The European Union Parliament and Council last week reached agreement on a comprehensive set of rules for AI development.  The rules ban several applications, such as scraping of facial images from public sources, and impose obligations on developers of high-risk systems.  Formal votes are still required in both Parliament and Council for the rules to become law.

Free Press is an activist organization dedicated to individual and press freedoms, so you won’t be surprised that they’re highly critical of how social media platforms are handling misinformation.   Still, this study provides a good overview of the many ways those platforms have failed to act responsibly in the past year.  They offer suggestions for how the platforms and government can make things better, although the chances for adoption are slim.

Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.