Google

bing-search-shows-few,-if-any,-signs-of-market-share-increase-from-ai-features

Bing Search shows few, if any, signs of market share increase from AI features

AI, Bing, Bing Chat, chatgpt, copilot, Google, microsoft, Windows 11, windows copilot / /

high hopes —

Bing’s US and worldwide market share is about the same as it has been for years.

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Bing Search shows few, if any, signs of market share increase from AI features

Microsoft

Not quite one year ago, Microsoft announced a “multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment” in OpenAI, a company that had made waves in 2022 with its ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E image creator. The next month, Microsoft announced that it was integrating a generative AI chatbot into its Bing search engine and Edge browser, and similar generative AI features were announced for Windows in the apps formerly known as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, and other products.

Adding AI features to Bing was meant to give it an edge over Google, and reports indicated that Google was worried enough about it to accelerate its own internal generative AI efforts. Microsoft announced in March 2023 that Bing surpassed the 100 million monthly active users mark based on interest in Bing Chat and its ilk; by Microsoft’s estimates, each percentage of Google’s search market share that Bing could siphon away was worth as much as $2 billion to Microsoft.

A year later, it looks like Microsoft’s AI efforts may have helped Bing on the margins, but they haven’t meaningfully eroded Google’s search market share, according to Bloomberg. Per Bloomberg’s analysis of data from Sensor Tower, Bing usage had been down around 33 percent year over year just before the AI-powered features were added, but those numbers had rebounded by the middle of 2023.

Microsoft hasn’t given an official update on Bing’s monthly active users in quite a while—we’ve asked the company for an update, and will share it if we get one—though Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Medhi told Bloomberg that “millions and millions of people” were still using the new AI features.

StatCounter data mostly tells a similar story. According to its data, Google’s worldwide market share is currently in the low 90s, and it has been for virtually the entire 15-year period for which StatCounter offers data. Bing’s worldwide market share number over the same period has been remarkably stable; it was about 3.5 percent in the summer of 2009, when what had been known as Live Search was renamed Bing in the first place, and as of December 2023, it was still stuck at around 3.4 percent.

Recent US data is slightly more flattering for Microsoft, where Bing’s usage rose from 6.7 percent in December 2022 to 7.7 percent in December 2023. But that doesn’t necessarily suggest any kind of AI-fueled influx in new Bing search users—usage remained in the mid-to-high 6 percent range through most of 2023 before ticking up right at the end of the year—and Bing’s US usage has floated in that same 6–7 percent zone for most of the last decade.

It even seems like Microsoft is making moves to distance its AI efforts from Bing a bit. What began as “Bing Chat” or “the new Bing” is now known as Windows Copilot—both inside Windows 11 and elsewhere. Earlier this week, the Bing Image Creator became “Image Creator from Designer.” Both products still feature Bing branding prominently—the Copilot screen in Windows 11 still says “with Bing” at the top of it, and the Image Creator tool is still hosted on the Bing.com domain. But if these new AI features aren’t driving Bing’s market share up, then it makes sense for Microsoft to create room for them to stand on their own.

That’s not to say Google’s search dominance is assured. Leipzig University researchers published a study earlier this week (PDF) suggesting Google, Bing, and the Bing-powered DuckDuckGo had seen “an overall downward trend in text quality,” especially for heavily SEO-optimized categories like purchase recommendations and product reviews.

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Google lays off 100 at YouTube; CEO says more layoffs are coming

Google, layoffs, Sundar Pichai / /

Layoffs will continue until morale improves —

Sundar Pichai tells employees to brace for “tough choices… throughout the year.”

–

Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days.

Enlarge / Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days.

