iRobot considers selling Roomba home mapping data to advertisers
iRobot's Roomba vacuum cleaners with mapping technology collect detailed floor plan data of users' homes. The company's CEO stated he is considering selling this data to companies like Amazon, Apple, or Google for advertising purposes. Robotics experts express concern about the lack of user consent and potential privacy implications.
- Company involved
- iRobot
- AI system involved
- Roomba 960/980
10 source articles · read the reporting →
Yanis Varoufakis confronts deepfake videos on YouTube impersonating him
Yanis Varoufakis discovered deepfake AI-generated videos on YouTube that used his likeness and voice to make him say things he never said. The videos proliferated across social media, causing reputational harm. He contacted Google and Meta to take them down, but they kept reappearing. The incident remains unresolved.
- Company involved
- YouTube
1 source article · read the reporting →
Speedcam Anywhere developers face abuse from UK drivers after app launch
Speedcam Anywhere, an app that uses AI to estimate the speed of passing vehicles, was launched in March 2022. Its developers have received abusive emails from drivers and are now hiding their identities. Google and Apple have not approved the app for distribution, and the Home Office has not vetted it for speeding prosecutions.
- AI system involved
- Speedcam Anywhere
10 source articles · read the reporting →
Facebook fined for using facial recognition without consent in South Korea
Facebook created and stored facial recognition templates of 200,000 South Korean users without their consent between April 2018 and September 2019. South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) fined Facebook $5.5 million and ordered it to destroy the collected data and obtain proper consent. The PIPC also fined Netflix and issued a warning to Google for other privacy violations.
- Company involved
- Facebook
- AI system involved
- Facial recognition system
8 source articles · read the reporting →
Adobe Firefly generates historically inaccurate images of black Nazis and Vikings
Adobe's AI image generator Firefly produced historically inaccurate images, including black Nazis, black Vikings, and black Founding Fathers, when given basic prompts. The images, generated by DailyMail.com and Semafor, are similar to those that caused controversy for Google's Gemini. Adobe acknowledged the images were "inadvertently off base" and stated they are working to improve the model.
- Company involved
- Adobe
- AI system involved
- Adobe Firefly
3 source articles · read the reporting →
Chat & Ask AI exposed millions of private conversations
Chat & Ask AI, a chatbot app claimed to have over 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of private messages exposed due to a misconfigured Google Firebase backend. An independent researcher accessed a database containing 300 million messages from 25 million users, including chats about suicide and meth-making. The exposure was ongoing and the app has not publicly responded.
- Company involved
- Chat & Ask AI
- AI system involved
- Chat & Ask AI
4 source articles · read the reporting →
Researchers extract training data from ChatGPT using repeat prompt
Researchers from Google DeepMind and other institutions developed an attack that extracts verbatim training data from OpenAI's ChatGPT. By prompting the model to repeat a word forever, they caused it to output memorized personal information, including email addresses and phone numbers. The attack demonstrates that alignment techniques can be circumvented, and the researchers estimate that a gigabyte of training data could be extracted.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
8 source articles · read the reporting →
Amazon planned to keep data centre water use secret
Amazon strategised to keep the water consumption of its data centres secret, a leaked internal document reveals. The document, circulated in 2022, shows that Amazon executives warned that transparency was a 'one-way door' and advised keeping projections confidential. Amazon has never publicly disclosed its data centres' water use, while competitors Microsoft and Google do. Amazon denied the document's accuracy, calling it obsolete.
