Facebook owner claims Movie Gen can create realistic-seeming video and audio clips that rival competitors’

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Friday it had built a new artificial intelligence model called Movie Gen that can create realistic-seeming video and audio clips in response to user prompts, claiming it can rival tools from leading media generation startups like OpenAI and ElevenLabs.

Samples of Movie Gen’s creations provided by Meta showed videos of animals swimming and surfing, as well as clips using people’s real photos to depict them performing actions like painting on a canvas.

Universities are pivoting to incorporate generative AI into academic life – without the plagiarism – in the belief it will become an intrinsic part of life and work

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Third-year student Jack Quinlan was confident he knew what I was going to ask before we conducted our interview. He wasn’t psychic, and I hadn’t fed him questions – he’d just done a trial run on ChatGPT.

Prior to our meeting, the software engineering and neuroscience undergraduate logged on to the program to generate the kinds of questions a “professional journalist at the Guardian” would ask a student about artificial intelligence at universities.

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Sea levels along the US coastline could rise as much as 12in from 2020 to 2050 due to climate crisis, scientists warn

Floods affecting much of the south-east US show the destructive force of higher sea levels and warmer temperatures. Now, researchers at the non-profit Climate Central are using artificial intelligence to predict how climate-related flooding will affect US communities into the next 75 years if warming continues at its current pace.

Previous research has shown that by 2050, sea levels along the US coastline could rise as much as 12in (30cm) from 2020 levels. High-tide flooding, which can occur even in sunny weather, is projected to triple by 2050, and so-called 100-year floods may soon become annual occurrences in New England.

Some California police departments are already using AI tools to help draft reports – and experts are concerned

Officer Wendy Venegas spoke softly in Spanish to the 14-year-old standing on the side of a narrow residential road in East Palo Alto. The girl’s face was puffy from crying as she quietly explained what had happened.

The girl said her father had caught her and her boyfriend “doing stuff” that morning, and her dad had either struck or pushed the boy, Venegas later explained. Now, the police had arrived to interview all three of them. So far, this was all standard procedure.

The startup behind ChatGP, which is reportedly planning to become a for-profit business, is now valued on par with Uber

OpenAI has raised $6.6bn (£5bn) in a funding round that values the artificial intelligence business at $157bn, with chipmaker Nvidia and Japanese group SoftBank among its investors.

The San Francisco-based startup, responsible for the ChatGPT chatbot, did not give details of a reported restructuring that will transform it into a for-profit business. The funding round was led by Thrive Capital, a US venture capital fund, and other backers include MGX, an Abu Dhabi-backed investment firm.

Event will push for greater transparency and aims to rank AI firms in terms of ability to meet climate goals

World leaders at the next AI summit will focus on the impact on the environment and jobs, including the possibility of ranking the greenest AI companies, it has been announced.

Rating artificial intelligence companies in terms of their ecological impact is among the proposals under consideration, while other areas being looked at include the effect on the labour market, giving all countries access to the technology, and bringing more states under the wing of global AI governance initiatives.

Exclusive: privacy and rights groups fear government may resurrect Tory plan for mass algorithmic surveillance

Ministers have been urged not to resurrect Conservative plans to tackle welfare fraud by launching mass algorithmic surveillance of bank accounts.

Disability rights, poverty, pensioner and privacy groups fear the government is poised to deliver a “snooper’s charter” by using automation and possibly artificial intelligence to crack down on benefit cheats and mistakes which cost £10bn a year. They fear it will mean a “huge blow for privacy in the UK”.

As the Goodbye Meta AI meme proved, many of us vastly overestimate our abilities to discern what’s true online – but spotting misinformation isn’t something we can do alone

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It’s a wild world out there online, with dis- and misinformation flying about at pace. I’m part-way through writing a book about the history of fake news, so I’m well aware that people making stuff up is not new. But what is new is the reach that troublemakers have, whether their actions are deliberate or accidental.

Social media and the wider web changed the game for mischief-makers, and made it easier for the rest of us to be inadvertently hoodwinked online (see: the odd “Goodbye Meta AI” trend that I wrote about this week for the Guardian). The rise of generative AI since the release of ChatGPT in 2022 has also supercharged the risks. While early research suggests our biggest fears about the impact of AI-generated deepfakes on elections are unfounded, the overall information environment is a puzzling one.