Aurich Lawson

Today’s Google layoff announcement concerns YouTube, which plans to lay off 100 employees. Tubefilter was the first to report the news. This is the third Google layoff announcement in eight days (the other two were at Google Assistant/Hardware and Google Ads) and the 10th Google layoff announcement we’ve covered in the past 12 months. It feels like we could be doing this kind of reporting via a template by now.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says to expect more layoffs. The Verge got hold of an internal memo from Pichai to Google’s remaining employees on January 10, telling them to brace for “tough choices” in the future and that “to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year where needed, and some roles may be impacted.” Last year Google cut 12,000 jobs in January and continued to make smaller additional cuts all year. Pichai told his employees that this year, “these role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions, and will not touch every team.”

The January 10 date of the memo means Googlers got a heads up about the Google Assistant, Hardware, Google Ads, and YouTube layoffs, but no one knows when the layoffs will stop. Making investors happy is a big factor in all these layoffs, so if you’re interested in the Wall Street perspective on Google’s headcount, back in March 2023, activist investor Christopher Hohn of TCI Fund Management wanted to see Pichai cut another 25,000 people after the 12,000 original layoffs. Hohn wants to see Alphabet/Google go back to 150,000 employees, which was the company headcount at the end of 2021.

Even after what seemed like an endless amount of layoff announcements last year, as of Q3 2023, Alphabet’s headcount was still at 182,381. Even though the company laid off over 12,000 people, it was still hiring people during that time, so year over year, Alphabet’s headcount only dropped by 4,400 people.

For years, one of Google’s big advantages was being a great workplace, with endless employee perks, 20 percent time to work on pet projects, and whimsical offices. Budget cutbacks and another year of looming layoffs will put a serious dent in the already awful morale at the company. Back when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced Google to Wall Street in an IPO founders letter, the two said: “Our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything.” Page and Brin are no longer in charge, though, and the company has changed significantly since then.

Google lays off 100 at YouTube; CEO says more layoffs are coming Read More »

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Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

climate change, climate denial, climate denialism, Google, online advertising, Policy, youtube / /
Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube

Content creators have spent the past five years developing new tactics to evade YouTube’s policies blocking monetization of videos making false claims about climate change, a report from a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), warned Tuesday.

What the CCDH found is that content creators who could no longer monetize videos spreading “old” forms of climate denial—including claims that “global warming is not happening” or “human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming”—have moved on.

Now they’re increasingly pushing other claims that contradict climate science, which YouTube has not yet banned and may not ever ban. These include harmful claims that “impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless,” “climate solutions won’t work,” and “climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.”

The CCDH uncovered these new climate-denial tactics by using artificial intelligence to scan transcripts of 12,058 videos posted on 96 YouTube channels that the CCDH found had previously posted climate-denial content. Verified by researchers, the AI model used was judged accurate in labeling climate-denial content approximately 78 percent of the time.

According to the CCDH’s analysis, the amount of content disputing climate solutions, climate science, and impacts of climate change today comprises 70 percent of climate-denial content—a percent that doubled from 2018 to 2023. At the same time, the amount of content pushing old climate-denial claims that are harder or impossible to monetize fell from 65 percent in 2018 to 30 percent in 2023.

These “new forms of climate denial,” the CCDH warned, are designed to delay climate action by spreading disinformation.

“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, the CCDH’s chief executive, said on a call with reporters, according to Reuters. “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening, but there is no hope. There are no solutions.'”

Since 2018—based on “estimates of typical ad pricing on YouTube” by social media analytics tool Social Blade—YouTube may have profited by as much as $13.4 million annually from videos flagged by the CCDH. And YouTube confirmed that some of these videos featured climate denialism that YouTube already explicitly bans.

In response to the CCDH’s report, YouTube de-monetized some videos found to be in violation of its climate change policy. But a spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the majority of videos that the CCDH found were considered compliant with YouTube’s ad policies.

The fact that most of these videos remain compliant is precisely why the CCDH is calling on YouTube to update its policies, though.

Currently, YouTube’s policy prohibits monetization of content “that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” YouTube’s spokesperson told Ars. “Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos. We also display information panels under relevant videos to provide additional information on climate change and context from third parties.”

