Taylor Swift performing recently, not a Facebook avatar made without permission. (Picture Paolo V, CC BY 2.0)Seen on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp by millions, the bots impersonating Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson and others were flirty, intimate and often suggested meet-ups, a Reuters scoop has found.
Most of the bots were created by users, but some high profile ones, garnering more than 10 million views, came from a Meta employee.
Meta admits fault
This is a failure of Meta’s policy enforcement, spokesman Andy Stone tells Reuters — and says there are guidelines in place against intimate celebrity pictures.
Meta has since deleted many of the bots in question, but some still remain, Reuters found.
While there are individual state laws protecting the likeness and appearance of celebrities, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland of SAG-AFTRA — the actors union — says they are pushing for federal laws against AI imitation.
Midjourney licensing its technology to Meta might be the first of many. (Picture: screenshot)Meta’s head of the Superintelligence Lab, Alexandr Wang, announced today a «technical collaboration between our research teams» as Midjourney has expertise that «complements our own.»
Little is known about the actual details of the collaboration, and Meta’s spokesperson, when asked by The Verge, simply defers to Wang’s x.com post:
Be careful what you share in Grok, or you might be spilling secrets to Google.Grok lists shared chats on Google
If you want to share a chat with friends on Grok, you might get more than you bargained for. According to Forbes, the share-button generates a unique URL that is also shared with search engines, and they found more than 370K stored Grok conversations on Google. OpenAI had a similar problem a few weeks back, and disabled the option. No news yet on mitigation from x.ai. More at Forbes.
Meta AI enacts hiring freeze as part of reorg
The Wall Street Journal reports that it is part of a wider reorganization of the «Superintelligence» unit, and CNBC reports that it is about «creating a solid structure» for the lab. Apparently, investors have been spooked by the massive expenditures on the unit, after spending big this summer to secure talent. Alexandr Wang, head of the Superintelligence Lab, denies the reports. More at the WSJ and CNBC.
Generated picture.Meta’s new «bias»-checker is a right-wing influencer Robby Starbuck rose to fame as an influencer campaigning against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the USA. He often sued companies to force them to end such policies, and even sued Meta after their AI wrongly implicated him in the events of January 6.
Now the suit is settled and he has a new job offer; as a Meta advisor to address «ideological and political bias» in their AIs. This is what Trump meant when he went against «woke» AI, and Meta says they have made «tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias» since working with Starbuck. More at The WSJ, The Verge, Mashable and MSNBC.
Gemini now defaults to remembering previous chats
Google Gemini’s new feature is always on by design, and will remember your older chats without specifically asking. The feature delivers «more personalized responses the more you use it,» Google says. It will remember «key details and preferences you’ve shared, leading to more natural and relevant conversations, as if you’re collaborating with a partner who’s already up to speed.»
It can be turned off by going to Settings, then «Personal context.» There is also an option called «Temporary Chats» that won’t be remembered. More at Google’s launch post, The Verge and 9to5Google.
OpenAI has since removed the checkbox that would share your chat with search engines.(Picture: Screenshot, OpenAI)If you clicked this box, your ChatGPT session would be on Google
ChatGPT was just two clicks away from spilling your secrets to Google, an investigation found yesterday. The «Make this chat discoverable» button on the share feature would register the whole chat on search engines. Plenty of people made that mistake, sharing «deeply personal details, including struggles with addiction, experiences of physical abuse, or serious mental health issues.» OpenAI removed the feature shortly after, saying it «introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to.» They are now scrambling to remove «indexed content from the relevant search engines.»
Apple open to mergers and acquisitions in AI space — We’re very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap, Apple’s Tim Cook said on yesterday’s earnings call. — We are not stuck on a certain size company, although the ones that we have acquired thus far this year are small in nature. He also said Apple was going to «significantly» grow it’s AI investments, after the company reported a 10% increase in revenue — the largest jump since 2021. They are also «making good progress» on personalizing Siri, he said.
Zuckerberg throws shade on open source projects
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta recently posted a manifesto of sorts, mapping out what he sees as a benevolent «personal superintelligence» «for everyone.» In it, he quietly states that superintelligence will pose new safety concerns, and «We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.» He repeated this in his later earnings call, saying «we kind of wrestle with whether it’s productive or helpful to share that.» See also his original post.
Developers are slightly souring on AI coding A new survey from Stack Overflow shows a significant drop in developer trust in AI coding, with trust in its accuracy dropping from 40% in previous years to 29% in 2025. «Favorability» has also dropped from 72% to 60% on a yearly basis. 52% of developers say they use AI agents in their work, while 72% reject «vibe coding.» The survey was taken with 49,000 worldwide developers. Stack Overflow is no stranger to AI effects, having dropped sharply after the AI coding boom.
Zuckerberg sits down with The Information to explain his Superintelligence spending. (Picture: Screenshot) Executive order coming on «Woke AI»
The US President is planning a new Executive Order regarding balance in AI models. They are going to have to incorporate more right-wing ideology in order to remain in contention for government contracts.
The order would «dictate that AI companies getting federal contracts be politically neutral and unbiased in their AI models.» No news yet on who will be the arbiter of what is «neutral,» but we can guess, right? More on The Wall Street Journal, discussion on r/singularity
Anthropic copyright case moves to class action
While Anthropic’s use of purchased books in training was ruled «fair use» by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in late june, their archive of 7 million pirated books was not.
In this phase of the trial, Alsup has okayed it proceeding as a class action suit, on behalf of all pirated authors.
At a maximum penalty of $150,000 for each infringement, that could total a competely debilitating bill if Anthropic is found guilty, and greatly impact the AI industry. More at Reuters.
