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Tag: algorithms

  • Teaching computers a new way to count could make numbers more accurate

    Teaching computers a new way to count could make numbers more accurate

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    There are many ways for computers to store numbers

    Andrew Ostrovsky/Panther Media GmbH/Alamy

    Changing the way numbers are stored in computers could improve the accuracy of calculations without needing to increase energy consumption or computing power, which could prove useful for software that needs to quickly switch between very large and small numbers.

    Numbers can be surprisingly difficult for computers to work with. The simplest are integers – a whole number with no decimal point or fraction. As integers grow larger, they require more storage space, which can lead to problems when we attempt to reduce those requirements – the infamous millennium…

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  • Hacking Generative AI for Fun and Profit

    Hacking Generative AI for Fun and Profit

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    You hardly need ChatGPT to generate a list of reasons why generative artificial intelligence is often less than awesome. The way algorithms are fed creative work often without permission, harbor nasty biases, and require huge amounts of energy and water for training are all serious issues.

    Putting all that aside for a moment, though, it is remarkable how powerful generative AI can be for prototyping potentially useful new tools.

    I got to witness this firsthand by visiting Sundai Club, a generative AI hackathon that takes place one Sunday each month near the MIT campus. A few months ago, the group kindly agreed to let me sit in and chose to spend that session exploring tools that might be useful to journalists. The club is backed by a Cambridge nonprofit called Æthos that promotes socially responsible use of AI.

    The Sundai Club crew includes students from MIT and Harvard, a few professional developers and product managers, and even one person who works for the military. Each event starts with a brainstorm of possible projects that the group then whittles down to a final option that they actually try to build.

    Notable pitches from the journalism hackathon included using multimodal language models to track political posts on TikTok, to auto-generate freedom of information requests and appeals, or to summarize video clips of local court hearings to help with local news coverage.

    In the end, the group decided to build a tool that would help reporters covering AI identify potentially interesting papers posted to the Arxiv, a popular server for research paper preprints. It’s likely my presence swayed them here, given that I mentioned at the meeting that scouring the Arxiv for interesting research was a high priority for me.

    After coming up with a goal, coders on the team were able to create a word embedding—a mathematical representation of words and their meanings—of Arxiv AI papers using the OpenAI API. This made it possible to analyze the data to find papers relevant to a particular term, and to explore relationships between different areas of research.

    Using another word embedding of Reddit threads as well as a Google News search, the coders created a visualization that shows research papers along with Reddit discussions and relevant news reports.

    The resulting prototype, called AI News Hound, is rough-and-ready, but it shows how large language models can help mine information in interesting new ways. Here’s a screenshot of the tool being used to search for the term “AI agents.” The two green squares closest to the news article and Reddit clusters represent research papers that could potentially be included in an article on efforts to build AI agents.

    Image may contain Chart and Scatter Plot

    Compliments of Sundai Club.

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  • China’s Plan to Make AI Watermarks Happen

    China’s Plan to Make AI Watermarks Happen

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    Chinese regulators likely learned from the EU AI Act, says Jeffrey Ding, an assistant professor of Political Science at George Washington University. “Chinese policymakers and scholars have said that they’ve drawn on the EU’s Acts as inspiration for things in the past.”

    But at the same time, some of the measures taken by the Chinese regulators aren’t really replicable in other countries. For example, the Chinese government is asking social platforms to screen the user-uploaded content for AI. “That seems something that is very new and might be unique to the China context,” Ding says. “This would never exist in the US context, because the US is famous for saying that the platform is not responsible for content.”

    But What About Freedom of Expression Online?

    The draft regulation on AI content labeling is seeking public feedback until October 14, and it may take another several months for it to be modified and passed. But there’s little reason for Chinese companies to delay preparing for when it goes into effect.

    Sima Huapeng, founder and CEO of the Chinese AIGC company Silicon Intelligence, which uses deepfake technologies to generate AI agents, influencers, and replicate living and dead people, says his product now allows users to voluntarily choose whether to mark the generated product as AI. But if the law passes, he might have to change it to mandatory.

    “If a feature is optional, then most likely companies won’t add it to their products. But if it becomes compulsory by law, then everyone has to implement it,” Sima says. It’s not technically difficult to add watermarks or metadata labels, but it will increase the operating costs for compliant companies.

