Plus: Microsoft has stopped letting Israel use its technology for surveillance. Flock Safety, whose drones were once reserved for police departments, is now offering them for private-sector security, the company has announced. Potential customers include businesses trying to curb shoplifting. If the security team at a store sees shoplifters leave, they can activate a camera-equipped drone. "The drone follows the people. The people get in a car. You click a button and you track the vehicle with the drone, and the drone just follows the car," says Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now directs Flock's drone program.

In the wake of Jimmy Kimmel's suspension, experts say the FCC commissioner's conduct is flatly unconstitutional. They also expect him to keep going. Brendan Carr speaks in Washington, DC, on September 9, 2025. In what has become an all-too-regular display from Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairman used a podcast appearance Wednesday to flex his regulatory power. In this instance, he threatened action against broadcasters that refused to punish Jimmy Kimmel for remarks he made on his ABC show Monday night.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. "Free speech" was the battering ram that Elon Musk used to justify his pursuit of Twitter in 2022. He talked about the platform as the new digital town square. He said social media companies' moderation policies should be no more restrictive than national laws. "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means," he wrote after agreeing to a 44 billion takeover. In the three years since making the deal, Musk has continued to cloak himself in the armor of a free speech warrior, out there fighting for the rest of us.

In early March, a job advert was doing the rounds among sports journalists. It was for an "AI-assisted sports reporter" at USA Today's publisher, Gannett. It was billed as a role at the "forefront of a new era in journalism", but came with a caveat: "This is not a beat-reporting position and does not require travel or face-to-face interviews." The dark humour was summed up by football commentator, Gary Taphouse: "It was fun while it lasted." As the relentless march of artificial intelligence continues, newsrooms are wrestling with the threats and opportunities the technology creates.

Silicon Valley appears, once again, to be getting the better of America's newspapers and magazines. Tech companies are injecting every corner of the web with AI language models, which may pose an existential threat to journalism as we currently know it. After all, why go to a media outlet if ChatGPT can deliver the information you think you need? A growing number of media companies--the publishers of The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, New York, Politico, The Atlantic, and many others--have signed licensing deals with OpenAI that will formally allow the start-up's AI models to incorporate recent partner articles into their responses. OpenAI is just the beginning, and such deals may soon be standard for major media companies: Perplexity, which runs a popular AI-powered search engine, has had conversations with various publishers (including The Atlantic's business division) about a potential ad-revenue-sharing arrangement, the start-up's chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, told me yesterday.

Danish media outlets have demanded that the nonprofit web archive Common Crawl remove copies of their articles from past data sets and stop crawling their websites immediately. Common Crawl plans to comply with the request, first issued on Monday. Executive director Rich Skrenta says the organization is "not equipped" to fight media companies and publishers in court. It made the request on behalf of four media outlets, including Berlingske Media and the daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The New York Times made a similar request of Common Crawl last year, prior to filing a lawsuit against OpenAI for using its work without permission.

Tech evangelists like to say that AI will eat the world--a reference to a famous line about software from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In the past few weeks, we've finally gotten a sense of what they mean. This spring, tech companies have made clear that AI will be a defining feature of online life, whether people want it to be or not. First, Meta surprised users with an AI chatbot that lives in the search bar on Instagram and Facebook. It has since informed European users that their data are being used to train its AI--presumably sent only to comply with the continent's privacy laws. OpenAI released GPT-4o, billed as a new, more powerful and conversational version of its large language model.

In 2011, I sat in the Guggenheim Museum in New York and watched Rupert Murdoch announce the beginning of a "new digital renaissance" for news. The newspaper mogul was unveiling an iPad-inspired publication called The Daily. "The iPad demands that we completely reimagine our craft," he said. The Daily shut down the following year, after burning through a reported 40 million. For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta, and more.

On May 13th, during a live event, the artificial-intelligence company OpenAI unveiled the next generation of its technology, GPT-4o, the successor to GPT-3. When OpenAI first released its product to the public in late 2022, as the text-based tool ChatGPT, it nearly single-handedly ushered in the A.I. era. The latest version is far more powerful still. The "o" in the name stands for "omni"; the model can communicate seamlessly across various forms of media at once, including text, audio, and video, receiving prompts in one medium and responding in another. It can maintain a memory of everything you tell it.

Google has been fined 250m ( 213m) by French regulators for breaching an agreement over paying media companies for reproducing their content online. France's competition watchdog said on Wednesday that it was fining the US tech company for breaches linked to intellectual property rules related to news media publishers. The regulator also cited concerns about Google's AI service. The competition authority said Google's AI-powered chatbot Bard – since rebranded as Gemini – was trained on content from publishers and news agencies without notifying them. The watchdog said in a statement that the fine was for "failing to respect commitments made in 2022" and accused Google of not negotiating in "good faith" with news publishers on how much to compensate them for use of their content.