A Dungeons & Dragons expansion book included AI-generated artwork. Fans on Twitter spotted it before the book was even released (noting, among other things, a wolf with human feet). An embarrassed representative for Wizards of the Coast then tweeted out an announcement about new guidelines stating explicitly that "artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their creation process for developing D&D art." GeekWire reports: The artist in question, Ilya Shkipin, is a California-based painter, illustrator, and operator of an NFT marketplace, who has worked on projects for Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast since 2014. Shkipin took to Twitter himself on Friday, and acknowledged in several now-deleted tweets that he'd used AI tools to "polish" several original illustrations and concept sketches. As of Saturday morning, Shkipin had taken down his original tweets and announced that the illustrations for Glory of the Giants are "going to be reworked..."

While the physical book won't be out until August 15, the e-book is available now from Wizards' D&D Beyond digital storefront.
Wizards of the Coast emphasized this won't happen again. About this particular incident, they noted "We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he's put years of work into books we all love. While we weren't aware of the artist's choice to use AI in the creation process for these commissioned pieces, we have discussed with him, and he will not use AI for Wizards' work moving forward."

GeekWire adds that the latest D&D video game, Baldur's Gate 3, "went into its full launch period on Tuesday. Based on metrics such as its player population on Steam, BG3 has been an immediate success, with a high of over 709,000 people playing it concurrently on Saturday afternoon."

Even Zoom is now telling its 8,400 employees to stop working remotely at least two days a week and return to the office. The policy applies to employees within 50 miles of a Zoom office ith a Zoom spokesperson calling this hybrid approach the "most effective".

Business Insider quips that Zoom making the move means "The remote work revolution is officially dead."

And earlier this week The Los Angeles Times argues that "After watching and waiting, some chaotic back-and-forth and a few false starts, the white-collar American workforce appears to be settling — for now — in a hybrid mode." Even as more corporations are moving to call workers back to the office, arguing it's better for preserving company culture and decision-making, few employers have required employees to work on-site five days a week. Most are like Meta and Los Angeles-based Farmers Group, which recently announced that most employees who had been working remotely will have to come in three days a week starting in September.

Some firms have backtracked in favor of a more flexible system, or put return-to-office plans on ice, because of worker resistance and other changes wrought by the pandemic... [M]any other companies have stayed silent on the issue of remote work, maintaining vague or largely unenforced policies as they wait to see where the struggle ends. More unions, including the guild at the Los Angeles Times, are wrestling with management over remote work, which has become a top labor issue. For all these reasons, the overall amount of work done from home has held remarkably steady this year at about 28%, according to monthly surveys of thousands of workers by WFH Research, a group including Stanford and the University of Chicago. That's way up from roughly 5% of work done at home before COVID-19.

And there are some signs that employers are giving workers greater flexibility in their work schedules and when they can work from home. In a nationwide survey conducted last month for The Times by polling firm Leger, 27% of full-time workers said their employers had become more lenient over the last year about working remotely. Only 15% said their employers got stricter. Most of the rest said there was no change. Leger's survey showed that 11% of full-time employees work 100% from home, and 31% work a hybrid schedule, with most saying they choose which days to come into the office. The remainder said that they work fully on company premises or that their jobs aren't compatible with at-home work. These results line up almost exactly with WFH data...

Rob Sadow, chief executive at Scoop Technologies, a firm specializing in flexible-work software and research, says the percentages of employers that are fully remote and fully in-office have both declined since the start of the year. What's grown in their place is a "structured" hybrid model in which employees and employers have essentially split the difference. "This two to three days a week is starting to feel like a pretty decent, happy medium," Sadow said. "Executives and employees are finding somewhat of a truce in terms of how much time is spent in the office and at home."
The article also points out that "Some employees have quit and moved to more remote-work friendly firms."

"Three of Reddit's biggest communities are no longer focused entirely on John Oliver in a form of protest against Reddit," reports the Verge.

Gizmodo argues that this means "the Reddit protest is finally over. Reddit won." Despite the infinite blackout threats, most moderators relented as the weeks rolled by. Three major holdouts were r/aww, r/pics, and r/videos, some of Reddit's largest communities that account for more than 91 million subscribers. The three subreddits reopened weeks ago but adopted rules by popular vote that prohibited content that did not feature HBO's John Oliver, rendering the forums useless for their previous purposes.