    Policies like this can steer AI away from being used for scamming or privacy invasion, he says, but it could also trigger the growth of an AI service black market where companies try to dodge legal compliance and save on costs.

    There’s also a fine line between holding AI content producers accountable and policing individual speech through more sophisticated tracing.

    “The big underlying human rights challenge is to be sure that these approaches don’t further compromise privacy or free expression,” says Gregory. While the implicit labels and watermarks can be used to identify sources of misinformation and inappropriate content, the same tools can enable the platforms and government to have stronger control over what users post on the internet. In fact, concerns about how AI tools can go rogue has been one of the main drivers of China’s proactive AI legislation efforts.

    At the same time, the Chinese AI industry is pushing back on the government to have more space to experiment and grow since they are already behind their Western peers. An earlier Chinese generative-AI law was watered down considerably between the first public draft and the final bill, removing requirements on identity verification and reducing penalties imposed on companies.

    “What we’ve seen is the Chinese government really trying to walk this fine tightrope between ‘making sure we maintain content control’ but also ‘letting these AI labs in a strategic space have the freedom to innovate,’” says Ding. “This is another attempt to do that.”

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  • Content Creators in the Adult Industry Want a Say in AI Rules

    Content Creators in the Adult Industry Want a Say in AI Rules

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    A group of sex industry professionals and advocates issued an open letter to EU regulators on Thursday, claiming that their views are being overlooked in vital discussions on policing AI technology despite also being implicated in AI’s momentous rise.

    In response to European internet regulations, a collective of adult industry members—including sex workers, erotic filmmakers, sex tech enterprises, and sex educators—urged the European Commission to include them in future negotiations shaping AI regulations, according to the letter, seen by WIRED.

    The group includes erotic filmmaker Erika Lust’s company as well as the European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance campaign group, and is signed the Open Mind AI initiative. The group aims to alert the commission of what it says is a “critical gap” in discussions on AI regulation. Those coordinating the campaign say that current discussion strategy risks excluding first-hand perspectives on adult content and overregulating an already-marginalized community.

    “AI is evolving every day [and] we see new developments at every corner,” said Ana Ornelas, a Berlin-based erotic author and educator who goes by the pseudonym Pimenta Cítrica, and who is one of the leaders of the initiative. “It is natural that people will turn to this new technology to satisfy their fantasies.”

    But deepfakes are now a major AI threat. Ninety six percent of them feature nonconsensual “porn,” mostly of women and girls. It is “extremely harmful” to those targeted, as well as to porn performers, says Ornelas. “It’s a threat both to their human integrity and their livelihood,” she adds. “But the way the landscape is posed, adult content creators, sex workers, and educators are getting the shorter end of the stick on both sides of the spectrum.” She says that she fears banishing all adult content will sweep legitimately created content away with nonconsensual material and push people to AI models with no filters at all.

    On August 1, the European Commission introduced what it called the world’s first comprehensive legislation on AI. The aim, it said, is to cultivate responsible use of AI across the bloc. It followed earlier EU legislation policing illegal and harmful activities on digital platforms. But the initiative’s organizers say regulators don’t understand the adult industry, risking censorship, draconian measures, and misunderstandings.

    “We can offer the right insight to policymakers so they can regulate in a way that safeguards fundamental rights, freedom, and fosters a more sex-positive online environment,” says Ornelas. The European Commission did not immediately respond to a WIRED request for comment.

    Sex workers and porn performers have already reported censorship and discrimination linked to global legislation clamping down on sex trafficking and banks limiting their services. Adult industry members, including sex educators, have also had to grapple with suspensions and removals from tech platforms.

    “There’s a lack of awareness of how policies impact our livelihoods,” says Paulita Pappel, an adult filmmaker and an organizer of the initiative. “We are facing discrimination, and if regulators are trying to protect the rights of people, it would be nice if they could protect the digital rights of everyone.”

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  • An AI Bot Named James Has My Old Local News Job

    An AI Bot Named James Has My Old Local News Job

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    It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did.

