’s happened today as Atari has announced it has acquired Intellivision, ending one of the longest company rivalries in the video game industry. According to the announcement, Atari will take over the Intellivision brand and over 200 games from its library.

“Atari will seek to



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Tech Insider

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Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
A super PAC funded primarily by Peter Thiel had been accused of illegally contributing to Sen. JD Vance's campaign.
  • The FEC dismissed accusations that a pro-JD Vance super PAC funded by Peter Thiel broke the law.
  • The complaint revolved around an obscure website containing data about the Ohio Senate race.
  • The FEC said that

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Tech Insider

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's company is using the
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's company is using the "we're incompetent" defense in its dustup with Scarlett Johansson.
  • Scarlett Johansson says OpenAI took her voice without permission.
  • OpenAI's response: Not true! The real story is that our CEO had no idea what he was doing.
  • That kind of move-fast-break-things argument is OK for a young startup. But OpenAI wants our trust so it can be embedded in our lives. Uh oh.

Earlier this week, the consensus around OpenAI was that the company was a lying, rapacious soul stealer. A company that wanted to use Scarlett Johansson to promote its product — and when she declined, went ahead and did it anyway, using a fake Scarlett Johansson.

Now, here comes a counternarrative: Nah, it's just incompetent.

Here's the problem: The second version of reality is the one OpenAI itself is pushing. That's the same OpenAI that's supposed to be ushering in a new era of possibility and wonder — the same company that's either partnering with the biggest companies in tech, is about to do so, or is forcing them to pivot their entire business to fight OpenAI.

Gulp.

The OpenAI defense — first put forth by the company in a blog post on Sunday and expanded upon in a Washington Post report Wednesday — boils down to this: The people who generated the "Sky" voice for OpenAI's newest product — the one people think sounds just like Scarlett Johansson — did so last year and never intended it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. The fact that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly asked Johansson — twice — to lend her voice to the product is just an unfortunate coincidence, made possible by the fact that Altman was out of the loop.

Here's the Post's Nitasha Tiku quoting and paraphrasing the OpenAI product manager Joanne Jang:

"Jang said she 'kept a tight tent' around the AI voices project, making Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati the sole decision-maker to preserve the artistic choices of the director and the casting office. Altman was on his world tour during much of the casting process and not intimately involved, she said."

And maybe all that is true! But, again: The choices we are now faced with are pretty gnarly: Either OpenAI is run by liars who take what they want, or OpenAI is run by bumblers.

The bumblers theory is a well-worn idea in tech because it's quite common for young, fast-growing companies to stub their toes — or fall over completely — in their early days. And OpenAI is a relatively young company, with a particularly chaotic history, which includes a foundational fight with Elon Musk and last year's well-publicized Thanksgiving coup-that-wasn't.

But the reason all this matters — why it's much more important than scandals of the day like a tone-deaf Apple ad (Remember that? From a couple of weeks ago?) — is that it seems like we are headed for a future where OpenAI is going to be a very big part of our lives, whether we like it or not. (I asked the company for comment, but it didn't respond.)

OpenAI's tech is already embedded in all kinds of other tech — most notably in just about everything Microsoft makes these days — and will be even more so in the future. It's reportedly about to show up in Apple's new phones. And when we use it to accomplish a task — knowingly or not — we are going to have to simply trust that it's doing a good job.

That's because the generative AI that OpenAI is pioneering and productizing is a black box — not just to us normals but to the people who actually build this stuff. So hoping that they get this stuff right is just that — a hope. Now they're telling us they can't handle the most basic stuff, like telling the left hand what the right hand is doing. Yikes.

Read the original article on Business Insider



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Engadget

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You can pick up a specced-out version of last year’s MacBook Pro M3 for cheaper than ever right now, at $1,800. This is a discount of $200 for Apple’s flagship laptop with 1TB of SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. This deal is only available for the 14-inch Space Gray model. The silver model is also on sale, but with just an eight percent discount.

As for the computer itself, it’s the MacBook Pro M3



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Tech Insider

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Elon Musk
Elon Musk has radically overhauled the site formerly known as Twitter since buying it in 2022.
  • Elon Musk's X is planning to make "likes" private by default, according to X's head of engineering. 
  • The move will apparently encourage more people to like "edgy" content on the site. 
  • Some high-profile figures have faced scrutiny if their accounts liked controversial content.

It looks