For a while, the subreddits stood strong, but r/videos was the first to backpedal, dropping the John Oliver rule but requiring all posts to feature profanity. Soon that rule was abandoned as well. Last week, the moderators of r/aww announced the John Oliver rule was over, and over the weekend r/pics quietly gave up the protest as well, as reported by the Verge. "More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people's attention has shifted to other things," an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change.

According to Reddark, a site that tracks the subreddit protest, 1,843 of the original 8,829 protesting communities are still dark. But most of these are small communities, and today the only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.
The Verge: Two other big communities have switched back, too. r/pics (with more than 30 million subscribers) had perhaps been the most visibly tied to John Oliver: Oliver himself posted a series of silly photos specifically for the community to use, and at one point, the moderators of r/pics invited Oliver to join the mod team. But sometime recently, r/pics removed any obvious trace of its connections to John Oliver; the Wayback Machine shows that r/pics was all about John Oliver as of Friday but no longer on Saturday...

r/videos (with more than 26 million subscribers) actually dropped its John Oliver rule back in June; it was replaced by a new rule that all posts needed to contain profanity in the title after a community vote. Earlier this month, the r/videos moderators reverted the rules to what they were before the protests started...

In June, more than 8,000 communities went dark to protest the API pricing, but in the weeks since, many subreddits have opened back up (some after feeling pressure from Reddit) and are operating as they did before. Many users are still disgruntled, though, and made their feelings known in July's r/Place canvas.

More than 1,800 subreddits are still private in protest, according to the Reddark tracker.
Some key passages from the moderator's announcement at r/aww: What about the protest, though; did we win? The short answer is no. The long answer is also no, as Reddit's minimal attempts at positive outreach remain overshadowed by the plethora of depressing developments...

At the end of the day, Reddit's API changes have gone into effect. They did not extend the transition period or reduce the exorbitant prices. They granted exemptions to a few apps and moderation tools, but that's about it. The best thing I can say is that they did honor their commitment to ensuring the continued functionality of some mod tools... Despite some reassurances and promises from Reddit, their conduct and these changes have driven away many developers, leading to the shutdown of some tools and an uncertain future for others.
The announcement with a link labeled "and more importantly," which leads to a picture with a message for Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (who uses the name "Spez" when posting on Reddit.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Jordi Van DenBussche used to devote every waking hour to building his presence on social media. The gaming creator, better known as Kwebbelkop, would labor 24/7 onhis YouTube channelcoming up with video ideas, shooting them, distributing them. He did this while courting brand deals and doing the other work integral to his survival on the platform. Five years ago, he ran into a problem. "Every time I wanted to take a holiday or I needed some time for myself, I couldn't really do that, because my entire business would stop," he says. It's an issue known as the "key person problem." Without Van Den Bussche on camera, the entire Kwebbelkop enterprise didn't work. He was too busy making videos to think about how to scale his business, and too tired to create videos. He needed a break: Around 2018, like many other YouTubers, he experienced significant burnout.

The burnout sparked a change in mindset. He began thinking about what would benefit him and what would benefit the creator industry -- which often relies on milking the on-camera presence of an individual until they reach a breaking point, then finding another person seeking fame and fortune. He came up with a solution: a series of AI tools designed to create and upload videos, practically without his involvement. "I'm retired from being an influencer," he says. "I've had a lovely career. I had a lot of fun. I want to take things to the next level. And that means making this brand live on forever."

Van Den Bussche's AI influencer platform, which launched this week after a suitably excitable level of hype on Twitter from its creator, is his attempt to make that happen. It comprises two versions of an AI tool. The first is trained on a creator's likeness -- their on-camera performances and what they say in videos -- and is used to create new content. It appears to be similar to Forever Voices,the controversial AI tool behind the CarynAI virtual influencer, which outsourced maintaining connections with fans on behalf of creators. The other involves simplifying the act of creation as much as possible by taking simple prompts -- such as "turn this article into a video formatted like an interview involving two people" -- and producing the end result. (The latter is similar toa tool called QuickVid, which has seen some early adoption.) Van Den Bussche won't reveal much about how the tools were built, but regardless of their origins they're coming at a critical time for generative AI and its impacts on how people work. And Van Den Bussche's way of doing things could have lasting impacts on creators on YouTube and beyond.

