Ring faces privacy backlash over its AI-powered'Search Party' feature, which uses outdoor cameras to track lost dogs and is enabled by default. PCWorld reports that Ring ended its Flock partnership but remains committed to expanding'Search Party' despite surveillance concerns from its Super Bowl ad. A leaked email from Ring founder Jamie Siminoff suggests the AI tracking feature may extend beyond pets to broader applications. Ring's been in damage-control mode ever since its now-infamous "lost dog" Super Bowl ad, furiously spinning the sinister imagery of digital "bounding boxes" locking in on a wayward pooch and a simulated aerial view of dozens of homes scanning the neighborhood. Rather than giving off warm fuzzies--your Ring camera can help find lost dogs!--the Super Bowl ad gave off serious "big brother" vibes to many viewers.

Ring's Super Bowl ad promoting its'Search Party' feature for finding lost pets backfired, with viewers finding the neighborhood camera surveillance imagery dystopian rather than heartwarming. PCWorld reports the backlash stems from Ring's controversial history of data-sharing with law enforcement and privacy concerns over the AI-powered feature being enabled by default. Many users are actively seeking to disable'Search Party' despite Ring's claims of strong privacy protections and user consent requirements.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. With a Super Bowl ad, California governor's race'is now kicked into gear' San José Mayor Matt Mahan, a moderate Democrat, has broken with Gov. Gavin Newsom on crime and other issues and is pitching himself as a pragmatist. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Backers of Matt Mahan, San José's mayor, spend $1.4 million in Super Bowl ad campaign funded by Silicon Valley tech executives to boost his gubernatorial bid.

Valve's Steam Machine: Everything we know The Crypto.com guy bought AI.com (and a Super Bowl ad) Kris Marszalek's new website will let users create their own AI agents. In this case it's AI.com, valued at one point at $100 million, which will serve as the online home for his new company of the same name. The website launch is being paired with a Super Bowl ad that will air this Sunday. AI.com's main offering is an AI agent that operates on the user's behalf -- organizing work, sending messages, executing actions across apps, building projects, and more. It's a similar concept to what companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are promising with their own agents and agentic features, and notably lacking in hard details.

A California billionaire has ramped up attacks on Tesla by running a Super Bowl ad questioning the safety of the car maker's self-driving technology. The 30-second commercial shows the electric cars crashing into child-sized mannequins, driving past a stopped school bus and hitting strollers in a parking lot while a narrator proclaims that "Tesla's full self-driving is endangering the public." The ad is the latest in what has been a yearlong campaign by tech executive Dan O'Dowd to have Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology, or FSD, barred from the roads and push lawmakers to increase scrutiny of the technology's safety. Dowd founded a campaign dubbed the Dawn Project to speak out against Tesla, and bugs and security defects in other computer systems. The organization has run a full-page ad in the New York Times and posted similar videos online, but the newest video ran during one of the nation's most watched sporting events, in which a 30-second commercial was reported to cost $6 million to $7 million.

Tesla has released the latest version of its Full Self-Driving tech -- which allows the car to maneuver city and residential streets without human input -- to around 400,000 people in North America, quadrupling the number of people using it during much of 2022. That has renewed questions about the tech's safety. Government investigators are looking into whether Tesla's driver-assistance features caused crashes. And in January, a report emerged that a former Tesla engineer had testified that a 2016 demo of in which the company claimed one of its cars was driving itself was actually staged.

Ahead of Sunday's match between the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, you can watch the ad Amazon will air during the Super Bowl. Titled Alexa's Body, it features an Amazon employee and the company's new $100 Echo model. Oh, and Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan makes an appearance too. The ad starts with the fictional employee praising the design of Amazon's latest smart speaker. "I literally couldn't imagine a more beautiful vessel for Alexa to be... inside," they say of the 2020 Echo, her train of thought drifting off as a bus pulls up outside, its side plastered with an ad for Jordan's new Prime Video series, Without Remorse.

A Sprint ad brought back the levity. In it, a trio of robots brainstorming ad ideas with a Sprint spokesperson and sports legend Bo Jackson were seemingly included for no reason other than laughs (and a mermaid, pegasus, and keytar also made appearances). Amazon also went for humor with its Alexa ad. This one featured the company's failed attempts to integrate its smart assistant into various devices, including a dog collar that translates barks into Amazon orders.

If you've watched even a few of the ads in Super Bowl LIII, you might have noticed two prevailing themes in this year's commercial roundup: that there are an awful lot of robots kicking around these ads, and the presence of all this artificial intelligence--in the eyes of the humans, at least--isn't such a good thing. Sprint's spot, for example, shows a robot creating an advertisement that, with all due respect to the great Bo Jackson, is nonsensical and utterly ridiculous. The Amazon ad "Not Everything Makes the Cut," shows the epic fails that ensue when Alexa is installed in devices like electric toothbrushes or put in charge of the electrical grid. Then there's Olay's "Killer Skin" spot, in which a woman, chased into hiding by a Michael Myers-like slasher, can't use her cell phone to call for help because the facial-recognition software won't work. Time and again, artificial intelligence is screwing everything up and letting us all down.

The Super Bowl is usually a terrible football game. Not in 2017 and 2018, though: Those games were unusually great! This year, however, the Super Bowl reverted to form--and it had a forgettable half-time show and largely forgettable ads to match. Were the commercials more entertaining than the game itself? The ads this year were largely risk-averse, save for a weird Burger King ad featuring Andy Warhol and a spot for the NFL itself featuring a very large cake.