Meta buys into Scale AI in the quest for fresh data

Hot off blowing over $100 billion on the Metaverse, Facebook/Meta has started doing the same with “AI.” Facebook just bought 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billio, acqui-hiring founder-CEO Alexandr Wang, in a deal designed to keep antitrust regulators at bay and Scale’s original investors sweet. [Reuters; The Information, paywalled] Scale will continue as ahttps://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/13/meta-buys-into-scale-ai-in-the-quest-for-fresh-data/

Disney sues AI image generator Midjourney

Midjourney runs a diffusion model that you can ask to generate pictures. Disney and Universal and several other movie studios have sued because Midjourney keeps spitting out their copyrighted characters. [Complaint, PDF; case docket] This is the first suit by big Hollywood movie studios against a generative AI company. Disney first went for one of […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/12/disney-sues-ai-image-generator-midjourney/
#Copyright

ChatGPT goes down — and fake jobs grind to a halt worldwide

ChatGPT suffered a worldwide outage from 06:36 UTC Tuesday morning. The servers weren’t totally down, but queries kept returning errors. OpenAI finally got it mostly fixed later in the day. [OpenAI, archive] But you could hear the screams of the vibe coders, the marketers, and the LinkedIn posters around the world. The Drum even ran […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/11/chatgpt-goes-down-and-fake-jobs-grind-to-a-halt-worldwide/

Doctors against data abuse — BMA and RCGP protest NHS AI data handover

A pile of patient data that was sent to NHS England from doctors to research Covid-19 just happened to get poured into the NHS’s new LLM, Foresight. The British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners have referred NHS England to the Information Commissioner’s Office: [RCGP; Politico] The https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/10/doctors-against-data-abuse-bma-and-rcgp-protest-nhs-ai-data-handover/

Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2025! Don’t expect much — it still doesn’t work

Apple Intelligence is most famous for mangling news headlines and text messages and making spam texts look legitimate. Bloomberg wrote in March: [Bloomberg, archive] People just aren’t embracing Apple Intelligence. Internal company data for the features indicates that real world usage is extremely low. The 2025 https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/09/apple-intelligence-at-wwdc-2025-dont-expect-much-it-still-doesnt-work/

Apple: ‘Reasoning’ AIs fail hard if they actually have to think

Apple Machine Learning Research has a new preprint: “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity.” [Apple, PDF] “Large Reasoning Models” don’t do logic. Worse yet, “frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities.” If the https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/08/apple-reasoning-ais-fail-hard-if-they-actually-have-to-think/

UK — High Court to lawyers: cut the ChatGPT or else

US lawyers have spent the past two years filing briefs full of citations to nonexistent cases — because a chatbot made them up. You’d think these intelligent and educated people would know better than to pull this. But it keeps happening. The UK is no different. In two recent cases, a chatbot made up citations […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/07/uk-high-court-to-lawyers-cut-the-chatgpt-or-else/
#Chatbots #JeremyJohnson

Builder․ai even more fake: creative accounting, no AI, no money

Builder.ai collapsed a couple of weeks ago.Its much-touted AI website builder seemed to be fully 100% AGI — A Guy Instead. More details have come out in Builder’s US bankruptcy. Engineer.AI Corporation filed for Chapter 7 liquidation on Monday. The company has about $50–100 million in debts and only $5–$10 million in assets. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/06/builder-ai-even-more-fake-creative-accounting-no-ai-no-money/

Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro!

You’ll have noticed how previously normal people start acting like addicts to their favourite generative AI and shouting at you like you’re trying to take their cocaine away. Matthias Döpmann is a software developer. He’s been trying out AI autocomplete for coding. He was very impressed at how good the tools are for the https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

Washington Post goes AI to clean up amateur right-wing op-eds

The Washington Post put up a new mission statement in January that called AI a “key enabler” of the paper’s success. It aspired to make the Post “an A.I.-fueled platform for news.” [NYT, archive] The first part of the AI-fueled platform plan is called Ripple. The Post wants to fill out the opinion section with […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/04/washington-post-goes-ai-to-clean-up-amateur-right-wing-op-eds/
#Journalism

Let’s put more AI slop into advertising!