The CCDH worries that YouTube standing by its current policy is too short-sighted. The group recommended tweaking the policy to instead specify that YouTube prohibits content “that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change.”

If YouTube and other social media platforms don’t acknowledge new forms of climate denial and “urgently” update their disinformation policies in response, these new attacks on climate change science “will only increase,” the CCDH warned.

“It is vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and shift our focus, our resources and our counternarratives accordingly,” the CCDH’s report said, adding that “demonetizing climate-denial” content “removes the economic incentives underpinning its creation and protects advertisers from bankrolling harmful content.”

Climate denialists find new ways to monetize disinformation on YouTube Read More »

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Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options

App Store, Apple, Apple v Epic, epic, fortnite, gaming, Google, Policy, Supreme Court, Tech / /

Epic v. Apple —

Most of Epic’s arguments are moot now, but one point will change the App Store.

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Fortnite characters looking across the many islands and vast realm of the game.

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of iOS developers after today’s Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and subscription signaling.

Epic Games

The Supreme Court declined to hear either of the petitions resulting from the multi-year, multi-court Epic v. Apple antitrust dispute. That leaves most of Epic’s complaints about Apple’s practices unanswered, but the gaming company achieved one victory on pricing notices.

It all started in August 2020, when Epic sought to work around Apple and Google’s app stores and implemented virtual currency purchases directly inside Fortnite. The matter quickly escalated to the courts, with firms like Spotify and Microsoft backing Epic’s claim that Apple’s App Store being the only way to load apps onto an iPhone violated antitrust laws.

The matter reached trial in May 2021. The precise definitions of “games” and “marketplace” were fervently debated. Epic scored a seemingly huge victory in September 2021 when a Northern California judge demanded that Apple allow developers to offer their own payment buttons and communicate with app customers about alternate payment options. An appeals court upheld that Apple’s App Store itself wasn’t a “walled garden” that violated antitrust laws but kept the ruling that Apple had to open up its payments and messaging.

Today’s denial of petitions for certiorari means that Apple has mostly run out of legal options to prevent changes to its App Store policies now that multiple courts have found its “anti-steering” language anticompetitive. Links and messaging from developers should soon be able to send users to alternative payment options for apps rather than forcing them to stay entirely inside Apple’s App Store, resulting in a notable commission for Apple.

Epic’s goals to see Fortnite restored to the App Store or see third-party stores or sideloading on iPhones remain unfulfilled. This is not the case with Epic’s antitrust suit against Google, which in mid-December went strongly in Epic’s favor. With a unanimous jury verdict against Google, a judge this month will determine how to address Google’s violations—potentially including Epic’s request that it and other developers be allowed to issue their own app stores and payment systems on Android devices.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter) that the Supreme Court’s denial means the “battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States” and that it was a “sad outcome for all developers.” Sweeney noted that as of today, developers on Apple’s platforms can “tell US customers about better prices on the web.” And he noted that regulatory and policy actions around the world, including the upcoming EU Digital Markets Act, may have further impact.

Apple has yet to comment on today’s Supreme Court decision.

Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options Read More »

youtube-appears-to-be-reducing-video-and-site-performance-for-ad-block-users

YouTube appears to be reducing video and site performance for ad-block users

ad blockers, Google, Tech, youtube / /

Surely this is an accident —

Latest consensus is that YouTube performance issues seem to be Adblock Plus’ fault.

– Updated

YouTube appears to be reducing video and site performance for ad-block users

Future Publishing | Getty Images

YouTube appeared to be continuing its war on ad blockers, with users complaining that the company was slowing down the site for users it catches running an ad blocker. 9to5Google spotted this Reddit thread filled with users seeing poor loading performance with ad blockers enabled.

A video at the top of the Reddit post shows what some users are seeing: A video with an ad blocker on can’t load quickly enough to keep up with the playback speed (which isn’t on normal; it’s maybe 2x) and has to pause at around 30 seconds. Turning off the ad blocker immediately improves loading performance, with the white line on YouTube’s progress bar showing significantly more buffering runway. Users report that the ad-block detection causes strange issues, like “lag” that makes full screen or comments not work or Chrome being unable to load other webpages while YouTube is open.

