Good morning, it’s a new week and I’m starting to feel a holiday coming on. Let’s get into the tech news.
1. Well that didn’t last long
Twitch has reversed a new policy allowing for ‘artisitic’ nudity on the platform after just two days. “In making this update, we were trying to be responsive to these requests and allow the thriving artist community on Twitch to utilise the human form in their art,” Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said in a blog post. Twitch was also trying to make its confusing Sexual Content Policy “easier to understand and enforce,” but things didn’t quite work out that way, and moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity will not be allowed on the platform.
2. Canva screws the lid on AI image generation
The Australian is reporting that Canva’s Magic Studio AI image generator, which we wrote about when it launched last year, has had its ability to train on the work of well-known artists limited. Canva has a list of more than 5,000 artists that are blocked from use with the Stable Diffusion-based image generator, preventing it from replicating an artist’s style. Canva’s head of AI Danny Wu said that the generator will decline the generation of an image if prompted to replicate an artist’s style, and the news comes amid growing legal concerns around the technology.
3. Proton Mail lashes out against proposed eSafety rules
The Guardian is reporting that Proton Mail’s founder has said that it is willing to fight the Australian eSafety regulator if forced to weaken its email encryption under newly proposed standards. Under the new standards, tech companies would need to detect and remove child abuse material and pro-terror material where it can, however, 350 signatories of an open letter address to the regulator, including Mozilla, Proton Mail, and Tor Project, are urging against the rules. “These proposals could not only force companies to bypass their own encryption, but could put businesses and citizens at risk while doing little to protect people from the online harms they are intended to address,” Proton CEO and founder Andy Yen said to The Guardian.
4. Activision Blizzard to settle gender discrimination lawsuit
Axios is reporting, by way of The Wall Street Journal, that Activision Blizzard has agreed to pay $US47 million to settle a gender discrimination lawsuit brought against it by California in 2021. California’s lawsuit included accusations that Activision Blizzard did not pay its employees equally, and that the company had a “sexist culture”. Payments will be distributed to women who were employed by the company in California between October 2015 and December 2020. In September 2021, Activision Blizzard settled a similar harassment lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for $US18 million.
5. ByteDance wants in on AI
The Verge is reporting that TikTok parent company ByteDance wants in on AI, and is secretly using OpenAI’s technology to build its own large language model. This action violated the developer licence of both Microsoft and OpenAI, and after The Verge published its story, ByteDance’s account was suspended. “While ByteDance’s use of our API was minimal, we have suspended their account while we further investigate,” OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said to The Verge. All of this said, most of ByteDance’s GPT usage was supposedly through the Microsoft Azure platform, not OpenAI.
BONUS ITEM: Congratulations, Andrew Ngai!
The clock ticks. Competitors focused on the ever-moving cells of data on their computer screen, their every keystroke a step closer to their destiny.
— SBS News (@SBSNews) December 17, 2023
This is the Microsoft Excel World Championship and Aussie Andrew Ngai is its victor.
Read more: https://t.co/s0cPkSb0lF pic.twitter.com/7W73rmkaIq