As generative AI advances, it is easy to see it as yet another area where machines are taking over – but humans remain at the centre of AI art, just in ways we might not expect

When faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls it Telephone Pictionary; another refers to it as Writey-Drawey. The internet tells me it is also called Eat Poop You Cat, a sequence of words surely inspired by one of the game’s results.

As recently as three years ago, it was rare to encounter text-to-image or image-to-text mistranslations in daily life, which made the outrageous outcomes of the game feel especially novel. But we have since entered a new era of image-making. With the aid of AI image generators like Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the generative features integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud programs, you can now transform a sentence or phrase into a highly detailed image in mere seconds. Images, likewise, can be nearly instantly translated into descriptive text. Today, you can play Eat Poop You Cat alone in your room, cavorting with the algorithms.

AI apps are increasingly popular among small-scale farmers seeking to improve the quality and quantity of their crop

Sammy Selim strode through the dense, shiny green bushes on the slopes of his coffee farm in Sorwot village in Kericho, Kenya, accompanied by a younger farmer called Kennedy Kirui. They paused at each corner to send the farm’s coordinates to a WhatsApp conversation.

The conversation was with Virtual Agronomist, a tool that uses artificial intelligence to provide fertiliser application advice using chat prompts. The chatbot asked some further questions before producing a report saying that Selim should target a yield of 7.9 tonnes and use three types of fertiliser in specific quantities to achieve that goal.

Governor vetoes bill requiring generative AI safety testing after tech industry says it would drive companies away

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, on Sunday vetoed a hotly contested artificial intelligence safety bill after the tech industry raised objections. Newsom said that requiring companies to stress-test large AI models before releasing them could drive AI businesses from the state and hinder innovation.

“California is home to 32 of the world’s 50 leading AI companies,” the governor said in a statement accompanying the veto. “The bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions – so long as a large system deploys it. I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology.”

OpenAI o1, AKA Strawberry, appears to be a significant advance, but its ‘chain of thought’ should be made public knowledge

It’s nearly two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT on an unsuspecting world, and the world, closely followed by the stock market, lost its mind. All over the place, people were wringing their hands wondering: What This Will Mean For [enter occupation, industry, business, institution].

Within academia, for example, humanities professors agonised about how they would henceforth be able to grade essays if students were using ChatGPT or similar technology to help write them. The answer, of course, is to come up with better ways of grading, because students will use these tools for the simple reason that it would be idiotic not to – just as it would be daft to do budgeting without spreadsheets. But universities are slow-moving beasts and even as I write, there are committees in many ivory towers solemnly trying to formulate “policies on AI use”.

Cosmetic surgery fuels the fallacy that looks bring happiness. But what is it like to live with a striking visible difference? The star of a new film about the subject shares his real-life experiences

Cosmetic surgery is back in the news. After six facelifts, a brow lift, neck lift and a lip lift, the reality star Katie Price has new “butterfly lips”, created with tape and filler that make the lips bigger and curled upwards. Price may have had more aesthetic surgery than most, but she’s not alone in going under the knife. Last year there were 35m such treatments around the world. Facial surgeries – eyelid lifts, rhinoplasties, lip fillers – rose by 20% in 2023. Whatever else is going on – pandemics, economic and political crises, wars, human rights abuses – we cling to the belief that if we fix our looks, we can improve our lives.

It’s an understandable – if solipsistic – belief, given the attention paid to beautiful people; they are the ones who seem to get the jobs, the relationships, the Oscars. We are far more likely to trust, forgive and believe people who are good-looking. And if we can have a piece of that, why would we not, despite knowing some treatments end in tragedy. Last week Alice Webb, a 33-year-old mother of five, died from complications following a non-surgical “Brazilian butt lift”.

Mark Zuckerberg’s new revamp is a far cry from the zip-up hoodies and suits emblematic of earlier eras of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg is revamping his public image with new threads. With a trio of bold shirts worn in recent appearances, he’s communicating that he came, he saw, he conquered and he will win again at any cost. The fits might be sick, but we would do well to beware.

