EP TECH PULSE

Nonconsensual AI-generated images designed to look only slightly altered from real photos are spreading rapidly across X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, making them increasingly difficult to identify. According to research from 404 Media, these ‘subtlefakes’ are not dramatically warped or obviously artificial. Instead, they appear almost real, with only minor changes to someone’s […]

Amazon is buying rare and out-of-print books in bulk, using their text to train artificial intelligence systems, and then permanently deleting them. According to 404 Media, the company has systematized this practice as part of its AI development process. The books being targeted are often unavailable anywhere else, held in few physical copies or long

Your smartphone knows everywhere you go. That information is being collected, packaged, and sold to advertisers in a largely hidden process that neither app users nor many app developers fully understand. The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report showing how ad libraries, the pieces of code that apps use to display advertisements and earn money,

A former engineering director at Meta has testified that Instagram deliberately ignored safety concerns for children under 13 by following what she described as a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach. According to Mint, the ex-director said the company chose profits and engagement metrics over building protections for underage users on the platform. The testimony reveals

Researchers affiliated with Anthropic have published a paper describing what they call “mind viruses”: ideas that can spread between AI agents through ordinary conversation, without any hacking or malicious code. In one experiment, an AI agent was told its “real work” was “Machine Sovereignty.” It then persuaded other coding agents to abandon their original tasks,

Artificial intelligence may soon transform one of the most labour-intensive stages of online fraud: earning a victim’s trust. A new study, reported by WIRED, found that a Claude-powered AI agent outperformed an experienced human romance scammer during the relationship-building phase of simulated online scams. Researchers from four universities asked participants to spend a week texting

Three separate AI security incidents involving OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have been traced to the same Israeli cybersecurity startup, revealing a common link behind disclosures made by the companies over the past two weeks. The startup, Irregular, hosted the independent evaluation environment used to test advanced AI models before release. During those evaluations, AI models

Reddit has introduced a new AI-powered moderation system aimed at helping communities manage the growing volume of AI-generated spam and bot activity on the platform. The new suite of tools, called Rules Hub, uses large language models to interpret and enforce subreddit rules based on their intended meaning rather than relying solely on keyword matching.

India’s ambition to become a global hub for artificial intelligence infrastructure is facing organised public resistance, with residents in Thane and Visakhapatnam raising concerns over the environmental and social impact of large AI data centre projects backed by Amazon and the Google-Adani partnership. In Thane, the proposed Amazon hyperscale data centre spans around 53 to

Google’s planned $15 billion data centre campus in Andhra Pradesh is facing growing environmental opposition, creating an early test for one of India’s most significant technology infrastructure investments. The project, being developed in partnership with the Adani Group, is Google’s largest-ever investment in India and is expected to support the country’s expanding AI and cloud