YouTube has used all sorts of tactics to get people to turn off ad blockers and subscribe to YouTube Premium. The company previously has been showing pop-up messages saying ad blockers violate YouTube terms of service. Earlier, the company was caught adding a five-second delay to the initial site load for ad blockers. The changes have kicked off a cat-and-mouse game between Google/YouTube and the ad blocker community.

But the slowdowns may be a big accident from ad blockers altering YouTube’s code: Adblock Plus has published a bug report covering “performance issues” introduced by version 3.22 and says things should be fixed in version 3.22.1. uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill says the issue is limited to AdBlock Plus and its spinoffs and that blaming YouTube is “an incorrect diagnosis.”

Regardless of whether this is due to the updated Adblock code, it’s not the first time this has happened with YouTube. The straightforward thing would be to show more of these pop-ups and not send people on a wild goose chase after fake technical issues. Users in the thread certainly seem confused about why YouTube suddenly stopped working. The top comment says, “I thought there was something wrong with my internet connection,” while another high-ranking user’s comment was to plan to reinstall Chrome.

This post was updated on January 15 at 4: 20 pm ET with Adblock Plus’ bug report information and developer Raymond Hill’s statement.

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report:-deepfake-porn-consistently-found-atop-google,-bing-search-results

Report: Deepfake porn consistently found atop Google, Bing search results

Bing, deepfake porn, Deepfakes, Google, Policy / /

Shocking results —

Google vows to create more safeguards to protect victims of deepfake porn.

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Report: Deepfake porn consistently found atop Google, Bing search results

Popular search engines like Google and Bing are making it easy to surface nonconsensual deepfake pornography by placing it at the top of search results, NBC News reported Thursday.

These controversial deepfakes superimpose faces of real women, often celebrities, onto the bodies of adult entertainers to make them appear to be engaging in real sex. Thanks in part to advances in generative AI, there is now a burgeoning black market for deepfake porn that could be discovered through a Google search, NBC News previously reported.

NBC News uncovered the problem by turning off safe search, then combining the names of 36 female celebrities with obvious search terms like “deepfakes,” “deepfake porn,” and “fake nudes.” Bing generated links to deepfake videos in top results 35 times, while Google did so 34 times. Bing also surfaced “fake nude photos of former teen Disney Channel female actors” using images where actors appear to be underaged.

A Google spokesperson told NBC that the tech giant understands “how distressing this content can be for people affected by it” and is “actively working to bring more protections to Search.”

According to Google’s spokesperson, this controversial content sometimes appears because “Google indexes content that exists on the web,” just “like any search engine.” But while searches using terms like “deepfake” may generate results consistently, Google “actively” designs “ranking systems to avoid shocking people with unexpected harmful or explicit content that they aren’t looking for,” the spokesperson said.

Currently, the only way to remove nonconsensual deepfake porn from Google search results is for the victim to submit a form personally or through an “authorized representative.” That form requires victims to meet three requirements: showing that they’re “identifiably depicted” in the deepfake; the “imagery in question is fake and falsely depicts” them as “nude or in a sexually explicit situation”; and the imagery was distributed without their consent.

While this gives victims some course of action to remove content, experts are concerned that search engines need to do more to effectively reduce the prevalence of deepfake pornography available online—which right now is rising at a rapid rate.

This emerging issue increasingly affects average people and even children, not just celebrities. Last June, child safety experts discovered thousands of realistic but fake AI child sex images being traded online, around the same time that the FBI warned that the use of AI-generated deepfakes in sextortion schemes was increasing.

And nonconsensual deepfake porn isn’t just being traded in black markets online. In November, New Jersey police launched a probe after high school teens used AI image generators to create and share fake nude photos of female classmates.

