In recent years, diffusion models [1, 2], particularly latent diffusion models [3], have spearheaded high quality textto-image generation, and have been widely adopted by researchers and the general public alike. Trained on massive datasets like LAION-5B [4], these models have developed a broad understanding of visual concepts, enabling new creative and practical applications. Notably, tools like Stable Diffusion [3, 5] have been made readily accessible for general use. Building on this foundation, efficient adaptation methods such as parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) [6, 7, 8], guidance based approaches [9, 10, 11], and pseudo-word generation [12] enable users to leverage this extensive pretraining for customizing models that can specialize on downstream tasks with smaller datasets. However, the rapid adoption of diffusion models has also raised significant privacy, ethical and legal concerns. One critical issue is the vulnerability of these models to privacy attacks, from membership inference [13], where an attacker determines whether a specific data point was used to train a particular model, to data extraction [14], which enables an attacker to reconstruct particular images from the training dataset. This issue is even more severe during the fine-tuning phase where the model is fine-tuned on smaller specialized datasets from a possibly different domain and each data record has more impact on the final model. This risk underscores the importance of privacy-preserving technologies, particularly as diffusion models often rely on vast datasets scraped from the internet without explicit consent from content owners.

For the first post-COVID Olympics, there are some major changes now in place at the Paris 2024 Games. First of all, there are no physical tickets for visitors. All tickets are digital, but spectators can separately purchase an additional paper souvenir ticket for their event. While this is significantly a COVID legacy, it's also a sign of the times, as more of the Olympic Games moves into the digital world. If we dig deeper, we see how the DNA of this transformation is a story about data and its expansion – and how the ability of the Olympics to grow economically relies on it being harnessed and exploited. As AI steadily changes the strategic positioning of all aspects of life, the sports world has rapidly begun a similar journey.

The Canadian women's soccer team was dealt a heavy blow Saturday after FIFA announced the women's national team would be deducted six points from the standings in the Paris Olympics after staffers were caught using drones to spy on New Zealand during closed-door training sessions. Following its investigation, the FIFA Appeal Committee announced the Canadian Soccer Association was responsible for failing to ensure its staff members were in compliance with Olympic rules. "CSA was found responsible for failing to respect the applicable FIFA regulations in connection with its failure to ensure the compliance of its participating officials of the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad Paris 2024 Final Competition (OFT) with the prohibition on flying drones over any training sites," the statement said. "The officials were each found responsible for offensive behavior and violation of the principles of fair play in connection with the CSA's Women's representative team's drones usage in the scope of the OFT." Head coach Bev Priestman was removed from her position Thursday night after two staff members were sent home from Paris when an investigation found that analyst Joseph Lombardi had allegedly used a drone to spy on New Zealand's practice sessions.

"We've seen this before at previous Olympic Games like in Japan, Brazil and Greece. What were supposed to be special security arrangements for the special circumstances of the games, ended up being normalised," says Noémie Levain, of the digital rights campaign group La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Web).

Former White House economist Kevin Hassett weighs in as Paris protests continue over hiking retirement age on'Your World.' The highest constitutional court in France issued a decision Wednesday supporting the use of AI-powered surveillance cameras for the 2024 Paris Olympics despite privacy concerns. The Constitutional Council ruled that certain contested provisions of a law relating to the Olympic and Paralympic Games of 2024 do not infringe upon the right to respect for private life, because it ensures that development and implementation of algorithmic processing stays under people's control. After hours of heated debate last month, the French Parliament cleared the final legislative hurdle to pass a controversial bill to launch the experimental use of large-scale, real-time camera systems supported by an algorithm to identify suspicious behavior, including unsupervised luggage and sounding alarms warning of possible crowd stampedes, Politico reported. The system would be in effect until March 2025 under the law, but some left leaning French MPs had argued the use of AI-powered surveillance cameras in Paris would be disregarding the freedom to come and go, the right to demonstrate, freedom of opinion, and the right to respect for private life.