I have a grayish dual position regarding generative art and, well, basically, generative creativity. One view is extremely cynical, and the other perspective is hopeful. I wrote earlier about this topic here (note: a bit gloomy). Let me start with the cynical view, hyperbolized for ease of communication. I see this as a big tech effort to lower tech wages, reduce negotiation positions of creative workers, push the commoditization of art, create a new scaleable consumer market, and more holistically drive society towards transhumanism.

The US Justice Department sued Google on Tuesday for its dominance of the online advertising market, launching a fresh legal battle against the California-based tech giant. The case was the second federal lawsuit against Google over alleged antitrust violations and the first since US President Joe Biden took office two years ago. The earlier case targeted Google's world-dominating search engine and is expected to go to trial later this year. In this latest suit, prosecutors took aim at Google's extremely profitable advertising business, asking that it be broken up to level the playing field for other companies. Google's ad dealings generated more than $200 billion in sales in 2021 and is parent company Alphabet's biggest moneymaker by a wide margin.

The Justice Department and eight states filed an antitrust suit against Google on Tuesday, seeking to shatter its alleged monopoly on the entire ecosystem of online advertising as a hurtful burden to advertisers, consumers and even the U.S. government. The government alleges that Google's plan to assert dominance has been to "neutralize or eliminate" rivals through acquisitions and to force advertisers to use its products by making it difficult to use competitors' products. The antitrust suit was filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press conference Tuesday that "for 15 years, Google has pursued a course of anti-competitive conduct" that has halted the rise of rival technologies and manipulated the mechanics of online ad auctions to force advertisers and publishers to use its tools. In so doing, he added, "Google has engaged in exclusionary conduct" that has "severely weakened," if not destroyed, competition in the ad tech industry.

Artificial intelligence is not only altering the course of the internet but also impacting the future of business. While some fear that it will have harmful economic repercussions by replacing people in jobs, AI can also serve as a game-changing tool to grow a business and increase its efficiency -- help with everything from lead generation to content creation. Launched by OpenAI in November of 2022, this chatbot amassed more than a million users in just five days. A generative dialogue AI application, it can create new content, and its potential uses are virtually endless -- from writing full essays to blog posts, song lyrics to cover letters and resumes. It can even draft legal contracts using local statutes/regulations pulled from public sources.

Vivian Dye is a smart woman. And so it took less than six months of selling customized golf merchandise on Zazzle, the most prominent online marketplace with three Zs in its name, for her to figure out that she needed an "Elizabeth Taylor on the beach." "I call it'Elizabeth Taylor on the beach' because she used to attract men for a cousin of hers," said Dye, referring to a plotline from an old movie. Even if customers didn't fancy her Liz, a monogrammed golfball covered with rose-colored sparkles drew users to her store, where she offered them customized pickleball paddles, shower curtains, and other golf balls. "I'm the golf ball queen," says Dye, who started selling on Zazzle in 2021, soon after retiring from her job in the mortgage industry.

Microsoft is making a "multibillion-dollar" investment that will lead to wider uses of OpenAI's technology, as well as more robust behind-the-scenes support. Microsoft has launched OpenAI-powered features, like natural language programming and a DALL-E 2 graphic design tool. OpenAI uses Microsoft's infrastructure to train its best-known systems, including DALL-E 2 and the popular ChatGPT bot. ChatGPT is coming to Azure soon. However, don't expect anyone to see ChatGPT in Bing – at least not yet.

Microsoft today said that it's extending its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art- and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and GPT-3, with a "multi-year, multi-billion-dollar" investment. OpenAI says that the infusion of new capital -- the exact amount of which wasn't disclosed -- will be used to continue its independent research and develop AI that's "safe, useful and powerful." The optics aren't the best for Microsoft, which just last week announced plans to lay off 10,000 employees as a part of broader cost-cutting measures. But they'd been telegraphed by the company earlier this month -- in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft planned to make OpenAI's foundational systems available as commercials platforms so that any entity in any industry can build on them. OpenAI will remain a capped-profit company as a part of the new investment deal with Microsoft.

Sentiment analysis has benefited from the availability of lexicons and benchmark datasets created over decades of research. However, its applications to the real world are a driving force for research in SA. This chapter describes some of these applications and related challenges in real-life scenarios. In this chapter, we focus on five applications of SA: health, social policy, e-commerce, digital humanities and other areas of NLP. This chapter is intended to equip an NLP researcher with the `what', `why' and `how' of applications of SA: what is the application about, why it is important and challenging and how current research in SA deals with the application. We note that, while the use of deep learning techniques is a popular paradigm that spans these applications, challenges around privacy and selection bias of datasets is a recurring theme across several applications.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is suddenly the darling of the tech world, thanks to ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can do things such as carry on conversations and write essays and articles with what some people believe is human-like skill. In its first five days, more than a million people signed up to try it. The New York Times hails its "brilliance and weirdness" and says it inspires both awe and fear. For all the glitz and hype surrounding ChatGPT, what it's doing now are essentially stunts -- a way to get as much attention as possible. The future of AI isn't in writing articles about Beyoncé in the style of Charles Dickens, or any of the other oddball things people use ChatGPT for. Instead, AI will be primarily a business tool, reaping billions of dollars for companies that use it for tasks like improving internet searches, writing software code, discovering and fixing inefficiencies in a company's business, and extracting useful, actionable information from massive amounts of data.

Apple's got a new helpful feature called "Safety Check" that'll guide you through what you've shared, with whom and how to revoke access. If you ever felt like someone was tracking you, be sure to review these settings. Are you concerned about facial recognition cameras monitoring your every move? Some large venues and arenas are using it as a security measure, claiming it ensures safety for guests and employees. However, the technology is also being used for surveillance and to block people from entering businesses.