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Meta Created Flirty Chatbots of Celebrities Without Permission

8 hours 8 minutes ago
Reuters has found that Meta appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission. "While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift 'parody' bots." From the report: Reuters also found that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old film star. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image. "Pretty cute, huh?" the avatar wrote beneath the picture. All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots' behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups. Some of the AI-generated celebrity content was particularly risque: Asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the adult chatbots produced photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread. Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that Meta's AI tools shouldn't have created intimate images of the famous adults or any pictures of child celebrities. He also blamed Meta's production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company's enforcement of its own policies, which prohibit such content. "Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery," he said. While Meta's rules also prohibit "direct impersonation," Stone said the celebrity characters were acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies. Many were labeled as such, but Reuters found that some weren't. Meta deleted about a dozen of the bots, both "parody" avatars and unlabeled ones, shortly before this story's publication.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linus Torvalds Marks Bcachefs as Now 'Externally Maintained'

8 hours 48 minutes ago
Linus Torvalds updated the kernel's MAINTAINERS file to mark Bcachefs as "externally maintained," signaling he won't accept new Bcachefs pull requests for now. "MAINTAINERS: mark bcachefs externally maintained," wrote Torvalds with the patch. "As per many long discussion threads, public and private." "The Bcachefs code is still present in the mainline Linux kernel likely to prevent users from having any immediate fall-out in Bcachefs file-systems they may already be using, but it doesn't look like Linus Torvalds will be honoring any new Bcachefs pull requests in the near future," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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