Apple now has more than 1 billion paid subscriptions across all of its services, including Apple Music, iCloud, Apple News, Apple TV+ and more. From a report: Apple has methodically executed a long-term strategy of offsetting slowing hardware sales growth with revenue from software services -- and that now accounts for more than a quarter of the company's sales. Apple's advertising business is expected to reach $6 billion by 2025, which would make it larger than both Snapchat and Twitter's ad business. [...] The quarter also represented Apple's biggest ever for software sales.

Threads, Meta's Twitter rival, is struggling to retain users roughly a month after its highly publicized launch, according to fresh industry estimates showing that app engagement has fallen to new lows. From a report: The data from market research firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower highlight the challenges facing Meta as it seeks to exploit the opening created by the chaos surrounding Twitter's management. Threads' daily active user count is down 82% from launch as of July 31, according to Sensor Tower, with just eight million users accessing the app each day.

That is the lowest it has been since the day after the app's release when daily active users peaked at roughly 44 million, Sensor Tower said. People are also opening the app less frequently and spending less time there, Sensor Tower added. On its launch day, Threads users opened the app an average of 14 times and spent an average of 19 minutes scrolling through it, the company reported. By the end of the month, however, those figures had fallen sharply.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton has been saying for months that 2023 would be a "recovery year" for Raspberry Pi supply -- the single-board computer, once known for its easy availability and affordability, has been hit with supply shortages for years. Hundreds of thousands of Pi boards were still being manufactured every month, but many were going to commercial buyers rather than retailers and end users. More recently, those manufacturing numbers have climbed from 400,000 monthly units to 600,000 to 800,000 to 1 million, a level that Upton says can be sustained "for as long as is necessary to clear our remaining customer backlogs and return to free availability."

We're now seeing very early signs that supply is returning to normal, at least for some Pi models. UK-based Pi reseller Pimoroni announced today that it was lifting some purchase limitations on 2GB and 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 boards and Pi Zero W boards (not, apparently, the more recent Pi Zero 2 W). The rpilocator stock tracker account has also noted that its number of automated stock alerts has decreased recently "because Pis are staying in stock longer," noting that Pimoroni and The Pi Hut had (and still have) multiple Pi 4 variants in stock.

Even as stock returns to normal, we'll still be dealing with the aftereffects of the shortage for some time to come; the "temporary" price increase for the 2GB Pi 4 board still hasn't been reverted, and Upton's past comments have implied that the company has put off the development of the Pi 5 to allow stock of current models to return to normal (the Pi 4 was introduced just over four years ago). Other retailers still have purchasing restrictions in place. And some models and retailers will clearly recover more quickly than others.

An Australian Senate committee has recommended a ban on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from federal government devices be extended to China's most popular social media platform, WeChat. From a report: The Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media also recommended in a report late Tuesday that social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter should become more transparent or be fined. Committee chair James Paterson said on Wednesday the report's recommendations would make Australia a more difficult target for the serious foreign interference risks that the nation faced. "It tackles both the problems posed by authoritarian-headquartered social media platforms like TikTok and WeChat and Western-headquartered social media platforms being weaponized by the actions of authoritarian governments including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter," Paterson told reporters.

German semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies AG announced that it's producing a printed circuit board (PCB) that dissolves in water. Engadget reports: Jiva's biodegradable PCB is made from natural fibers and a halogen-free polymer with a much lower carbon footprint than traditional boards made with fiberglass composites. A 2022 study by the University of Washington College of Engineering and Microsoft Research saw the team create an Earth-friendly mouse using a Soluboard PCB as its core. The researchers found that the Soluboard dissolved in hot water in under six minutes. However, it can take several hours to break down at room temperature.

