Instagram users with public accounts may want to check their settings, as Meta now lets anyone use publicly posted photos to create new AI-generated images without requiring consent. The new feature can be turned off, but is opt-out rather than opt-in.

The tool that lets the public use your pictures is called Muse Image, and Meta released it on July 7. It’s the first image-generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs.

To use photos from a public account, all users have to do is @-mention an eligible public Instagram account in the Meta AI app and generate new images using photos from that profile.

Continue reading “Meta’s New AI Image Tool Appropriates Your Public Instagram Photos” →

Potential damages in Meta’s youth safety lawsuit have grown so large that it’s hard to pay attention to any of the other details. The company is now potentially on the hook for $1.4 trillion — that’s trillion with a T.

To put that in context, the company’s current market capitalization is barely higher than that figure, at $1.5 trillion.

The plaintiffs in the case are the states of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. They allege that Facebook and Instagram were designed to turn young users into addicts and that the company misled the public about the safety of its platforms. Continue reading “Meta’s $1.4 Trillion Teen Safety Case Puts Facebook and Instagram on Trial” →

The AI boom has turned the Internet into a battleground with data as the prize. Publishers, creators, AI tech giants, and data brokers are now fighting over what counts as public information, who has a right to collect it, and what uses of that information require the consent of its creator.

Data scraping isn’t new, but the scale of it is. A decade ago, the average person wouldn’t have foreseen a world in which every publicly available web page is raw material for bots that can write, summarize, code, search, and answer questions.

But here we are, and few companies sit closer to the epicenter of that fight than Bright Data. The company operates one of the world’s largest public web data platforms and helps customers scrape publicly available information for market research, cybersecurity, price comparison, and AI.

Continue reading “Freedom of Access vs. Freedom of Use — Inside the Battle Over Artificial Intelligence and Data Scraping” →

Meta has found a new way to squeeze more money out of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses customers. The company is adding monthly usage limits to Conversation Focus, a feature that helps users hear speech more clearly in noisy places.

Starting this week, users will only get three hours of free access to Conversation Focus. If they want to keep using it after that, they’ll have to cough up $19.99/month for a Meta One Premium subscription. Even then, Meta caps usage at 15 hours, making it a pricey subscription with a poor return on investment.

It’s obviously a good deal for Meta because it allows the tech giant to keep generating revenue from its smart glasses after the initial sale. Continue reading “Meta’s Smart Glasses Paywall Is a Warning for Anyone Buying AI Gadgets” →