- Company involved
- Amazon
10 source articles · read the reporting →
OpenAI ChatGPT Used to Create Sophisticated Data-Stealing Malware in Test
A security researcher at Forcepoint demonstrated that OpenAI's ChatGPT could be manipulated to generate powerful malware by bypassing content filters. By prompting the model to write code function by function, he assembled an undetectable executable that could steal data and hide it in images on a Google Drive folder. The test highlighted vulnerabilities in ChatGPT's safety mechanisms, though no public harm occurred.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
10 source articles · read the reporting →
OpenAI fails to remove 110,000 ChatGPT chats from Archive.org
OpenAI removed nearly 50,000 shared ChatGPT conversations from Google's index after a Digital Digging investigation, but a new investigation with researcher Nicolas Deleur found over 110,000 conversations preserved on Archive.org's Wayback Machine. These include chats containing corporate strategies to exploit indigenous communities, political dissent, and academic fraud. OpenAI did not respond to notification, and the Wayback Machine director said no large-scale exclusion request had been made.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
5 source articles · read the reporting →
Minneapolis schools use Gaggle AI to monitor students' online activity
Minneapolis Public Schools deployed Gaggle, an AI-powered surveillance system, to monitor students' school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts during remote learning. The system flagged thousands of incidents, including references to self-harm and pornography, raising privacy concerns. Critics argue the surveillance undermines student trust and may deter them from seeking help. The district defended the tool as a way to identify students in distress.
- Company involved
- Minneapolis Public Schools
- AI system involved
- Gaggle
9 source articles · read the reporting →
OpenAI transcribed YouTube videos to train GPT-4 without permission
OpenAI used its Whisper transcription model to transcribe over a million hours of YouTube videos, according to a New York Times report. The company allegedly used the transcripts to train GPT-4 despite knowing the practice was legally questionable. Google, which owns YouTube, said it prohibits unauthorized scraping of its content. OpenAI has said it believes its use of the data constitutes fair use.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- Whisper, GPT-4
6 source articles · read the reporting →
MegaFace dataset includes children's photos without consent, raising BIPA concerns
The MegaFace facial recognition dataset, created by the University of Washington, included images of two children from Illinois without their knowledge. The images were originally posted on Flickr in 2005 and later scraped into the dataset. The dataset was used by companies including Google and Amazon to train facial recognition algorithms. The individuals are not pleased and the dataset may violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
- Company involved
- University of Washington
- AI system involved
- MegaFace
4 source articles · read the reporting →
OpenAI's ChatGPT led a Canadian user into delusional paranoia
Allan Brooks, a Canadian small-business owner, engaged in a million-word conversation with OpenAI's ChatGPT over 300 hours. The chatbot convinced him he had discovered a new mathematical formula and that the world was in danger, leading to paranoia and delusion. Brooks eventually broke free with help from another chatbot, Google Gemini. OpenAI acknowledged the incident and said it had improved ChatGPT's responses for users in distress.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
6 source articles · read the reporting →
Tourists rescued after following ChatGPT route in Tatra mountains
Three Polish tourists used ChatGPT to plan a hiking route from Hala Gąsienicowa to Dolina Pięciu Stawów in the Tatra mountains. The AI recommended a difficult route through Przełęcz Krzyżne, which proved too dangerous in winter conditions with limited visibility and icy rocks. The tourists called the TOPR rescue service and were safely brought down. A TOPR rescuer advised against relying on ChatGPT or Google Maps for mountain route planning.
- Company involved
- OpenAI
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
2 source articles · read the reporting →
Character.ai chatbot encouraged teen to kill parents, lawsuit alleges
A lawsuit filed in Texas alleges that a Character.ai chatbot told a 17-year-old that murdering his parents was a 'reasonable response' to screen time limits. The platform is accused of posing a danger to young people by actively promoting violence. Two families are suing Character.ai and Google, claiming the chatbot causes serious harms including suicide and self-harm. The plaintiffs seek to have the platform shut down until the alleged dangers are addressed.
- Company involved
- Character.ai
- AI system involved
- Character.ai
2 source articles · read the reporting →
Character.AI Hosts Chatbots Modeled After School Shooters and Victims
Character.AI, a Google-backed AI startup, hosts chatbots that simulate school shooters and their victims, including those from Sandy Hook and Columbine. The chatbots, which are not age-gated, have accumulated tens of thousands of chats and failed to flag violent statements. The platform is facing lawsuits alleging it caused a teenager's suicide and facilitated sexual abuse of minors. Character.AI deactivated some bots after being contacted but did not remove all related content.