In addition to dissolving the PCB fibers, the process makes it easier to retrieve the valuable metals attached to it. âoeAfter [it dissolves], we're left with the chips and circuit traces which we can filter out,â said UW assistant professor Vikram Iyer, who worked on the mouse project. The video [here] shows the Soluboard dissolving in a frying pan with boiling water. "Adopting a water-based recycling process could lead to higher yields in the recovery of valuable metals," said Jonathan Swanston, CEO and co-founder of Jiva Materials. Jiva says the board has a 60 percent smaller carbon footprint than traditional PCBs -- specifically, it can save 10.5 kg of carbon and 620 g of plastic per square meter of PCB.

An anonymous reader shared this story from CNN: Barry Sherry was traveling from his home in Virginia to Europe for the cycling trip of a lifetime: a week riding through the Swiss Alps, followed by another in Luxembourg, where his cycling group was riding with two former Tour de France competitors, and then a third week cycling in Finland with friends. It was, he says, to be his last cycling trip to Europe. "I'm 68 — I'm getting old," he says... While his suitcase arrived on the carousel, his [$8,000] bike — zipped up in its carrier — had become one of the 7.6 out of every 1,000 items of luggage to be, as the industry coyly terms it, "mishandled." In other words: lost...

The "Find My" app, which traces Apple devices including AirTags, showed the bike at Heathrow... British Airways has up to six flights per day from Heathrow to Zurich, but as each day came and went, none of them had Sherry's bike on board... Each day, he updated his location on the British Airways website, and each day, his bike failed to arrive — or move from Heathrow, according to the AirTag. By this point Sherry was tweeting the airline daily, showing them screenshots of the mapped location of the bike, but getting generic responses from British Airways that he believes were bots... That evening, he tweeted the location of the bag again, tagging American Airlines (who'd sold him the ticket) and Heathrow Airport, too. "AA seemed to have a human at the other end, and I thought maybe they could reach a human at BA," he says.

Was it that final tweet, tagging AA and Heathrow, that did it? Sherry will never know — though he suspects the daily tweets showing screenshots of the bike's location were the key. After his tweet on Thursday night to all three accounts, on Friday morning he checked his Find My app, and saw his bike was on the move... "Had I not started an annoying Twitter campaign, I do think it would have remained at Heathrow until I could have talked to someone face to face."
CNN reports that Sherry's week in Luxembourg "went ahead as planned, with Sherry adding that he was particuarly attached to his bike because "Fourteen years ago I was diagnosed with cancer, and the only time I wasn't thinking about it was when I was riding my bike."

He'd put the AirTag with his bike "after hearing other cyclists rave about them."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Meta's new Twitter competitor, Threads, is looking for ways to keep users interested after more than half of the people who signed up for the text-based platform stopped actively using the app, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees in a company town hall yesterday. Threads launched on July 5 and signed up over 100 million users in less than five days, buoyed by user frustration with Elon Musk-owned Twitter.

"Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We're not there yet," Zuckerberg told employees yesterday, according to Reuters, which listened to audio of the event. Third-party data suggests that Threads may have lost many more than half of its active users. Daily active users for Threads on Android dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23, web analytics company SimilarWeb reported.

"We don't yet have daily numbers for iOS, but we suspect the boom-and-bust pattern is similar," SimilarWeb wrote. "Threads took off like a rocket, with its close linkage to Instagram as the booster. However, the developers of Threads will need to fill in missing features and add some new and unique ones if they want to make checking the app a daily habit for users." Although losing over half of the initial users in a short period might sound discouraging, the Reuters article said Zuckerberg told employees that user retention was better than Meta executives expected. "Zuckerberg said he considered the drop-off 'normal' and expected retention to grow as the company adds more features to the app, including a desktop version and search functionality," Reuters wrote.

OpenAI has released ChatGPT for Android, months after launching the free iOS app for iPhones and iPads. You can download it in the Google Play Store. The Verge reports: According to a company tweet, it's available first in the US, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil, with other countries set to follow later, mimicking the staged rollout we saw for the iOS version. On July 27th, OpenAI announced additional availability, saying the Android ChatGPT app is now available in Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, the UK, and South Korea.

Since 2006, Slashdot has been covering a contest CmdrTaco once summarized as "Compress Wikipedia and Win." It rewards progress on compressing a 1-billion-character excerpt of Wikipedia — approximately the amount that a human can read in a lifetime.

