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UK’s focus on online child safety
Britain’s communications regulator, Ofcom laid down its first steps around online safety calling for tech companies to be mindful about child safety by preventing child abuse, grooming and pro-suicide content online. While Ofcom will not be hearing individual complaints, it fully intends to force companies like Meta to make Facebook and Instagram safer. The draft code for the law that was published today included measures like stopping random users from messaging a child and making children’s location details hidden. The body also asked companies to use “hash matching,” a technology used to identify illegal images of child sexual abuse by checking them on a database.
Under the law, companies found to be non-compliant could be fined up to 18 million pounds or $22.1 million or 10% of their annual global turnover.
Meta to require disclosure for AI-created political ads
Meta has announced that from 2024, any advertisers using AI to create political or election-related advertisements will have to disclose the same on Facebook and Instagram. If the ads show a digitally produced person or alters the ad to say something that wasn’t originally said, it must be stated openly. Any place, or changes to an actual event or even showing a digitally altered version of the event must be disclosed by the advertiser.
The updates come on the heels of Meta previous announcement that barred political advertisers from using generative AI ads tools. The power of generative AI tools to create realistic looking fake content has been worrying for lawmakers ahead of federal elections.
Amazon spending millions on new AI model
A Reuters report stated that Amazon is investing millions to train a powerful large language model to rival OpenAI and Google. Codenamed Olympus, the AI model has 2 trillion parameters making it one of the biggest AI models till date. The team working on the project is led by Rohit Prasad, the former head of Alexa and is reporting directly to CEO Andy Jassy. Prasad who is the head scientist of AGI at the company has brought in AI researchers across the company for this effort.
Amazon already has smaller homegrown models like Titan and offers them with AWS services.
Published - November 09, 2023 04:11 pm IST
