 |
|
|
|||||
Streams on TikTok Live were used to exploit children, according to a newly unredacted lawsuit filed by Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes. The lawsuit says that TikTok was not only aware that TikTok Lives were exposing minors to concerning messages from adults, but the company also directly profited off of some of the exchanges through TikTok Live's virtual gifting system. Following an investigation by Forbes into TikTok Live, TikTok conducted its own review called "Project Meramec," according to the suit. The company found that "hundreds of thousands of children" were getting around TikTok's age restrictions, hosting livestreams and interacting with adults. Because TikTok pockets a portion of the sale of digital gifts in livestreams, the company was technically making money on "transactional gifting" over "nudity and sexual activity" that happened during streams. And since TikTok's algorithm favors livestreams where virtual gifts are being exchanged, the lawsuit says, some of these sexually exploitative streams were also distributed more widely than they would have been otherwise. The lawsuit details another TikTok investigation, "Project Jupiter," that looked in to whether TikTok Live's gifting feature was being used to launder money. As it turns out, it was. According to the lawsuit, the company found that "criminals were selling drugs and running fraud operations" during livestreams. When reached for a comment on the lawsuit, TikTok shared the following statement: This lawsuit ignores the number of proactive measures that TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support community safety and well-being. Instead, the complaint cherry-picks misleading quotes and outdated documents and presents them out of context, which distorts our commitment to the safety of our community.We stand by our efforts, which include: robust safety protections and screen time limits for teen accounts enabled by default, Family Pairing tools for parents to supervise their teens, strict livestreaming requirements, and aggressive enforcement of our Community Guidelines on an ongoing basis. Utah's AG filed the redacted version of this lawsuit in June 2024, following a different suit from 2023 concerning the addictive design of the TikTok app. The Utah lawsuit isn't the first time the company has come under scrutiny for its handling of child safety. The FTC has investigated TikTok's handling of child privacy, and the ban of the app now headed to the Supreme Court on appeal was partially pushed over concerns with how social video app could be used to influence children. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/utah-lawsuit-alleges-tiktok-knew-minors-were-being-exploited-on-livestreams-220851340.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Sony Be it for the Walkman portables and Trinitron TVs of old or the PlayStation consoles, Alpha cameras and superlative headphones of the twenty-first century, Sony has long been a mainstay at CES. But for the past couple of years at the world's biggest electronics trade show, Sony has opted to focus on a different field: Automotive. The Afeela electric vehicle dominated Sony's 2023 and 2024 CES press conferences, and we know that trend will continue for 2025, with an appearance at the Sony event (and a followup press conference) already confirmed. What to expect at Sony's CES 2025 press conference The Afeela is the first product from Sony Honda Mobility, a joint venture between the Japanese electronics and transportation giants. After a surprise rollout at CES 2023, the Sony CES presser teed up additional details on the EV's LiDAR-heavy sensor array and AI-enhanced cabin tech (the latter coming with an assist from Microsoft) at CES 2024. If the car's previously announced scheduling waypoints preorders in 2025 ahead of 2026 availability remain intact, we're hoping to hear which of the Afeela's concept car niceties will actually make the cut once it enters the streets of the real world. Of course, it won't be all Afeela all the time in Vegas. Expect Sony to spend time talking up its imaging, gaming or maybe even its movie studio division. And with any luck, we'll get more info on the company's XR headset, which was shown off at the 2024 show, only to never be seen again. CES 2025 would be the perfect place to show off a meaty update of a possible competitor to the Apple Vision Pro. Sony's CES 2025 livestream You can watch the Sony CES press conference as it happens below. The feed will start Monday, January 6 at 8:00PM ET. The separate Afeela press conference will take place on Tuesday, January 7 at 4:30PM PT, and will be streamed on YouTube as well. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/sony-ces-2025-press-conference-watch-it-here-monday-at-8pm-et-212207358.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Meta has nuked a bunch of its AI-generated profiles from Facebook Instagram, the company confirmed, after the AI characters prompted widespread outrage and ridicule from users on social media. The AI-generated profiles, which were labeled as AI managed by Meta, launched in September of 2023, rolling out alongside the companys celebrity-branded AI chatbots (also discontinued). Meta doesnt seem to have updated any of these profiles for several months, and the pages seem to have been largely unnoticed until this week, following an interview published by the Financial Times with Metas VP of Generative AI, Connor Hayes. In the interview, Hayes spoke about the companys goal to eventually fill its services with AI-generated profiles that can interact with people and function kind of in the same way that accounts do. Those comments brought attention to the extant fMeta-created AI profiles and, well, users were not exactly impressed with what they found. With handles like hellograndpabrian, a supposed retired textile businessman who is always learning and datingwithCarter, an AI dating coach, the chatbots were meant to showcase unique interests and personalities for users to chat with. On Instagram, their profiles also featured AI-generated posts that, as 404 Media noted, looked a lot like the AI spam thats become prevalent in many corners of Facebook. Meta An AI persona called Liv sparked particular outrage. The Instagram profile identified Liv as a proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah posted a series of screenshots in which she interrogated Liv about how Meta trained the AI, with Liv sharing that it was created by a predominantly white team. Independent journalist Mady Castigan posted another conversation in which Liv said that its creators had been inspired in part by Sophia Vergaras character from Modern Family, a character that is neither queer nor Black. There is confusion: the recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product, a spokesperson told Engadget. The accounts referenced are from a test we launched at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters." Beyond sparking ridicule for their responses and attempts to appropriate marginalized identities, users found the AI profiles were impossible to block, for reasons unknown. Rather than fix the issue, Meta's solution was to kill the experiment entirely. "We identified the bug that was impacting the ability for people to block those AIs," a spokesperson said, "and are removing those accounts to fix the issue. While this trial run has gone up in flames, the company doesnt seem to be abandoning its plans to bring more AI-generated characters to its apps. Earlier this year, the company teased AI clones of human creators capable of holding lifelike video calls. Creators can already train their own chatbots to respond to followers on their behalf. Meta also began experimenting with inserting its own AI-generated imagery into users Facebook feeds. In an interview last year, Hayes told me that Meta likely will become more proactive about surfacing AI-generated content over time, comparing it to the shift from showing recommended content instead of posts from people you follow. In the beginning of social apps the corpus of stuff that you could see on a given day was sort of constrained by who you followed or were friends with. And over the last like, five or six years, a lot of apps ourselves included have moved to, you know, relax that constraint and start recommending content from accounts you don't follow. I think probably the next leap that's going to happen there is relaxing the constraint of what humans can create, and actually getting to feeds of content that are a combination of things that, you know, humans have created, but also that are entirely machine generated. It may still be awhile before Meta fully realizes that vision. But if the reaction to its early experimentations is any indication, the company still has a lot of work to do to convince people AI personas are worth interacting with in the first place.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-sends-its-ai-generated-profiles-to-hell-where-they-belong-204758789.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||