And today a new record was announced. The 1 billion characters have now been compressed to just 114,156,155 bytes — about 114 megabytes, or just 11.41% of the original size — by Saurabh Kumar, a New York-based quantitative developer for a high-frequency/algorithmic trading and financial services fund. The amount of each "Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge" increases based on how much compression is achieved (so if you compress the file x% better you receive x% of the prize). Kumar's compression was 1.04% smaller than the previous record, so they'll receive €5187.

But "The intention of this prize is to encourage development of intelligent compressors/programs as a path to AGI," said Marcus Hutter (now a senior researcher at Google DeepMind) in a 2020 interview with Lex Fridman.

17 years after their original post announcing the competition, Baldrson (Slashdot reader #78,598) returns to explain the contest's significance to AI research, starting with a quote from mathematician Gregory Chaitin — that "Compression is comprehension."

But they emphasize that the contest also has one specific hardware constraint rooted in theories of AI optimization: The Hutter Prize is geared toward research in that it restricts computation resources to the most general purpose hardware that is widely available. Why? As described by the seminal paper "The Hardware Lottery" by Sara Hooker, AI research is biased toward algorithms optimized for existing hardware infrastructure. While this hardware bias is justified for engineering (applying existing scientific understanding to the "utility function" of making money) to quote Sara Hooker, it "can delay research progress by casting successful ideas as failures."

The complaint that this is "mere" optimization ignores the fact that this was done on general purpose computation hardware, and is therefore in line with the spirit of Sara Hookers admonition to researchers in "The Hardware Lottery". By showing how to optimize within the constraint of general purpose computation, Saurabh's contribution may help point the way toward future directions in hardware architecture.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The number one movie in North America is Warner Bros. Discovery's Barbie, which Deadline reports has teamed up with Oppenheimer to fuel a mind-blowing $300M+ box office weekend. ["Oppenheimer Shatters Expectations with $80 Million Debut," read the headline at Variety.]

Now it seems everybody is trying to tap into Barbie buzz, including Microsoft's Xbox [which added Barbie and Ken's cars to Forza Horizon 5] and even Microsoft-backed education nonprofit Code.org. ("Are your students excited about Barbie The Movie? Have them try an HourOfCode [programming game] with Barbie herself!").
The idea is to inspire young students to become coders. But as Code.org shares Instagram images of a software developer Barbie, Slashdot reader theodp remembers when, nine years ago, Code.org's CEO "took to Twitter to blast Barbie and urge for her replacement." They'd joined a viral 2014 Computer Engineer Barbie protest that arose in response to the publication of Barbie F***s It Up Again, a scathing and widely reported-on blog post that prompted Mattel to pull the book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer immediately from Amazon. This may have helped lead to Barbie's loss of her crown as the most popular girls' toy in the ensuing 2014 holiday season to Disney's Frozen princesses Elsa and Anna, and got the Mattel exec who had to apologize for Computer Engineer Barbie called to the White House for a sit down a few months later. (Barbie got a brainy makeover soon thereafter)...

The following year, Disney-owned Lucasfilm and Code.org teamed up on Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code, a signature tutorial for the 2015 Hour of Code. Returning to a Disney princess theme in 2016, Disney and Code.org revealed a new Hour of Code tutorial featuring characters from the animated film Moana just a day ahead of its theatrical release. It was later noted that Moana's screenwriters included Pamela Ribon, who penned the 2014 Barbie-blasting blog post that ended Barbie's short reign as the Hour of Code role model of choice for girls.

Interestingly, Ribon seems to bear no Barbie grudges either, tweeting on the day of the Barbie movie release, "I was like holy s*** can't wait to see it."
To be fair, the movie's trailer promises "If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you," in a deconstruction where Barbie is played by D.C. movies' "Harley Quinn" actress Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey), whose other roles include Tonya Harding and the home-wrecking second wife in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Leaving a Ubisoft account inactive for too long "apparently puts it at risk of permanent deletion," writes PC Gamer, calling the policy "a customer-unfriendly practice." A piracy and anti-DRM focused Twitter account, PC_enjoyer, recently shared a screenshot of a Ubisoft support email telling the user that their Ubisoft account had been suspended for "inactivity," and would be "permanently closed" after 30 days. The email provided a link to cancel the move. Now, that sounds like a phishing scam, right? I and many commenters wondered that, looking at the original post, but less than a day later, Ubisoft's verified support account responded to the tweet, seemingly confirming the screenshotted email's legitimacy.