With tech companies seemingly slow to stop the rise in deepfakes, some states have passed laws criminalizing deepfake porn distribution. Last July, Virginia amended its existing law criminalizing revenge porn to include any “falsely created videographic or still image.” In October, New York passed a law specifically focused on banning deepfake porn, imposing a $1,000 fine and up to a year of jail time on violators. Congress has also introduced legislation that creates criminal penalties for spreading deepfake porn.

Although Google told NBC News that its search features “don’t allow manipulated media or sexually explicit content,” the outlet’s investigation seemingly found otherwise. NBC News also noted that Google’s Play app store hosts an app that was previously marketed for creating deepfake porn, despite prohibiting “apps determined to promote or perpetuate demonstrably misleading or deceptive imagery, videos and/or text.” This suggests that Google’s remediation efforts blocking deceptive imagery may be inconsistent.

Google told Ars that it will soon be strengthening its policies against apps featuring AI-generated restricted content in the Play Store. A generative AI policy taking effect on January 31 will require all apps to comply with developer policies that ban AI-generated restricted content, including deceptive content and content that facilitates the exploitation or abuse of children.

Experts told NBC News that “Google’s lack of proactive patrolling for abuse has made it and other search engines useful platforms for people looking to engage in deepfake harassment campaigns.”

Google is currently “in the process of building more expansive safeguards, with a particular focus on removing the need for known victims to request content removals one by one,” Google’s spokesperson told NBC News.

Microsoft’s spokesperson told Ars that Microsoft updated its process for reporting concerns with Bing searches to include non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) used in “deepfakes” last August because it had become a “significant concern.” Like Google, Microsoft allows victims to report NCII deepfakes by submitting a web form to request removal from search results, understanding that any sharing of NCII is “a gross violation of personal privacy and dignity with devastating effects for victims.”

In the past, Microsoft President Brad Smith has said that among all dangers that AI poses, deepfakes worry him most, but deepfakes fueling “foreign cyber influence operations” seemingly concern him more than deepfake porn.

This story was updated on January 11 to include information on Google’s AI-generated content policy and on January 12 to include information from Microsoft.

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android-15-might-bring-back-lock-screen-widgets

Android 15 might bring back lock screen widgets

Android 15, Google, Tech, widgets / /

A copy of a copy —

After iOS 16 reintroduced lock screen widgets, Google is dusting off its old code.

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Jelly Bean is back!

Enlarge / Jelly Bean is back!

Andrew Cunningham

It sure looks like Android 15 is going to have lock screen widgets. The Android 14 QPR2 beta landed the other day, and Mishaal Rahman over at Android Authority found a hidden unfinished feature that brings back lock screen widgets. We’ve expected this to happen since Apple’s big lock screen widget release with iOS 16.

Rahman found a new “communal” space feature that resembles lock screen widgets. After enabling the feature and swiping in from the right of the lock screen, a pencil icon will pop up. Tapping the icon opens up a widget list, allowing you to move some widgets to the lock screen. Right now, in this unfinished state, the default lock screen clock and notification panel UI don’t know how to get out of the way yet, so you get a pile of widgets with the usual lock screen UI on top. It’s a mess.

Lock screen widgets... sort of. It's early.

Enlarge / Lock screen widgets… sort of. It’s early.

Any time one smartphone operating system does something, the other tends to copy it, and iOS added lock screen widgets in 2022. Two years later is plenty of time for Google to adjust and copy the feature. The thing is, Android added lock screen widgets in 2012 with Android 4.2. Google removed the feature two years later in Android 5.0, so really, this is Android copying iOS copying Android. Some of this code is apparently making a comeback, as all the widgets available to the lock screen were ones that still had the 10-year-old “keyguard” flag set for Android 4.2.

The widget lock screen has strangely been named the “communal” space, and Rahman speculates this might be because this particular UI experiment was meant for tablets in a dock mode. “Communal” would mean that everyone in your house could see them, and maybe it would be good to limit the amount of personal data displayed without needing to pass the lock screen. This is just one of the feature experiments that happened to slip out the door, though, and it’s hard to imagine Google not letting phones do this, too, when iOS already does it.