    So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new journalists—even if they seemed a little off. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who appears to be unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” presented their first news broadcast, over pulsing music that reminds me of the Challengers score. There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James’ hands can’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth doesn’t always line up with the words she’s saying.

    When James asks Rose about the implications of a strike on local hotels, Rose just lists hotels where the strike is taking place. A story on apartment fires “serves as a reminder of the importance of fire safety measures,” James says, without naming any of them.

    James and Rose are, you may have noticed, not human reporters. They are AI avatars crafted by an Israeli company named Caledo, which hopes to bring this tech to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year.

    “Just watching someone read an article is boring,” says Dina Shatner, who cofounded Caledo with her husband Moti in 2023. “But watching people talking about a subject—this is engaging.”

    The Caledo platform can analyze several prewritten news articles and turn them into a “live broadcast” featuring conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have begun using AI avatars to read out prewritten articles, this claims to be the first platform that lets the hosts riff with one another. The idea is that the tech can give small local newsrooms the opportunity to create live broadcasts that they otherwise couldn’t. This can open up embedded advertising opportunities and draw in new customers, especially among younger people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.

    Instagram comments under the broadcasts, which have each garnered between 1,000 and 3,000 views, have been pretty scathing. “This ain’t that,” says one. “Keep journalism local.” Another just reads: “Nightmares.”

    When Caledo started seeking out North American partners earlier this year, Shatner says, The Garden Island was quick to apply, becoming the first outlet in the country to adopt the AI broadcast tech.

    I’m surprised to hear this, because when I worked as a reporter there last year, the paper wasn’t exactly cutting edge—we had a rather clunky website—and appeared to me to not be in a financial position to be making this sort of investment. As the newspaper industry struggled with advertising revenue decline, the oldest and currently the only daily print newspaper on Kauai, The Garden Island, had shrunk to only a couple reporters listed on its website, tasked with covering every story on an island of 73,000. In recent decades, the paper has been passed around between several large media conglomerates—including earlier this year, when its parent company Oahu Publications’ parent company, Black Press Media, was purchased by Carpenter Media Group, which now controls more than 100 local outlets throughout North America.

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  • What You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your Privacy

    What You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your Privacy

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    But X also makes it clear the onus is on the user to judge the AI’s accuracy. “This is an early version of Grok,” xAI says on its help page. Therefore chatbot may “confidently provide factually incorrect information, missummarize, or miss some context,” xAI warns.

    “We encourage you to independently verify any information you receive,” xAI adds. “Please do not share personal data or any sensitive and confidential information in your conversations with Grok.”

    Grok Data Collection

    Vast amounts of data collection are another area of concern—especially since you are automatically opted in to sharing your X data with Grok, whether you use the AI assistant or not.

    The xAI’s Grok Help Center page describes how xAI “may utilize your X posts as well as your user interactions, inputs and results with Grok for training and fine-tuning purposes.”

    Grok’s training strategy carries “significant privacy implications,” says Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN. Beyond the AI tool’s “ability to access and analyze potentially private or sensitive information,” Briedis adds, there are additional concerns “given the AI’s capability to generate images and content with minimal moderation.”

    While Grok-1 was trained on “publicly available data up to Q3 2023” but was not “pre-trained on X data (including public X posts),” according to the company, Grok-2 has been explicitly trained on all “posts, interactions, inputs, and results” of X users, with everyone being automatically opted in, says Angus Allan, senior product manager at CreateFuture, a digital consultancy specializing in AI deployment.

    The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is explicit about obtaining consent to use personal data. In this case, xAI may have “ignored this for Grok,” says Allan.

    This led to regulators in the EU pressuring X to suspend training on EU users within days of the launch of Grok-2 last month.

    Failure to abide by user privacy laws could lead to regulatory scrutiny in other countries. While the US doesn’t have a similar regime, the Federal Trade Commission has previously fined Twitter for not respecting users’ privacy preferences, Allan points out.

    Opting Out

    One way to prevent your posts from being used for training Grok is by making your account private. You can also use X privacy settings to opt out of future model training.

    To do so select Privacy & Safety > Data sharing and Personalization > Grok. In Data Sharing, uncheck the option that reads, “Allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning.”

    Even if you no longer use X, it’s still worth logging in and opting out. X can use all of your past posts—including images—for training future models unless you explicitly tell it not to, Allan warns.