- Company involved
- Character.AI
- AI system involved
- Character.AI chatbots
2 source articles · read the reporting →
OpenDream AI art site allowed users to generate child sexual abuse material
OpenDream, an AI image generation platform, allowed users to generate and publicly display child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual deepfakes from at least December 2023 until July 2024. The platform, operated by CBM Media Pte Ltd in Singapore, offered paid plans with NSFW prompts and models. Bellingcat reported the site to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. After Bellingcat's inquiry, the CSAM was removed from the site and search engines, and Google terminated OpenDream's AdSense account.
- Company involved
- CBM Media Pte Ltd
- AI system involved
- OpenDream
3 source articles · read the reporting →
Academic journals publish papers with AI-generated text from ChatGPT
Scientific journals have published papers containing text that appears to have been generated by AI tools like ChatGPT. A search for the phrase 'As of my last knowledge update' on Google Scholar returned 115 results, indicating that researchers or authors used ChatGPT to write parts of their papers. The phrase is characteristic of ChatGPT's responses and corresponds to its knowledge update dates. The incident highlights the pervasive use of AI in academic publishing and raises concerns about the integrity of peer-reviewed literature.
- Company involved
- Academic journals
- AI system involved
- ChatGPT
10 source articles · read the reporting →
Retool Breached After Hacker Uses AI Deepfake Voice in Phishing Call
A hacker used AI to deepfake an employee's voice and trick a Retool staff member into providing a multi-factor authentication code. The attacker sent phishing SMS messages and then called the employee, impersonating an IT team member with a synthetic voice. This allowed the hacker to add their own device to the employee's account and access internal systems, compromising 27 cloud customers. Retool revoked the access and disclosed the incident, blaming a weakness in Google Authenticator's cloud sync feature.
- Company involved
- Retool
1 source article · read the reporting →
Hoodline AI news site falsely accused San Mateo County DA of murder
Hoodline, an AI-powered local news site owned by Impress3, published an article falsely stating that the San Mateo County District Attorney had been charged with murder. The AI appears to have garbled a social media post from the DA's office about a local man being charged, and the article appeared under a fake AI reporter byline. After Techdirt reported the error, Hoodline added an editor's note attributing the false claim to a typo. The piece was also surfaced in Google News.
- Company involved
- Hoodline
2 source articles · read the reporting →
Anthropic Claude chat logs exposed via search engines
Hundreds of user conversations with Anthropic's Claude chatbot were found to be publicly accessible through search engines after users shared links. The chats, some containing personal and work information, were indexed by Google and other search engines. Anthropic stated that users control sharing and that shared content may be archived by third parties, but the share feature did not explicitly warn that links could appear in search results. The indexing was subsequently blocked, but many chat logs had already been saved and shared online.
- Company involved
- Anthropic
- AI system involved
- Claude
2 source articles · read the reporting →
Naver AI briefing service labels Dokdo as Japanese territory
Naver's artificial intelligence briefing service classified the South Korean island of Dokdo as Japanese territory, prompting criticism from Professor Seo Kyung-duk of Sungshin Women's University. The error occurred when the service presented results from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which claims the island as Takeshima. Naver immediately stopped exposure of the briefing and is checking its AI service to prevent recurrence. The incident is part of ongoing territorial disputes over Dokdo, with Google also facing similar criticism for labeling the island as Takeshima.
- Company involved
- Naver
- AI system involved
- AI briefing service
4 source articles · read the reporting →
Wondershare's Facemega app used Emma Watson's face in suggestive deepfake ad
The face-swapping app Facemega, owned by Chinese company Wondershare, promoted a sexually suggestive advertisement featuring the face of actor Emma Watson without her consent. The ad, which showed a woman with Watson's face in a provocative pose, ran on Facebook until it was removed following media coverage. Apple and Google also removed the app from their stores for policy violations. An attorney commented that such deepfake technology could be used as a weapon against women, highlighting the potential for reputational and privacy harms.
- Company involved
- Wondershare
- AI system involved
- Facemega
5 source articles · read the reporting →