Android 15 might bring back lock screen widgets Read More »

ai-firms’-pledges-to-defend-customers-from-ip-issues-have-real-limits

AI firms’ pledges to defend customers from IP issues have real limits

AI, Amazon, copyright, Google, indemnity, microsoft, syndication / /

Read the fine print —

Indemnities offered by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are narrow.

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The Big Tech groups are competing to offer new services such as virtual assistants and chatbots as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on generative AI

Enlarge / The Big Tech groups are competing to offer new services such as virtual assistants and chatbots as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on generative AI

FT

The world’s biggest cloud computing companies that have pushed new artificial intelligence tools to their business customers are offering only limited protections against potential copyright lawsuits over the technology.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to offer new services such as virtual assistants and chatbots as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on generative AI—systems that can spew out humanlike text, images and code in seconds.

AI models are “trained” on data, such as photographs and text found on the internet. This has led to concern that rights holders, from media companies to image libraries, will make legal claims against third parties who use the AI tools trained on their copyrighted data.

The big three cloud computing providers have pledged to defend business customers from such intellectual property claims. But an analysis of the indemnity clauses published by the cloud computing companies show that the legal protections only extend to the use of models developed by or with oversight from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

“The indemnities are quite a smart bit of business . . . and make people think ‘I can use this without worrying’,” said Matthew Sag, professor of law at Emory University.

But Brenda Leong, a partner at Luminos Law, said it was “important for companies to understand that [the indemnities] are very narrowly focused and defined.”

Google, Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment.

The indemnities provided to customers do not cover use of third-party models, such as those developed by AI start-up Anthropic, which counts Amazon and Google as investors, even if these tools are available for use on the cloud companies’ platforms.

In the case of Amazon, only content produced by its own models, such as Titan, as well as a range of the company’s AI applications, are covered.

Similarly, Microsoft only provides protection for the use of tools that run on its in-house models and those developed by OpenAI, the startup with which it has a multibillion-dollar alliance.

“People needed those assurances to buy, because they were hyper aware of [the legal] risk,” said one IP lawyer working on the issues.

The three cloud providers, meanwhile, have been adding safety filters to their tools that aim to screen out any potentially problematic content that is generated. The tech groups had become “more satisfied that instances of infringements would be very low,” but did not want to provide “unbounded” protection, the lawyer said.

While the indemnification policies announced by Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are similar, their customers may want to negotiate more specific indemnities in contracts tailored to their needs, though that is not yet common practice, people close to the cloud companies said.

OpenAI and Meta are among the companies fighting the first generative AI test cases brought by prominent authors and the comedian Sarah Silverman. They have focused in large part on allegations that the companies developing models unlawfully used copyrighted content to train them.

Indemnities were being offered as an added layer of “security” to users who might be worried about the prospect of more lawsuits, especially since the test cases could “take significant time to resolve,” which created a period of “uncertainty,” said Angela Dunning, a partner at law firm Cleary Gottlieb.

However, Google’s indemnity does not extend to models that have been “fine-tuned” by customers using their internal company data—a practice that allows businesses to train general models to produce more relevant and specific results—while Microsoft’s does.

Amazon’s covers Titan models that have been customized in this way, but if the alleged infringement is due to the fine-tuning, the protection is voided.

Legal claims brought against the users—rather than the makers—of generative AI tools may be challenging to win, however.

When dismissing part of a claim brought by three artists a year ago against AI companies Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney, US Judge William Orrick said one “problem” was that it was “not plausible” that every image generated by the tools had relied on “copyrighted training images.”

For copyright infringement to apply, the AI-generated images must be shown to be “substantially similar” to the copyrighted images, Orrick said.