Perplexity gets huge India boost
The AI search engine has sealed a deal to give 360 million customers of the Airtel telco their Perplexity Pro service for free. Airtel is the second largest telecoms operator in India. The trial lasts a year and comes with no strings attached, and offers access to ChatGPT models along with Claude Sonnet and Opus 4. It would normally cost $200 per year.
Previously, Google has offered Gemini for free for all students in India, as everyone is trying to capture the enormous market. More at India Dispatch, TechCrunch, and a press release by Airtel.
Zuckerberg explains «Superintelligence» hires
The Meta CEO just announced a 5GW data center with even more to be built, some the size of Manhattan, in a push worth «hundreds of billions.» In a recent interview with The Information, he explained his reasoning on his expensive AI hires — by saying infrastructure investments pale in comparison to human costs. And, he says, his new hires «want the fewest number of people reporting to them — and the most GPUs.» See the interview here (25 minutes), and Business Insider on talent motivations.
AI strategy might be on the move at Meta, according to reports. (Picture: Dylan Tweney, CC BY 2.0)According to a New York Times article out today, the top leadership of the new Superintelligence Labs at Meta have held internal discussions on ditching open source models.
They have reportedly stopped testing on the open source Behemoth model, after it delivered «underwhelming» performance, TechCrunch reports.
«Unchanged» policy
They also caution that discussions are just discussions and don’t reflect official policy from the social media giant.
Meta is looking to kickstart its AI teams after a string of mishaps. (Picture: Meta)The top AI executive and 15-year Google veteran was offered «tens of millions» in compensation to join the Superintelligence Labs at Meta.
Pang was in charge of roughly 100 developers making Apple’s Foundational models, powering features the company calls «Apple Intelligence,» and is found in every corner of iOS 26, such as email summaries, notifications and Genmoji — that was all over the latest WWDC 2025.
Bad vibes at Apple Bloomberg (paywalled) writes that news of Apple considering other models than its in-house ones to power a smarter Siri has impacted the morale at the foundational model team, and MacRumors says that other engineers are also entertaining offers from outside companies.
This piece of 1977 hardware hardly broke a sweat beating Copilot in chess. (Picture: Wikipedia) TikTok gets a taste of racist Veo 3-generations
Racist and dehumanizing Veo 3 videos aimed at blacks and immigrants are raking in millions of views on TikTok, MediaMatters reports.
The videos depict black people as monkeys with warrants, decries missing parents and calls them «the usual suspects.» Some of these 8-second videos, complete with watermarks, had 3 to 4 million views at the time they were discovered. — We proactively enforce robust rules against hateful speech and behavior and have removed the accounts we identified in the report, many of which were already banned prior to the report publishing, says TikTok in a statement to Mashable.
For higher engagement, Meta’s chatbots will reach out first
Users of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram could soon receive unprompted messages to ask about recent conversations, according to leaked documents seen by Business Insider. This is intended for bots made in Meta’s AI Studio, which lets users create custom chatbots. These will remember past chats and preferences, and will «follow up with you to share ideas or ask additional questions,» says a Meta spokesman.
Microsoft’s Copilot also sucks at chess
After first brimming with confidence and promising a «strong fight,» claiming to think 10-15 moves ahead, «remember previous moves and maintain continuity in gameplay» and that «our match should be much smoother» against the Atari 2600 chess simulator from 1977, Copilot went the way of ChatGPT by failing miserably in their game. By the seventh turn, it had lost two pawns, a knight and a bishop, while the Atari had only lost a single pawn. It went south from there, as reported by The Register.
Meta’s historical hiring spree might come to a close now they’ve announced their team. (Picture: Carnaval.com Studios, CC BY 2.0)After a few hectic weeks of agressively poaching talent from their rivals, and an acqiusition or two, Meta reveals the completion of their new AI lab.
This comes hot on the heels of several months or years of what Zuckerberg deemed lackluster performance from the Llama team, before he decided to get some seasoned pros in.
The new team is headed up Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman from Scale AI and Github, respectively.
They will be joined by an 11-man team that will spearhead Metas future AI efforts, that reads like a who’s who of significant AI efforts over the last couple of years from Anthropic, OpenAI and even Google’s DeepMind:
Fair use is a provision in copyright that makes it legal to copy for «transformative works.» (Picture: Alan Levine, CC BY 2.0)After initially being sceptical of declaring the training on copyrighted books «fair use,» U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria relented — but not the strength on Meta’s case.
Instead, he clearly says in his summary judgement that it «is generally illegal to copy protected works without permission,» (CNBC) but the plaintiffs «made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.» (The Verge.)
Zuckerberg, caricatured here, is going all in on his new superintelligence team at Meta. (Picture: Tim Reckmann, CC BY 2.0)UPDATED. OpenAI pioneer Sutskever started the company a year ago, after leaving OpenAI during the CEO and boardroom scuffle, and it was valued at $32 billion during a recent funding round, reports CNBC.
They rebuffed Meta’s buyout offer, CNBC writes, claiming information from anonymous sources close to the transaction.
Now, Meta has turned their eyes to recruiting the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence and the previous AI chief at Apple, Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who run an AI venture fund together— which Meta would hold a stake in as part of the deal.
After weeks of speculation, Meta’s Scale AI deal is finally done. (Picture: Ishmael Daro, CC BY 2.0)Hoping to straighten out its AI efforts, the Facebook owner forks out a stunning amount for 49% of the company. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang now joins Meta in a new «superintelligence» group.
With Meta calling it a «strategic partnership,» Wang is expected to be joined by «a small number of Scale AI employees,» writes CNBC.
