Google is adding some new features to its image search function to make it easier to spot altered content, the company announced at its I/O 2023 keynote Wednesday. Photos shown in search results will soon include an "about this image" option that tells users when the image and ones like it were first indexed by Google. You can also learn where it may have appeared first and see other places where the image has been posted online. That information could help users figure out whether something they're seeing was generated by AI, according to Google. For example, you'll be able to see if the image has been on fact-checking websites that point out whether an image is real or altered.

Knowingly or unknowingly, Microsoft kicked off a race to integrate generative AI into search engines when it introduced Bing AI in February. Google seemingly rushed into an announcement just a day before Microsoft's launch event, telling the world its generative AI chatbot would be called Bard. Since then, Google has opened up access to its ChatGPT and Bing AI rival, but while Microsoft's offering has been embedded into its search and browser products, Bard remains a separate chatbot. That doesn't mean Google hasn't been busy with generative AI. It's infused basically all of its products with the stuff, while leaving Search largely untouched.

After OpenAI's ChatGPT caught the tech world off guard late last year, Google reportedly declared a "code red," scrambling to plan a response to the new threat. Today at Google I/O 2023, we finally see a more fleshed-out picture of how the company views AI's role in its cloud-based productivity suite. Google Duet AI is the company's branding for its collection of AI tools across Workspace apps. Like Microsoft Copilot for Office apps, Duet AI is an umbrella term for a growing list of generative AI features across Google Workspace apps. First, the Gmail mobile app will now draft full replies to your emails based on a prompt in a new "Help me write" feature.

For the past two months, anybody wanting to try out Google's new chatbot AI, Bard, had to first register their interest and join a waitlist before being granted access. On Wednesday, the company announced that those days are over. Bard will immediately be dropping the waitlist requirement as it expands to 180 additional countries and territories. What's more, this expanded Bard will be built atop Google's newest Large Language Model, PaLM 2, making it more capable than ever before. Google hurriedly released the first generation Bard back in February after OpenAI's ChatGPT came out of nowhere and began eating the industry's collective lunch like Gulliver in a Lilliputian cafeteria. Matters were made worse when Bard's initial performances proved less than impressive -- especially given Google's generally accepted status at the forefront of AI development -- which hurt both Google's public image and its bottom line.

Back in March, Adobe announced that it, too, would be jumping into the generative AI pool alongside the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech industry heavyweights with the release of Adobe Firefly, a suite of AI features. Available across Adobe's product lineup including Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro, Firefly is designed to eliminate much of the drudge work associated with modern photo and video editing. On Wednesday, Adobe and Google jointly announced during the 2023 I/O event that both Firefly and the Express graphics suite will soon be incorporated into Bard, allowing users to generate, edit and share AI images directly from the chatbot's command line. According to a release from the company, users will be able to generate an image with Firefly, then edit and modify it using Adobe Express assets, fonts and templates within the Bard platform directly -- even post to social media once it's ready. Those generated images will reportedly be of the same high quality that Firefly beta users are already accustomed to as they are all being created from the same database of Adobe Stock images, openly licensed and public domain content.

Google is stuffing generative AI into seemingly all its products, and that now includes the photo app on your phone. The company has previewed an "experimental" Magic Editor tool in Google Photos that can not only fix photos, but outright change them to create the shot you wanted all along. You can move and resize subjects, stretch objects (such as the bench above), remove an unwanted bag strap or even replace an overcast sky with a sunnier version. Magic Editor will be available in early form to "select" Pixel phones later this year, Google says. The tech giant warns that output might be flawed, and that it will use feedback to improve the technology.

In April, the release of "Heart On My Sleeve," a generative-AI track in the style of Drake and the Weeknd, sparked debate over the definition of artistic expression and offered a glimpse into consumers' appetite for music created using AI. Responding to the track, Universal Music Group, which works with Drake and the Weeknd, asked "which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation."

Artificial intelligence will be transformative in ways we can't even imagine, with implications for Americans' elections, jobs, and security,

Fox News contributor Joe Concha joins "Fox & Friends First" to discuss Elon Musk's warning that AI could threaten elections and his concerns on the declining birth rate. The top lawyer for OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, argued that the best way to regulate artificial intelligence is not to start with government mandated rules and regulations but to allow the companies themselves to set standards that ensure AI is used safely and responsibly. OpenAI General Counsel Jason Kwon made that argument during a Tuesday panel discussion in Washington, D.C., which was hosted by BSA/The Software Alliance, even as he acknowledged that AI is developing so quickly that it can often lead to unexpected results that companies quickly need to rein in. Still, when asked what his message to policymakers was, Kwon recommended voluntary, industry-led standards for AI, calling for a tactic that many companies in most industries tend to favor over government mandates. The top lawyer at OpenAI, run by CEO Sam Altman, above, said this week that the company recommends voluntary industry standards to regulate AI, not government mandates.

Meta is open-sourcing an AI tool called ImageBind that predicts connections between data similar to how humans perceive or imagine an environment. While image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 pair words with images, allowing you to generate visual scenes based only on a text description, ImageBind casts a broader net. It can link text, images / videos, audio, 3D measurements (depth), temperature data (thermal), and motion data (from inertial measurement units) -- and it does this without having to first train on every possibility. It's an early stage of a framework that could eventually generate complex environments from an input as simple as a text prompt, image or audio recording (or some combination of the three). You could view ImageBind as moving machine learning closer to human learning.