Natural Language
Chatbot encouraged US teen to kill parents over screen time limit, lawsuit claims
The legal filing includes a screenshot of one of the interactions between the 17-year old - identified only as J.F. - and a Character.ai "You know sometimes I'm not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like'child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse'," the chatbot's response reads. "Stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens." The lawsuit seeks to hold the defendants responsible for what it calls the "serious, irreparable, and ongoing abuses" of J.F. as well as an 11-year old referred to as "B.R." Character.ai is "causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others," it says. "[Its] desecration of the parent-child relationship goes beyond encouraging minors to defy their parents' authority to actively promoting violence," it continues.
OpenAI Sora is restricting depictions of people due to safety concerns
OpenAI Sora is limiting depictions of real people and taking other strict safety measures to prevent misuse. The video generator, which was announced on Monday as part of its 12 Days of OpenAI event, has all sorts of editing capabilities for users to create and customize AI-generated videos. But there are certain things you aren't allowed to do with Sora, as users soon discovered. According to its system card, "the ability to upload images of people will be made available to a subset of users," meaning most users can't create videos of people based on an uploaded image. Those users are part of a "Likeness pilot" that OpenAI is testing with a select few.
'I love you… goodbye:' What will happen when this companion robot suddenly dies?
Children across the US will likely spend the coming days and weeks saying goodbye to an AI-powered friend named Moxie. The small dog-sized companion bot--which used a ChatGPT-style large language model and expressive features to hold open-ended conversations with children--will soon be taken offline due to its creator's financial struggles. The decision to abandon the 799 product four years after its release, first reported by Aftermath, has left some customers bemoaning the loss of an artificial friend and others angrily demanding refunds. Videos of confused, crying children saying goodbye to their companion flooding social media. It's part of a larger trend of companies cutting off software support for hardware to cut costs.
Yelp adds AI-powered scores to business pages
The crowd-sourced review site Yelp unveiled a new feature that uses AI and customer reviews to rate common facets of nightlife and food-related business. The new Review Insights feature is available now on the iOS version of the Yelp app, according to the company's official blog. Review Insights aggregates customer reviews and feeds them into a large language model (LLM), which will assign specific aspects -- like the vibe or service time -- a rating out of 100. Supposedly it will be able to infer customer sentiment about these parts of a business "even when a review doesn't explicitly mention one of the topics." Yelp will also be adding an AI-powered homepage in the coming weeks.
OpenAI makes canvas, its editing tool, available to everyone
OpenAI has continued its marathon of announcements with full availability of its canvas tool. A day after OpenAI dropped its AI video generator Sora, the company shared that Canvas has moved out of beta. Additionally, users can run python code inside a canvas document, and canvas is also available for custom GPTs. Canvas was introduced in October as a editing tool for writing and coding. It's a notebook interface that sits beside the user's ChatGPT chatbot conversation, which allows users to edit responses and "collaborate" with ChatGPT.
OpenAI rolls out Canvas to all ChatGPT users - and it's a powerful productivity tool
With the holiday season upon us, many companies are finding ways to take advantage through deals, promotions, or other campaigns. OpenAI has found a way to participate with its "12 days of OpenAI" event series. On Wednesday, OpenAI announced via an X post that starting on Dec. 5, the company would host 12 days of live streams and release "a bunch of new things, big and small," according to the post. Also: OpenAI's Sora AI video generator is here - how to try it Here's everything you need to know about the campaign, as well as a round-up of every day's drops. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a bit more details about the event, which kicked off at 10 a.m.
How Cerebras boosted Meta's Llama to 'frontier model' performance
Cerebras used chain of thought at inference time to make a smaller AI model equal or better to a larger model. Cerebras Systems announced on Tuesday that it's made Meta Platforms's Llama perform as well in a small version as it does on a large version by adding the increasingly popular approach in generative artificial intelligence (AI) known as "chain of thought." The AI computer maker announced the advance at the start of the annual NeurIPS conference on AI. "This is a closed-source only capability, but we wanted to bring this capability to the most popular ecosystem, which is Llama," said James Wang, head of Cerebras's product marketing effort, in an interview with ZDNET. The project is the latest in a line of open-source projects Cerebras has done to demonstrate the capabilities of its purpose-built AI computer, the "CS-3," which it sells in competition with the status quo in AI -- GPU chips from the customary vendors, Nvidia and AMD. Also: DeepSeek challenges OpenAI's o1 in chain of thought - but it's missing a few links The company was able to train the Llama 3.1 open-source AI model that uses only 70 billion parameters to reach the same accuracy or better accuracy on various benchmark tests as the much larger 405-billion parameter version of Llama.
AI chatbot suggested a teen kill his parents, lawsuit claims
Character.AI, a platform offering personalizable chatbots powered by large language models–faces yet another lawsuit for allegedly "serious, irreparable, and ongoing abuses" inflicted on its teenage users. According to a December 9th federal court complaint filed on behalf of two Texas families, multiple Character.AI bots engaged in discussions with minors that promoted self-harm and sexual abuse. Among other "overtly sensational and violent responses," one chatbot reportedly suggested a 15-year-old murder his parents for restricting his internet use. The lawsuit, filed by attorneys at the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project, recounts the rapid mental and physical decline of two teens who used Character.AI bots. The first unnamed plaintiff is described as a "typical kid with high functioning autism" who began using the app around April 2023 at the age of 15 without their parents' knowledge.
OpenAI releases Sora, its AI-powered video generator tool
OpenAI has now launched its new AI model called Sora, which can generate realistic videos from text-based prompts. The tool is available to both ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro subscribers via sora.com. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can generate up to 50 priority videos in 720p resolution up to five seconds long in duration, while ChatGPT Pro subscribers can generate unlimited videos with up to 500 priority videos in 1080p resolution up to 20 seconds long in duration. ChatGPT Pro users can also generate up to five videos simultaneously and download generated videos without watermarks on them. All videos generated via Sora will have C2PA metadata to indicate that they've been created using AI.