During a live, packed-auditorium podcast interview last week, the CEO of Meta wore a drop-shouldered black shirt reading “pathei mathos”, Greek for “learning through suffering”. At his 40th birthday party in May, he donned a black tee with the motto “Carthago delenda est,” which translates from Latin to “Carthage must be destroyed.” He wore a black shirt with black text that read “Aut Zuck aut nihil” during Meta’s Connect product demonstration on Wednesday.

There is nothing wrong with mining content for data, but it has to be properly regulated and creators must be compensated

• Justine Roberts is the CEO of Mumsnet

After nearly 25 years as a founder of Mumsnet, I considered myself pretty unshockable when it came to the workings of big tech. But my jaw hit the floor last week when I read that Google was pushing to overhaul UK copyright law in a way that would allow it to freely mine other publishers’ content for commercial gain without compensation.

At Mumsnet, we’ve been on the sharp end of this practice, and have recently launched the first British legal action against the tech giant OpenAI. Earlier in the year, we became aware that it was scraping our content – presumably to train its large language model (LLM). Such scraping without permission is a breach of copyright laws and explicitly of our terms of use, so we approached OpenAI and suggested a licensing deal. After lengthy talks (and signing a non-disclosure agreement), it told us it wasn’t interested, saying it was after “less open” data sources.

Magic Notes tool records and analyses face-to-face meetings and suggests follow-up actions

Hundreds of social workers in England have begun using an artificial intelligence system that records conversations, drafts letters to doctors and proposes actions that human workers might not have considered.

Councils in Swindon, Barnet and Kingston are among seven now using the AI tool that sits on social workers’ phones to record and analyse face-to-face meetings. The Magic Notes AI tool writes almost instant summaries and suggests follow-up actions, including drafting letters to GPs. Two dozen more councils have or are piloting it.

Even if you haven’t knowingly opted in, companies are still scraping your personal information to train their systems

Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. If you’d like to skip to a section about a particular site or social network, click the “Jump to” menu at the top of this article.

The competition to make the latest, greatest, most advanced artificial intelligence thing has turned an already data-hungry tech industry ravenous. Companies looking to build out their AI-powered search engines, smart email composers or chatbots are scraping your posts and personal data and using them to train those systems, which need ever-increasing amounts of text and images.

Ex-employee William Saunders says he is also concerned by reports Sam Altman could hold stake in restructured firm

OpenAI’s plan to become a for-profit company could encourage the artificial intelligence startup to cut corners on safety, a whistleblower has said.

William Saunders, a former research engineer at OpenAI, told the Guardian he was concerned by reports that the ChatGPT developer was preparing to change its corporate structure and would no longer be controlled by its non-profit board.

Mark Zuckerberg is embracing both AI and full-on imperial monomania. As for petty gripes about elections and teen mental health, so what?

The good news is that Mark Zuckerberg has become bored of looking like an answer to the AI prompt “efit of a teen villain”. The bad? While the Meta overlord has grown out the Caesar hairstyle that has sustained him since 2016, he is now leaning in to open imperial monomania. This week’s Meta Connect conference saw Mark take the stage in a T-shirt reading Aut Zuck Aut Nihil. Either Zuck Or Nothing. The original was Aut Caesar Aut Nihil and was enthusiastically adopted as a motto by one of the worst Borgias (tough field) … but look, I’m sure it’s ironic. Mark’s such a gifted ironist.

We’ll get to the magic glasses and AI feedspam he was pushing at this week’s event in a minute – but before we do, let’s recap. Easily the most significant thing Mark Zuckerberg has said this year was that he isn’t sorry any more – in fact, that he wished he’d never said sorry for most of what he’d ever said sorry for. I paraphrase only slightly. A couple of weeks ago, Zuckerberg appeared on stage for a podcast and called Facebook’s willingness to offer stakes-free apologies for things he wasn’t to blame for – like election manipulation or the effect of social media on teen mental health – “a 20-year mistake”.

The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked a panic about computers gaining power over humankind. But the real threat comes from falling for the hype. By Navneet Alang