    It’s possible to delete all of your conversation history at once, xAI says. Deleted conversations are removed from its systems within 30 days, unless the firm has to keep them for security or legal reasons.

    No one knows how Grok will evolve, but judging by its actions so far, Musk’s AI assistant is worth monitoring. To keep your data safe, be mindful of the content you share on X and stay informed about any updates in its privacy policies or terms of service, Briedis says. “Engaging with these settings allows you to better control how your information is handled and potentially used by technologies like Grok.”

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  • The US Government Wants You—Yes, You—to Hunt Down Generative AI Flaws

    The US Government Wants You—Yes, You—to Hunt Down Generative AI Flaws

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    At the 2023 Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, prominent AI tech companies partnered with algorithmic integrity and transparency groups to sic thousands of attendees on generative AI platforms and find weaknesses in these critical systems. This “red-teaming” exercise, which also had support from the US government, took a step in opening these increasingly influential yet opaque systems to scrutiny. Now, the ethical AI and algorithmic assessment nonprofit Humane Intelligence is taking this model one step further. On Wednesday, the group announced a call for participation with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, inviting any US resident to participate in the qualifying round of a nationwide red-teaming effort to evaluate AI office productivity software.

    The qualifier will take place online and is open to both developers and anyone in the general public as part of NIST’s AI challenges, known as Assessing Risks and Impacts of AI, or ARIA. Participants who pass through the qualifying round will take part in an in-person red-teaming event at the end of October at the Conference on Applied Machine Learning in Information Security (CAMLIS) in Virginia. The goal is to expand capabilities for conducting rigorous testing of the security, resilience, and ethics of generative AI technologies.

    “The average person utilizing one of these models doesn’t really have the ability to determine whether or not the model is fit for purpose,” says Theo Skeadas, CEO of the AI governance and online safety group Tech Policy Consulting, which works with Humane Intelligence. “So we want to democratize the ability to conduct evaluations and make sure everyone using these models can assess for themselves whether or not the model is meeting their needs.”

    The final event at CAMLIS will split the participants into a red team trying to attack the AI systems and a blue team working on defense. Participants will use NIST’s AI risk management framework, known as AI 600-1, as a rubric for measuring whether the red team is able to produce outcomes that violate the systems’ expected behavior.

    “NIST’s ARIA is drawing on structured user feedback to understand real-world applications of AI models,” says Humane Intelligence founder Rumman Chowdhury, who is also a contractor in NIST’s Office of Emerging Technologies and a member of the US Department of Homeland Security AI safety and security board. “The ARIA team is mostly experts on sociotechnical test and evaluation, and [is] using that background as a way of evolving the field toward rigorous scientific evaluation of generative AI.”

    Chowdhury and Skeadas say the NIST partnership is just one of a series of AI red team collaborations that Humane Intelligence will announce in the coming weeks with US government agencies, international governments, and NGOs. The effort aims to make it much more common for the companies and organizations that develop what are now black-box algorithms to offer transparency and accountability through mechanisms like “bias bounty challenges,” where individuals can be rewarded for finding problems and inequities in AI models.

    “The community should be broader than programmers,” Skeadas says. “Policymakers, journalists, civil society, and nontechnical people should all be involved in the process of testing and evaluating of these systems. And we need to make sure that less represented groups like individuals who speak minority languages or are from nonmajority cultures and perspectives are able to participate in this process.”

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  • OpenAI Warns Users Could Become Emotionally Hooked on Its Voice Mode

    OpenAI Warns Users Could Become Emotionally Hooked on Its Voice Mode

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    In late July, OpenAI began rolling out an eerily humanlike voice interface for ChatGPT. In a safety analysis released today, the company acknowledges that this anthropomorphic voice may lure some users into becoming emotionally attached to their chatbot.

    The warnings are included in a “system card” for GPT-4o, a technical document that lays out what the company believes are the risks associated with the model, plus details surrounding safety testing and the mitigation efforts the company’s taking to reduce potential risk.