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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android-users-could-soon-replace-google-assistant-with-chatgpt

Android users could soon replace Google Assistant with ChatGPT

AI, chatgpt, Google, Google Assistant, Tech / /

Who’s going to make a ChatGPT speaker? —

The Android ChatGPT app is working on support for Android’s assistant APIs.

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Android users could soon replace Google Assistant with ChatGPT

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Hey Android users, are you tired of Google’s neglect of Google Assistant? Well, one of Google’s biggest rivals, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is apparently coming for the premium phone space occupied by Google’s voice assistant. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority found that the ChatGPT app is working on support for Android’s voice assistant APIs and a system-wide overlay UI. If the company rolls out this feature, users could set the ChatGPT app as the system-wide assistant app, allowing it to pop up anywhere in Android and respond to user questions. ChatGPT started as a text-only generative AI but received voice and image input capabilities in September.

Usually, it’s the Google Assistant with system-wide availability in Android, but that’s not special home cooking from Google—it all happens via public APIs that technically any app can plug into. You can only have one app enabled as the system-wide “Default Assistant App,” and beyond the initial setting, the user always has to change it manually. The assistant APIs are designed to be powerful, keeping some parts of the app running 24/7 no matter where you are. Being the default Assistant app enables launching the app via the power button or a gesture, and the assist app can read the current screen text and images for processing.

The Default Assistant App settings.

Enlarge / The Default Assistant App settings.

Ron Amadeo

If some Android manufacturer signed a deal with ChatGPT and included it as a bundled system application, ChatGPT could even use an always-on voice hotword, where saying something like “Hey, ChatGPT” would launch the app even when the screen is off. System apps get more permissions than normal apps, though, and an always-on hotword is locked behind these system app permissions, so ChatGPT would need to sign a distribution deal with some Android manufacturer. Given the red-hot popularity of ChatGPT, though, I’m sure a few would sign up if it were offered.

Rahman found that ChatGPT version 1.2023.352, released last month, included a new activity named “com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantActivity.” He managed to turn on the normally disabled feature that revealed ChatGPT’s new overlay API. This is the usual semi-transparent spinning orb UI that voice assistants use, although Rahman couldn’t get it to respond to a voice command just yet. This is all half-broken and under development, so it might never see a final release, but companies usually release the features they’re working on.

Of course, the problem with any of these third-party voice assistant apps as a Google Assistant replacement is that they don’t run a serious app ecosystem. As with Bixby and Alexa, there are no good apps to host your notes, reminders, calendar entries, shopping list items, or any other input-based functions you might want to do. As a replacement for Google Search, though, where you ask it a question and get an answer, it would probably be a decent alternative.

Google has neglected Google Assistant for years, but with the rise of generative AI, it’s working on revamping Assistant with some Google Bard smarts. It’s also reportedly working on a different assistant, “Pixie,” which would apparently launch with the Pixel 9, but that will be near the end of 2024.

Android users could soon replace Google Assistant with ChatGPT Read More »

elon-musk-drops-price-of-x-gold-checks-amid-rampant-crypto-scams

Elon Musk drops price of X gold checks amid rampant crypto scams

cloudsek, Cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency scam, cyber threat analysts, elon musk, Ethereum, Google, hacker, Mandiant, NFTs, phishing scam, Policy, Twitter, X / /
Elon Musk drops price of X gold checks amid rampant crypto scams

There’s currently a surge in cryptocurrency and phishing scams proliferating on X (formerly Twitter)—hiding under the guise of gold and gray checkmarks intended to mark “Verified Organizations,” reports have warned this week.

These scams seem to mostly commandeer dormant X accounts purchased online through dark web marketplaces, according to a whitepaper released by the digital threat monitoring platform CloudSEK. But the scams have also targeted high-profile X users who claim that they had enhanced security measures in place to protect against these hacks.

This suggests that X scammers are growing more sophisticated at a time when X has launched an effort to sell even more gold checks at lower prices through a basic tier announced this week.