"You can avoid the account closure by logging into your account within the 30 days (since receiving the email pictured) and selecting the Cancel Account Closure link contained in the email," Ubisoft Support wrote. "We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account so if you have any difficulties logging in then please create a support case with us."

I was unable to find anything regarding account closure for inactivity in Ubisoft's US terms of use or its end user licence agreement, but the company does reserve the right to suspend or end services at any time. Ubisoft has a support page titled "Closure of inactive Ubisoft accounts." The page first describes instances where the service clashes with local data privacy laws, then reads: "We may also close long-term inactive accounts to maintain our database. You will be notified by email if we begin the process of closing your inactive account."

This page links to another dedicated to voluntarily closing one's Ubisoft account, and seems to operate by the same rules: a 30-day suspension before permanent deletion. "As we will be unable to recover the account once it has been closed, we strongly recommend only putting in the request if you are absolutely sure you would like to close your account."
"If you have a good spam filter or just reasonably assume it's a phishing attempt, then you might one day try your old games and find they're just gone," worries long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. "If you're someone who still plays games from decades ago every so often, this is a scenario you might want to think about."

The site Eurogamer reports that when a Twitter user complained that "I lost my Ubisoft account, and all the Ubisoft Steam game[s] I've bought are now useless", Ubisoft Support "responded to say that players can raise a ticket if they would like to recover their account."

The original tweet now includes this "reader-added context" supplied by other Twitter users — along with three informative links: For added context, Ubisoft can be required under certain data protection laws, such as the GDPR, to close inactive accounts if they deem the data no longer necessary for collection.

Ubisoft has claimed they don't close accounts that are inactive for less than 4 years.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Axios: Over 20% of the U.S.' population — 80 million people — are expected to face an air temperature or heat index above 105 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend as a record-breaking heat wave persists over most of the South, the National Weather Service (NWS) warns...

The extreme temperatures, which have been exacerbated by human-caused climate change, will come after several days of excessive heat and will be an immediate risk to public health... Heat index is what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature, and indices 103 degreesF or above can lead to dangerous heat disorders.

"Dozens" of temperature records could break across the Southern U.S., including overnight highs, the NWS said... About 115 million people in over a dozen states from California to Florida were under heat alerts on Thursday morning... The threatening heat is forecast to continue over the Southwest through "at least" July 28 and may expand into other parts of the country...

Global temperatures are hitting unprecedented highs, too, this year amid climate change and global warming. Elevated temperatures are also contributing to Canada's worst fire season on record, in which at least 27.1 million acres have burned across the country so far.
On Wednesday the city of Phoenix, Arizona — population 1.6 million — "experienced its 20th straight day with a temperature of over 110 degreesF," the article points out. And meanwhile Austin Texas (population 960,000) "saw its 10th straight day of temperatures at or above 105 degreesF for the first time in recorded history."

The National Weather Service's advice? "Take the heat seriously and avoid extended time outdoors."

Earlier this week, Meta announced it has teamed up with Microsoft to launch Llama 2, its "open-source" large language model (LLM) that uses artificial intelligence to generate text, images, and code. In an opinion piece for The Register, long-time ZDNet contributor and technology analyst, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writes: "Meta is simply open source washing an open but ultimately proprietary LLM." From the report: As Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK, said, it's "not an OSI approved license but a significant release of Open Technology ... This is a step to moving AI from the hands of the few to the many, democratizing technology and building trust in its use and future through transparency." And for many developers, that may be enough. [...] But the devil is in the details when it comes to open source. And there, Meta, with its Llama 2 Community License Agreement, falls on its face. As The Register noted earlier, the community agreement forbids the use of Llama 2 to train other language models; and if the technology is used in an app or service with more than 700 million monthly users, a special license is required from Meta. Stefano Maffulli, the OSI's executive director, explained: "While I'm happy that Meta is pushing the bar of available access to powerful AI systems, I'm concerned about the confusion by some who celebrate LLaMa 2 as being open source: if it were, it wouldn't have any restrictions on commercial use (points 5 and 6 of the Open Source Definition). As it is, the terms Meta has applied only allow some commercial use. The keyword is some."