    OpenAI has faced scrutiny in recent months after a number of employees working on AI’s long-term risks quit the company. Some subsequently accused OpenAI of taking unnecessary chances and muzzling dissenters in its race to commercialize AI. Revealing more details of OpenAI’s safety regime may help mitigate the criticism and reassure the public that the company takes the issue seriously.

    The risks explored in the new system card are wide-ranging, and include the potential for GPT-4o to amplify societal biases, spread disinformation, and aid in the development of chemical or biological weapons. It also discloses details of testing designed to ensure that AI models won’t try to break free of their controls, deceive people, or scheme catastrophic plans.

    Some outside experts commend OpenAI for its transparency but say it could go further.

    Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, an applied policy researcher at Hugging Face, a company that hosts AI tools, notes that OpenAI’s system card for GPT-4o does not include extensive details on the model’s training data or who owns that data. “The question of consent in creating such a large dataset spanning multiple modalities, including text, image, and speech, needs to be addressed,” Kaffee says.

    Others note that risks could change as tools are used in the wild. “Their internal review should only be the first piece of ensuring AI safety,” says Neil Thompson, a professor at MIT who studies AI risk assessments. “Many risks only manifest when AI is used in the real world. It is important that these other risks are cataloged and evaluated as new models emerge.”

    The new system card highlights how rapidly AI risks are evolving with the development of powerful new features such as OpenAI’s voice interface. In May, when the company unveiled its voice mode, which can respond swiftly and handle interruptions in a natural back and forth, many users noticed it appeared overly flirtatious in demos. The company later faced criticism from the actress Scarlett Johansson, who accused it of copying her style of speech.

    A section of the system card titled “Anthropomorphization and Emotional Reliance” explores problems that arise when users perceive AI in human terms, something apparently exacerbated by the humanlike voice mode. During the red teaming, or stress testing, of GPT-4o, for instance, OpenAI researchers noticed instances of speech from users that conveyed a sense of emotional connection with the model. For example, people used language such as “This is our last day together.”

    Anthropomorphism might cause users to place more trust in the output of a model when it “hallucinates” incorrect information, OpenAI says. Over time, it might even affect users’ relationships with other people. “Users might form social relationships with the AI, reducing their need for human interaction—potentially benefiting lonely individuals but possibly affecting healthy relationships,” the document says.

    Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a member of the team working on AI safety at OpenAI, says that voice mode could evolve into a uniquely powerful interface. He also notes that the kind of emotional effects seen with GPT-4o can be positive—say, by helping those who are lonely or who need to practice social interactions. He adds that the company will study anthropomorphism and the emotional connections closely, including by monitoring how beta testers interact with ChatGPT. “We don’t have results to share at the moment, but it’s on our list of concerns,” he says.

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  • Generative AI Has a “Shoplifting” Problem. This Startup CEO Has a Plan to Fix It

    Generative AI Has a “Shoplifting” Problem. This Startup CEO Has a Plan to Fix It

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    Bill Gross made his name in the tech world in the 1990s, when he came up with a novel way for search engines to make money on advertising. Under his pricing scheme, advertisers would pay when people clicked on their ads. Now, the “pay-per-click” guy has founded a startup called ProRata, which has an audacious, possibly pie-in-the-sky business model: “AI pay-per-use.”

    Gross, who is CEO of the Pasadena, California, company, doesn’t mince words about the generative AI industry. “It’s stealing,” he says. “They’re shoplifting and laundering the world’s knowledge to their benefit.”

    AI companies often argue that they need vast troves of data to create cutting-edge generative tools and that scraping data from the internet, whether it’s text from websites, video or captions from YouTube, or books pilfered from pirate libraries, is legally allowed. Gross doesn’t buy that argument. “I think it’s bullshit,” he says.

    So do plenty of media executives, artists, writers, musicians, and other rights-holders who are pushing back—it’s hard to keep up with the constant flurry of copyright lawsuits filed against AI companies, alleging that the way they operate amounts to theft.

    But Gross thinks ProRata offers a solution that beats legal battles. “To make it fair—that’s what I’m trying to do,” he says. “I don’t think this should be solved by lawsuits.”

    His company aims to arrange revenue-sharing deals so publishers and individuals get paid when AI companies use their work. Gross explains it like this: “We can take the output of generative AI, whether it’s text or an image or music or a movie, and break it down into the components, to figure out where they came from, and then give a percentage attribution to each copyright holder, and then pay them accordingly.” ProRata has filed patent applications for the algorithms it created to assign attribution and make the appropriate payments.

