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Taylor Swift Wants to Trademark Her Likeness. These TikTok Deepfake Ads Show Why

WIRED

Researchers show scammers are using AI-manipulated footage of celebrity interviews to trick users into sharing their personal data. Last week, Taylor Swift filed a trio of trademark applications to protect her image and voice. One is meant to cover a well-known photograph of the pop singer holding a pink guitar during a concert on her record-breaking Eras tour, while the two sound trademarks are for simple identifying phrases: "Hey, it's Taylor Swift" and "Hey, it's Taylor." The move comes as AI deepfakes continue to proliferate across social media. Any individual stands to have their likeness exploited in the creation of nonconsensual AI-generated material; earlier this month, an Ohio man was the first person convicted under a new federal law criminalizing "intimate" visual deceptions of this sort.


Musk accuses Altman of betraying OpenAI's nonprofit founding mission

Al Jazeera

Musk accuses Altman of betraying OpenAI's nonprofit founding mission Tech billionaire Elon Musk has taken the stand for a second day in a landmark United States trial against Sam Altman, a fellow OpenAI co-founder whom he accuses of betraying promises to keep the company a nonprofit dedicated to humanity's benefit. The trial centres on OpenAI's 2015 founding as a nonprofit that later evolved into a for-profit venture. The world's richest man, Musk gave testimony in the case on Wednesday, telling jurors that he lost confidence that Altman would maintain the company's nonprofit mission. Musk, who left the company in 2018, said that by late 2022, he was concerned that Altman was trying to "steal the charity" and alleged that "it turned out to be true". Altman was present at the proceedings in a California federal court, but did not testify.




Female Looksmaxxer Alorah Ziva Is Suing Clavicular for Alleged Battery

WIRED

Aleksandra Mendoza, aka Alorah Ziva, alleges that the 20-year-old influencer injected her with drugs on a livestream and had nonconsensual sex with her while she was underage. An 18-year-old woman who promotes herself as the "#1 female looksmaxxer" is suing the highly controversial streamer Braden Eric Peters, aka Clavicular, for fraud, battery, and alleged sexual assault. In the suit, which was filed in Miami-Dade County court and obtained by WIRED, Aleksandra Mendoza, who goes by the name @zahloria, or Alorah Ziva, on Instagram, alleges that she first encountered Peters in May 2025, when she was just 16 years old. According to the complaint, Peters promised Mendoza he could make her "the female face of looksmaxxing," the online trend of using surgery or drugs to enhance one's facial features. Eager to grow her social media following, Mendoza agreed to make four looksmaxxing videos for Peters in exchange for a $1,000 payment, court documents say.


Families sue OpenAI, alleging chatbot aided in Canadian school shooting

Al Jazeera

The families of victims of a school shooting in a remote Canadian Rockies town are suing artificial intelligence company OpenAI in a United States federal court, alleging that the ChatGPT maker failed to alert police to the shooter's alarming interactions with the chatbot. A lawsuit filed on Wednesday on behalf of 12-year-old Maya Gebala, who was critically injured in the February shooting, is among the first of more than two dozen cases from families in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, in what their lawyers say represents "an entire community stepping forward to hold OpenAI accountable". The cases represent the families of the five slain children targeted in the school shooting. Those include Zoey Benoit, Abel Mwansa Jr, Ticaria "Tiki" Lampert, Kylie Smith, all 12, and Ezekiel Schofield, 13, as well as education assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand. Jesse Van Rootselaar, whose interactions with ChatGPT are at the centre of the lawsuits, shot her mother and stepbrother at home before killing an educational assistant and five students aged 12 to 13 at her former school on February 10, according to police.


Certified Minimax Unlearning with Generalization Rates and Deletion Capacity

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of (ϵ,δ)-certified machine unlearning for minimax models. Most of the existing works focus on unlearning from standard statistical learning models that have a single variable and their unlearning steps hinge on the direct Hessian-based conventional Newton update. We develop a new (ϵ,δ)-certified machine unlearning algorithm for minimax models. It proposes a minimax unlearning step consisting of a total Hessian-based complete Newton update and the Gaussian mechanism borrowed from differential privacy. To obtain the unlearning certification, our method injects calibrated Gaussian noises by carefully analyzing the "sensitivity" of the minimax unlearning step (i.e., the closeness between the minimax unlearning variables and the retraining-from-scratch variables).


Certified Minimax Unlearning with Generalization Rates and Deletion Capacity

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of (ϵ,δ)-certified machine unlearning for minimax models. Most of the existing works focus on unlearning from standard statistical learning models that have a single variable and their unlearning steps hinge on the direct Hessian-based conventional Newton update. We develop a new (ϵ,δ)-certified machine unlearning algorithm for minimax models. It proposes a minimax unlearning step consisting of a total Hessian-based complete Newton update and the Gaussian mechanism borrowed from differential privacy. To obtain the unlearning certification, our method injects calibrated Gaussian noises by carefully analyzing the "sensitivity" of the minimax unlearning step (i.e., the closeness between the minimax unlearning variables and the retraining-from-scratch variables).


Victims Allege OpenAI Is Responsible for Mass Shooting

Mother Jones

A new lawsuit underscores key questions about the Tumbler Ridge killer's use of ChatGPT. A community vigil in Tumbler Ridge two days after the rural community experienced one of Canada's deadliest shootings Paige Taylor White/AFP/Getty Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting and their families sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US district court in San Francisco on Wednesday, claiming various negligence, product liability, and other violations. The civil complaints are the latest in a wave of litigation against OpenAI alleging that its globally popular chatbot, ChatGPT, helped people commit lethal violence. The complaints were filed by families of multiple victims wounded and killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, where a suicidal 18-year-old opened fire on February 10.