Most recently, the cyber threat intelligence company Mandiant—which is a subsidiary of Google—confirmed its X account was hijacked despite enabling two-factor authentication. According to Bleeping Computer, the hackers used Mandiant’s account to “distribute a fake airdrop that emptied cryptocurrency wallets.”

A Google spokesperson declined to comment on how many users may have been scammed, but Mandiant is investigating and promised to share results when its probe concludes.

In September, a similar fate befell Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who had his account hijacked by hackers. The bad actors posted a fake offer for free non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a link to a fake website designed to empty cryptocurrency wallets. The post was only up for about 20 minutes but drained $691,000 in digital assets from Buterin’s unsuspecting followers, according to CloudSEK’s research.

Another group monitoring cryptocurrency and phishing scams linked to X accounts is MalwareHunterTeam (MHT), Bleeping Computer reported. This week, MHT has flagged additional scams targeting politicians’ accounts, including a Canadian senator, Amina Gerba, and a Brazilian politician, Ubiratan Sanderson.

On X, gold ticks are supposed to reassure users that an account can be trusted by designating that an account is affiliated with an official organization or company. Gray ticks signify an account is linked to government organizations. CloudSEK estimated that hijacked gold and gray checks could be sold online for between $1,200 to $2,000, depending on how old the account is or how many followers it has. Bad actors can also buy accounts affiliated with gold accounts for $500 each.

A CloudSEK spokesperson told Ars that its team is “in the process of reporting the matter” to X.

X did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.

CloudSEK predicted that scams involving gold checks would continue to be a problem so long as selling gold and gray checks remains profitable.

“It is evident that threat actors would not budge from such profit-making businesses anytime soon,” CloudSEK’s whitepaper said.

For organizations seeking to avoid being targeted by hackers on X, CloudSEK recommends strengthening brand monitoring on the platform, enhancing security settings, and closing out any dormant accounts. It’s also wise for organizations to cease storing passwords in a browser, and instead use a password manager that’s less vulnerable to malware attacks, CloudSEK said. Organizations on X may also want to monitor activity on any apps that become connected to X, Bleeping Computer advised.

Elon Musk drops price of X gold checks amid rampant crypto scams Read More »

google-agrees-to-settle-chrome-incognito-mode-class-action-lawsuit

Google agrees to settle Chrome incognito mode class action lawsuit

chrome, class action, Google, incognito mode, lawsuit, Policy, privacy / /

Not as private as you thought —

2020 lawsuit accused Google of tracking incognito activity, tying it to users’ profiles.

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Google agrees to settle Chrome incognito mode class action lawsuit

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Google has indicated that it is ready to settle a class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 over its Chrome browser’s Incognito mode. Arising in the Northern District of California, the lawsuit accused Google of continuing to “track, collect, and identify [users’] browsing data in real time” even when they had opened a new Incognito window.

The lawsuit, filed by Florida resident William Byatt and California residents Chasom Brown and Maria Nguyen, accused Google of violating wiretap laws. It also alleged that sites using Google Analytics or Ad Manager collected information from browsers in Incognito mode, including web page content, device data, and IP address. The plaintiffs also accused Google of taking Chrome users’ private browsing activity and then associating it with their already-existing user profiles.

Google initially attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed by pointing to the message displayed when users turned on Chrome’s incognito mode. That warning tells users that their activity “might still be visible to websites you visit.”

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected Google’s bid for summary judgement in August, pointing out that Google never revealed to its users that data collection continued even while surfing in Incognito mode.

“Google’s motion hinges on the idea that plaintiffs consented to Google collecting their data while they were browsing in private mode,” Rogers ruled. “Because Google never explicitly told users that it does so, the Court cannot find as a matter of law that users explicitly consented to the at-issue data collection.”

According to the notice filed on Tuesday, Google and the plaintiffs have agreed to terms that will result in the litigation being dismissed. The agreement will be presented to the court by the end of January, with the court giving final approval by the end of February.

Google agrees to settle Chrome incognito mode class action lawsuit Read More »