    This week, the company, which has raised $25 million, launched with a number of big-name partners, including Universal Music Group, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, and media company Axel Springer. In addition, it has made deals with authors with large followings, including Tony Robbins, Neal Postman, and Scott Galloway. (It has also partnered with former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.)

    Even journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who believes scraping the web for AI training is fair use, has signed on. He tells WIRED that it’s smart for people in the news industry to band together to get AI companies access to “credible and current information” to include in their output. “I hope that ProRata might open discussion for what could turn into APIs [application programming interfaces] for various content,” he says.

    Following the company’s initial announcement, Gross says he had a deluge of messages from other companies asking to sign up, including a text from Time CEO Jessica Sibley. ProRata secured a deal with Time, the publisher confirmed to WIRED. He plans to pursue agreements with high-profile YouTubers and other individual online stars.

    The key word here is “plans.” The company is still in its very early days, and Gross is talking a big game. As a proof of concept, ProRata is launching its own subscription chatbot-style search engine in October. Unlike other AI search products, ProRata’s search tool will exclusively use licensed data. There’s nothing scraped using a web crawler. “Nothing from Reddit,” he says.

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  • Google Cracks Down on Explicit Deepfakes

    Google Cracks Down on Explicit Deepfakes

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    A few weeks ago, a Google search for “deepfake nudes jennifer aniston” brought up at least seven high-up results that purported to have explicit, AI-generated images of the actress. Now they have vanished.

    Google product manager Emma Higham says that new adjustments to how the company ranks results, which have been rolled out this year, have already cut exposure to fake explicit images by over 70 percent on searches seeking that content about a specific person. Where problematic results once may have appeared, Google’s algorithms are aiming to promote news articles and other non-explicit content. The Aniston search now returns articles such as “How Taylor Swift’s Deepfake AI Porn Represents a Threat” and other links like a Ohio attorney general warning about “deepfake celebrity-endorsement scams” that target consumers.

    “With these changes, people can read about the impact deepfakes are having on society, rather than see pages with actual non-consensual fake Images,” Higham wrote in a company blog post on Wednesday.

    The ranking change follows a WIRED investigation this month that revealed that in recent years Google management rejected numerous ideas proposed by staff and outside experts to combat the growing problem of intimate portrayals of people spreading online without their permission.

    While Google made it easier to request removal of unwanted explicit content, victims and their advocates have urged more proactive steps. But the company has tried to avoid becoming too much of a regulator of the internet or harm access to legitimate porn. At the time, a Google spokesperson said in response that multiple teams were working diligently to bolster safeguards against what it calls nonconsensual explicit imagery (NCEI).

    The widening availability of AI image generators, including some with few restrictions on their use, has led to an uptick in NCEI, according to victims’ advocates. The tools have made it easy for just about anyone to create spoofed explicit images of any individual, whether that’s a middle school classmate or a mega-celebrity.

    In March, a WIRED analysis found Google had received over 13,000 demands to remove links to a dozen of the most popular websites hosting explicit deepfakes. Google removed results in around 82 percent of the cases.

    As part of Google’s new crackdown, Higham says that the company will begin applying three of the measures to reduce discoverability of real but unwanted explicit images to those that are synthetic and unwanted. After Google honors a takedown request for a sexualized deepfake, it will then try to keep duplicates out of results. It will also filter explicit images from results in queries similar to those cited in the takedown request. And finally, websites subject to “a high volume” of successful takedown requests will face demotion in search results.

    “These efforts are designed to give people added peace of mind, especially if they’re concerned about similar content about them popping up in the future,” Higham wrote.

    Google has acknowledged that the measures don’t work perfectly, and former employees and victims’ advocates have said they could go much further. The search engine prominently warns people in the US looking for naked images of children that such content is unlawful. The warning’s effectiveness is unclear, but it’s a potential deterrent supported by advocates. Yet, despite laws against sharing NCEI, similar warnings don’t appear for searches seeking sexual deepfakes of adults. The Google spokesperson has confirmed that this will not change.

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