Adobe is bringing its generative AI (GAI) tech to mobile for the first time. Firefly GAI features are included in the beta of the new Express app on Android and iOS starting today. They should afford users more expansive creation and editing options while they're on the go. Using text prompts, you'll be able to generate images and insert, remove or replace people, objects and other elements such as backgrounds. Quick Actions enable you to apply edits, remove backgrounds and resize images with a single tap.

In recent months, the social impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained considerable public interest, driven by the emergence of Generative AI models, ChatGPT in particular. The rapid development of these models has sparked heated discussions regarding their benefits, limitations, and associated risks. Generative models hold immense promise across multiple domains, such as healthcare, finance, and education, to cite a few, presenting diverse practical applications. Nevertheless, concerns about potential adverse effects have elicited divergent perspectives, ranging from privacy risks to escalating social inequality. This paper adopts a methodology to delve into the societal implications of Generative AI tools, focusing primarily on the case of ChatGPT. It evaluates the potential impact on several social sectors and illustrates the findings of a comprehensive literature review of both positive and negative effects, emerging trends, and areas of opportunity of Generative AI models. This analysis aims to facilitate an in-depth discussion by providing insights that can inspire policy, regulation, and responsible development practices to foster a human-centered AI.

Independent evaluation and red teaming are critical for identifying the risks posed by generative AI systems. However, the terms of service and enforcement strategies used by prominent AI companies to deter model misuse have disincentives on good faith safety evaluations. This causes some researchers to fear that conducting such research or releasing their findings will result in account suspensions or legal reprisal. Although some companies offer researcher access programs, they are an inadequate substitute for independent research access, as they have limited community representation, receive inadequate funding, and lack independence from corporate incentives. We propose that major AI developers commit to providing a legal and technical safe harbor, indemnifying public interest safety research and protecting it from the threat of account suspensions or legal reprisal. These proposals emerged from our collective experience conducting safety, privacy, and trustworthiness research on generative AI systems, where norms and incentives could be better aligned with public interests, without exacerbating model misuse. We believe these commitments are a necessary step towards more inclusive and unimpeded community efforts to tackle the risks of generative AI.

An artificial intelligence engineer at Microsoft published a letter Wednesday alleging that the company's AI image generator lacks basic safeguards against creating violent and sexualized images. In the letter, engineer Shane Jones states that his repeated attempts to warn Microsoft management about the problems failed to result in any action. Jones said he sent the message to the Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft's board of directors. "Internally the company is well aware of systemic issues where the product is creating harmful images that could be offensive and inappropriate for consumers," Jones states in the letter, which he published on LinkedIn. He lists his title as "principal software engineering manager".

Artificial intelligence can appear to be many different things--a whole host of programs with seemingly little common ground. Sometimes AI is a conversation partner, an illustrator, a math tutor, a facial-recognition tool. But in every incarnation, it is always, always a machine, demanding almost unfathomable amounts of data and energy to function. AI systems such as ChatGPT operate out of buildings stuffed with silicon computer chips. To build bigger machines--as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and other tech companies would like to do--you need more resources.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, we have seen increased excitement about generative artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with concerns about its safety. Given this inflection point, we must pay renewed attention to its impact on the future of knowledge work carried out by professionals. This is because compared to earlier types of AI, generative AI gets closer to the core activities of professionals, namely giving advice to and treating clients. And yet, how and how fast professionals' work will change is not well understood. Instead of leaving the issue to be part of "unintended consequences,"3 this column argues that we can influence how generative AI will become embedded in the work we do as professionals. Professionals in a variety of fields--including medicine, audit, accounting, law, and data science--are essentially in the business of diagnosis and treatment, connecting the two via inference.

The tech giant said the lawsuit was near-sighted and akin to Hollywood's losing backlash against the VCR. In a motion to dismiss part of the lawsuit filed Monday, Microsoft, which was sued in December alongside ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, scoffed at the newspaper's claim that Times content receives "particular emphasis" and that tech companies "seek to free-ride on the Times's massive investment in its journalism". But in its response, Microsoft said the lawsuit was akin to Hollywood's resistance to the VCR that consumers used to record TV shows and which the entertainment business in the late 1970s feared would destroy its economic model. "'The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone,'" Microsoft said in its response, quoting from congressional testimony delivered by Jack Valenti, then head of the motion picture association of America, in 1982. In this case, Microsoft said, the Times is attempting to use "its might and its megaphone to challenge the latest profound technological advance: the Large Language Model."

Microsoft engineer Shane Jones raised concerns about the safety of OpenAI's DALL-E 3 back in January, suggesting the product has security vulnerabilities that make it easy to create violent or sexually explicit images. He also alleged that Microsoft's legal team blocked his attempts to alert the public to the issue. Now, he has taken his complaint directly to the FTC, as reported by CNBC. "I have repeatedly urged Microsoft to remove Copilot Designer from public use until better safeguards could be put in place," Jones wrote in a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan. He noted that Microsoft "refused that recommendation" so now he's asking the company to add disclosures to the product to alert consumers to the alleged danger. Jones also wants the company to change the rating on the app to make sure it's only for adult audiences.

Despite years of evidence to the contrary, many Republicans still believe that President Joe Biden's win in 2020 was illegitimate. A number of election denying candidates won their primaries during Super Tuesday, including Brandon Gill, the son-in-law of right-wing pundit Dinesh D'Souza and promoter of the debunked 2000 Mules film. Going into this year's elections, claims of election fraud remain a staple for candidates running on the right, fueled by dis- and misinformation, both online and off. And the advent of generative AI has the potential to make the problem worse. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms, found that even though generative AI companies say they've put policies in place to prevent their image-creating tools from being used to spread election-related disinformation, researchers were able to circumvent their safeguards and create the images anyway.

Elon Musk supported making OpenAI a for-profit company, the ChatGPT maker said, attacking a lawsuit from the wealthy investor who has accused the artificial intelligence business of betraying its founding goal to benefit humanity as it pursued profits instead. In its first response since the Tesla CEO sued last week, OpenAI vowed to get the claim thrown out and released emails from Musk, escalating the feud between the San Francisco-based company and the billionaire that bankrolled its creation years ago. "The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits," OpenAI said in a blog post late Tuesday from five company executives and computer scientists, including CEO Sam Altman. "We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon's claims." AGI refers to artificial general intelligence, which are general purpose AI systems that can perform just as well as -- or even better than -- humans in a wide variety of tasks.