Facebook is floating AI-generated ad campaigns! You’ll type in your rough ideas and Facebook will generate a small campaign for you, with ad copy and imagery. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says AI advertising is part of his “vision” for the future of Meta. [WSJ, archive] But ad agencies have been trying out generative AI since ChatGPT […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/03/lets-put-more-ai-slop-into-advertising/
#Imagegenerators #Facebook #MarkZuckerberg

Microsoft and AI: spending billions to make millions

Microsoft has carefully leaked the news of its BIG SALE of Copilot licenses to Barclays Bank! 100,000 seats! Fantastic! [Bloomberg, archive] That’s a few million dollars? If that. Microsoft claims “dozens” of organisations bought into Copilot big time — but the only other one the Register could confirm was Siemens. [Register] Microsoft’s Business https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/31/microsoft-and-ai-spending-billions-to-make-millions/

The UK will totally replace two-thirds of junior civil servants with AI chatbots, says the chatbot

The UK government is still flat out of ideas and still convinced “AI” is the magical fix-all for bureaucracy. By “AI,” it means ChatGPT it buys in from Microsoft. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, plans to fire 10,000 civil servants by the end of this parliament, https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/30/the-uk-will-totally-replace-two-thirds-of-junior-civil-servants-with-ai-chatbots-says-the-chatbot/

Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it

Game studio executives love AI slop — because they despise paying artists and writers. The execs hire art directors who also love AI slop: [Aftermath] He’ll just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/29/game-studios-love-ai-the-gamers-hate-it/
#Gaming #ElectronicArts #NFT #TakeTwo #Ubisoft #UbisoftQuartz

Google takes AI propaganda to the movies

Google is very upset that a lot of the public don’t really like AI. You might think this was because of AI slop and explicit threats to their jobs, but Google is pretty sure it’s because people saw the Terminator films. So Google is funding films about how AI is good really. Mira Lang at […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/28/google-takes-ai-propaganda-to-the-movies/
#Imagegenerators #100Zeros #DarrenAronofsky #DeepMind #Google

AI resorts to robot blackmail! — because Anthropic asked for a story of robot blackmail

Anthropic AI promotes itself with increasingly frenzied science fiction about AI doom. In every case, the chatbot does an evil thing because the researchers specifically told it to. This weekend’s headlines: “AI system resorts to blackmail if told it will be removed”! [BBC] This comeshttps://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/25/ai-resorts-to-robot-blackmail-because-anthropic-asked-for-a-story-of-robot-blackmail/

AI coding bot allows prompt injection with a pull request

GitLab is a program code repository. It’s got an AI coding bot, because of course it does — it’s called Duo and it runs on Claude. Duo will make suggestions, analyse submitted pull requests and even give security tips! [GitLab] You can prompt-inject the bot by submitting a malicious pull request, and the bot will […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/24/ai-coding-bot-allows-prompt-injection-with-a-pull-request/
#Codecompletion

How to make a splash in AI economics: fake your data

In a fast-moving field like “AI,” with buzzwords and dumb money flying about, researchers don’t have time for for the peer review process. Preprints can have all the impact you could ever want! Let’s look at “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” which was posted to arXiv by MIT economics Ph.D. student Aidan https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/17/how-to-make-a-splash-in-ai-economics-fake-your-data/

Lloyd’s offers corporate insurance against AI chatbot errors! Now try to get a payout

You’ve replaced those annoying human employees with a website chatbot. Unfortunately, it keeps hallucinating discounts for your customers or swearing at them and badmouthing your company What if we insured you against this? Technology error and omission insurance covers some AI losses — https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/12/lloyds-offers-corporate-insurance-against-ai-chatbot-errors-now-try-to-get-a-payout/

Soundcloud claims the right to train AI on all your songs — but swears it hasn’t yet, honest

Soundcloud is a site where musicians can host their music. On Thursday 9 May, Bluesky user Thomas Brunet noticed something in the Soundcloud terms of service: [Bluesky; Soundcloud] You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/11/soundcloud-claims-the-right-to-train-ai-on-your-uploaded-music-but-swears-it-hasnt-yet-honest/