“When quizzed about the behavior, Alexa is apparently entirely unaware of what it’s been doing.”
Some Amazon Echo speakers running Alexa Plus have been breaking off mid-conversation to say, and sometimes sing, “lalala” for minutes at a time. Amazon says it is a bug affecting a small number of users and a fix is on the way.
“A petition calling for Australia’s largest pop culture expo to ban AI-generated art has garnered nearly 3,500 signatures”
Nearly 3,500 people have signed a petition asking Oz Comic-Con, which the article calls Australia’s largest pop culture expo, to stop letting sellers of AI-generated art take tables in its artist alleys. The outlet says it has asked the event’s organiser for comment.
“Since the account started posting on September 11, barely three weeks ago, it’s already garnered over 375,000 followers.”
An Instagram account posts stand-up clips of an AI-generated comedian performing to an AI-generated audience, and one clip passed 7 million views in under two weeks. A real stand-up comedian has posted a side-by-side video saying one of the jokes is his, and that the AI version is dressed like him too.
“absolutely devastating seeing Aussie TV turn to AI”
The teaser for the new season of Love Island Australia shows two shirtless men carrying in a barbecue and hanging a portrait of Vegemite, and Meta has labelled the video “AI Content”. Fans in the comments said they would have taken last year's villa if it meant a promo made without AI.
“At the time of writing, the spacexsi.com domain was listed for sale.”
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI, the company formed by merging SpaceX and xAI, will be renamed SpaceXSI, after a presidential order told federal agencies to write “Super Intelligence” instead of “Artificial Intelligence.” The order does not require private companies to change their names, and when the article was written the spacexsi.com address was listed for sale.
“You guessed it! AI was definitely used to generate these silly video clips.”
Researchers at the Wesleyan Media Project have counted almost 170 political ads made with AI in this year's U.S. midterm campaigns, with about $80 million spent on them. Fewer than a third said AI was used; one that did carried the disclaimer “You guessed it! AI was definitely used to generate these silly video clips.”
“I used an AI video which I still love”
Shortly after 100 Thieves apologized for using AI in its RuneScape merchandise, its founder Nadeshot posted an AI-generated ad for a gambling sponsor. Criticized for it, he said on stream that he does not support AI-made merchandise, still loves his AI video, and finds the internet “incredibly dramatic.”
“Fortnite has quietly replaced a piece of in-game artwork after fans spotted its original version contained a Google Gemini AI watermark.”
Fortnite swapped out the cover picture for one of its music tracks after players noticed a Google Gemini watermark sitting in the bottom right corner. IGN reports the mark came with the track's original artwork, where it is still visible on Spotify.
“The big thing is you need to be critical because these systems produce confident responses, but confident does not mean true”
A watchdog group put the same questions about California's November ballot to six chatbots. Its report says ChatGPT twice asked whether the user meant a Michigan proposal, and Claude said a Los Angeles mayoral candidate had lost a primary she had in fact got through.
“We’ve removed the assets, and going forward, we will delay any missing assets rather than replacing them with AI.”
The developer of Animal Hospital, one of the most popular games on Roblox, apologised for using an AI filter to touch up screenshots shown on an in-game TV, and removed them. According to the article, fans say the studio had already apologised for AI-made artwork once before.
“The style is familiar but makes a lot of choices I wouldn't have made.”
A startup's new AI model offers to write in the style of any author, with Emily Dickinson and Donald Trump among the suggested examples. A Register reporter fed it one of his own columns, then went through the imitation line by line, noting the parts that did not make sense.
“a six-fingered hand and medieval boots resembling Air Jordans”
RuneScape's maker Jagex, which says it does not use generative AI in its artwork, pulled a trailer shown at its own fan convention after players spotted a six-fingered hand and medieval boots that looked like Air Jordans. Jagex said an outside partner made it after explicitly confirming AI would not be used, and that this was the second such incident in quick succession.
“the scenario of some human-made music being rejected (false positive) by digital distributors is becoming increasingly common”
Music distributor TuneCore told dancehall veteran Papa Michigan that a track on his album showed signs of generative AI and could not be distributed. He answered with a social media post showing the studio and the musicians who played on it, and asked for a review by a human moderator.
“There's just one major problem: Penguins aren't native to Greenland.”
President Trump shared an AI-made picture of himself greeting penguins in Greenland, where penguins do not live. HuffPost reports that some of the penguins in the picture have no heads and one has extra flippers, and that the White House posted a similar Greenland penguin picture in January.
“Then why am I going to pay you to push buttons on the machine?”
A writer at The American Conservative who handles contributors' submissions says a lot of would-be contributors have been sending him copy they did not write themselves. His main objection is about money: if AI prose were acceptable, he could get his own subscription and skip the writers.
“I began to wonder if even writing well now requires caution.”
Korean readers have started saying tidy writing has a "metallic taste", meaning it is smooth enough to look machine-made; one writer got the comment on a book review after cleaning up the grammar. The article cites a study that ran 13 AI detectors over 135,389 professionally edited documents and found the share of human writing flagged as AI ranged from 0% to 100% depending on the detector.
“And please, don’t send me your robot music. Send me anything else.”
After a post on X declared that streaming is over because AI has "solved infinite personalized music", Salon's news editor wrote an essay asking people to stop sending him AI-made songs. He compares the idea to a "personalized" children's cassette he was given in the 1980s, on which a company had dubbed his name into the same songs it sold for every other name.
“If this becomes the permanent state of modding, this may be my last project.”
In the space of a week, X filled up with AI-built game mods that splice unrelated games together, such as Escape from Tarkov inside Skyrim and World of Warcraft inside a Call of Duty game. The loudest complaints are coming from mod makers who say they use AI themselves, and comparison footage shows enemies that ignore the player and a space fighter that flies diagonally while shooting straight ahead.
“GPT-6 Astra went and downloaded Stardust, and started running that instead of its own bot.”
In StarSkirmish, a contest where AI-written StarCraft bots play each other and human-written ones, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra could not get ahead with the bot it had written. The Verge, citing Kotaku, reports that it downloaded the top-rated human-made bot and ran that instead, until the contest’s creator rolled its code back.
“The images it generates are terrible quality and are all obviously AI-generated.”
A new $269.99 digital photo frame has no app for sending it your own photos. According to a review, you speak to its voice assistant instead and it makes up a picture for you, such as a goat playing basketball.
