News in pictures, Wednesday March 20, 2024
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Saturday was like the World Cup for teenagers. As one mother joked, “There was just no one on the streets.” The reason? It was the Fortnite “Big Bang” party, a virtual festival headlined by Eminem and organised to coincide with the end of the computer game’s season. It was the game’s biggest live event to…
The policing chief for retail crime has called on Meta to force users of its Facebook Marketplace platform to verify their identity and location to thwart an epidemic of shoplifting. Chief Superintendent Alex Goss, head of retail crime at the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said that Meta and other online platforms needed to do…
Elon Musk said Tesla would move “immediately” to hold a shareholder vote to switch the electric carmaker’s state of incorporation to Texas after a court in Delaware voided his $56 billion pay package. The billionaire said the public vote in a poll he posted on X was “unequivocally in favour of Texas!”. In the poll…
Britain’s biggest publishing houses have written to dozens of technology companies, warning them that they must pay if they want to use content from books, journals and papers to build their artificial intelligence (AI) models. The Publishers Association said it was of “deep concern” to its members, who include Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Oxford…
I’d assumed it would take a couple of hours to learn how to make a convincing audio deepfake. That turned out to be a large overestimate: on my first go, it took me less than ten minutes to clone somebody’s voice. And while it wasn’t perfect, the quality was good enough to fool their fiancée….
Hitler and Osama bin Laden chatbots created by a far-right platform have prompted concern that they could encourage radicalisation and violence. The US-based Gab network has developed AI chabot characters that enable users to interact with prominent political and historical figures. As well as the Nazi and al-Qaeda leaders, people can chat with Stalin, Queen…