Maffulli then dove in deeper. "Open source means that developers and users are able to decide for themselves how and where to use the technology without the need to engage with another party; they have sovereignty over the technology they use. When read superficially, Llama's license says, 'You can't use this if you're Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Bytedance, Alibaba, or your startup grows as big.' It may sound like a reasonable clause, but it also implicitly says, 'You need to ask us for permission to create a tool that may solve world hunger' or anything big like that." Stephen O'Grady, open source licensing expert and RedMonk co-founder, explained it like this: "Imagine if Linux was open source unless you worked at Facebook." Exactly. Maffulli concluded: "That's why open source has never put restrictions on the field of use: you can't know beforehand what can happen in the future, good or bad."

The OSI isn't the only open-source-savvy group that's minding the Llama 2 license. Karen Sadler, lawyer and executive director at the Software Freedom Conservancy, dug into the license's language and found that "the Additional Commercial Terms in section 2 of the license agreement, which is a limitation on the number of users, makes it non-free and not open source." To Sadler, "it looks like Meta is trying to push a license that has some trappings of an open source license but, in fact, has the opposite result. Additionally, the Acceptable Use Policy, which the license requires adherence to, lists prohibited behaviors that are very expansively written and could be very subjectively applied -- if you send out a mass email, could it be considered spam? If there's reasonably critical material published, would it be considered defamatory?" Last, but far from least, she "didn't notice any public drafting or comment process for this license, which is necessary for any serious effort to introduce a new license."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, responded to Vox Media's claim that AI content is currently "well-received by search engines." Sullivan said, "It's still not correct that AI content will be "well-received by search engines," at least for us." Sullivan went on to explain on Twitter that "There's lots of AI content on the web that doesn't rank well and hence isn't well received" by Google Search. "AI content has no magic ranking powers," Sullivan said. Only "if content is helpful, then it might succeed," but not because AI wrote it does it mean the content is helpful.

Sullivan wrote to the author, "FYI about this part: "he's learned that AI content 'will, at least for the moment, be well-received by search engines'." This isn't correct. Our systems are looking at the helpfulness of content, rather than how it is produced," Danny Sullivan clarified. "We'd encourage publishers, however they produce content, to ensure they're making it for people-first," he added. "Producing a lot of content with the primary purpose of ranking in search, rather than for people, should be avoided. Sites producing a lot of unhelpful content not intended for people-first may find all of their content less likely to be successful with search," he said.

Artificial intelligence companies are exploring a new avenue to obtain the massive amounts of data needed to develop powerful generative models: creating the information from scratch. From a report: Microsoft, OpenAI and Cohere are among the groups testing the use of so-called synthetic data -- computer-generated information to train their AI systems known as large language models (LLMs) -- as they reach the limits of human-made data that can further improve the cutting-edge technology. The launch of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT last November has led to a flood of products rolled out publicly this year by companies including Google and Anthropic, which can produce plausible text, images or code in response to simple prompts.

The technology, known as generative AI, has driven a surge of investor and consumer interest, with the world's biggest technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Meta racing to dominate the space. Currently, LLMs that power chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard are trained primarily by scraping the internet. Data used to train these systems includes digitised books, news articles, blogs, search queries, Twitter and Reddit posts, YouTube videos and Flickr images, among other content. Humans are then used to provide feedback and fill gaps in the information in a process known as reinforcement learning by human feedback (RLHF). But as generative AI software becomes more sophisticated, even deep-pocketed AI companies are running out of easily accessible and high-quality data to train on. Meanwhile, they are under fire from regulators, artists and media organisations around the world over the volume and provenance of personal data consumed by the technology.

Apple Pay is launching in Morocco today -- almost nine years after the service was first announced. MacRumors reports: CIH Bank is launching Apple Pay in the country as of Tuesday, according to the bank's Twitter account. It's not clear if other banks in Morocco will be coming on board with support for Apple's digital payment method, but it's likely. The support means that CIH Bank's customers will be able to add their Mastercard credit cards and bank cards to the Wallet app by tapping the plus button in the top-right corner. Apple has yet to update its regional website to officially confirm the launch.