Ina Fried

The controversial California AI bill that has divided the tech world

A California effort to regulate artificial intelligence has divided the tech world, with some trying

Trump speeds AI-driven truth decay

Donald Trump's false charge that his opponent used artificial intelligence to forge a photo of a crowd of supporters shows yet another dimension of AI's potential to 

Tech giants up ante by withholding products from EU

Aiming to fight what they see as vague and overly burdensome regulation by the European Union, U.S. tech giants are playing one of the strongest cards they have: withholding their products. Until now, the U.S. tech giants have dominated the global digital economy by serving (almost) everyone, accepting divergent regional laws as the cost of doing business.

For AI firms, anything "public" is fair game

Leading AI companies have a favorite phrase when it comes to describing where they get the data to train their models: They say it's "

"Extremely concerned": UN official warns Silicon Valley execs of AI dangers

Volker Türk, the UN's high commissioner for human rights, was in Silicon Valley last week to deliver a simple message to tech companies: Your products can do real harm and it's your job to make sure that they don't. Technologies like artificial intelligence hold enormous potential for addressing a range of societal ills, but without effort and intent, these same technologies can act as powerful weapons of oppression, said Türk. New regulations are often where the tech debate lands, but Türk tells Axios that the firms should already be ensuring their products comply with the existing 

AI's next fight is over whose values it should hold

There's no such thing as an AI system without values — and that means this newest technology platform must navigate partisan rifts, culture-war chasms and international tensions from the very beginning. Every step in training, tuning and deploying AI models forces its creators to make choices about whose values the system will respect, whose point of view it will present and what limits it will observe. AI systems' points of view begins in the data with which they are trained — and the efforts their developers may take to mitigate the biases in the data. From there, most systems undergo an

AI's road to reality

A middle road for AI adoption is taking shape, routing around the debate between those who fear humanity could lose control of AI and those who favor a full-speed-ahead plan to seize the technology's benefits.

AI could choke on its own exhaust as it fills the web

The internet is beginning to fill up with more and more content generated by artificial intelligence rather than human beings, posing weird new dangers both to human society and to the AI programs themselves. Experts estimate that AI-generated content 

"Nutrition labels" aim to boost trust in AI

As adoption of generative AI grows, providers are hoping that greater transparency about how they do and don't use customers' data will increase those clients' trust in the technology. There's a mad 

How AI will turbocharge misinformation—and what we can do about it

Attention-grabbing warnings of artificial intelligence's existential threats have eclipsed what many experts and researchers say is a much more imminent risk: A near-certain rise in misinformation. The struggle to separate fact from fiction online didn't start with the rise of generative AI — but the red-hot new technology promises to make misinformation more abundant and more compelling. By some estimates, AI-generated content