Media

Leading AI laboratories have established election war rooms to monitor and respond to deepfakes during the midterm elections. The piece examines whether this traditional social media strategy is effective at countering AI-generated election misinformation.

AI inference startup Fal raised $1.3 billion in a Series F round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, doubling its valuation to $16 billion since April. The company, which hosts video, image, and audio models, surpassed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year amid surging demand for running open-source models.

Netflix is rolling out a new "AI Discover" tab for U.S. TV users to test experimental content discovery features. The initial feature uses a real-time learning intelligence layer to recommend shows and movies based on user-selected moods, available time, and preferences.

Google has expanded its experimental AI app Dreambeans to India, adding support for 13 local languages alongside English. The app connects to users' Google services, such as Gmail, Photos, and Search, to proactively generate personalized, illustrated, and animated stories without needing user prompts.

The New York Times and several other newspapers have filed federal lawsuits against web browser company Brave, alleging it scraped their copyrighted content using an unidentified crawler. The publishers claim Brave acted as a distributor of stolen data by selling the scraped articles to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

A Wired investigation revealed a network of over 400 seemingly mundane mobile apps and domains, linked to Hong Kong-registered KeLing Technology Limited, that covertly load web interfaces for generating sexually explicit AI deepfakes. These apps bypassed Apple and Google app store reviews using bait-and-switch tactics and were heavily promoted through thousands of explicit ads on Meta's platforms.

AI-generated gaming wikis filled with fabricated and irrelevant information are flooding search engine results, particularly targeting smaller indie games to capture ad traffic or spread malware. Simultaneously, legitimate volunteer-run wikis are struggling with soaring server costs caused by aggressive scraping from AI crawlers like Meta's.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic have agreed to adopt a unified standard allowing publishers to opt out of AI web scraping across multiple companies simultaneously. Proposed through the Internet Engineering Task Force by an Anthropic technical lead, the shared policy token will operate within a website's existing robots.txt file.