Meta has stopped even pretending to avoid right-wing misinformation on its site. The Washington Post reports that it has declined to block ads designed to appear they are from the Kamala Harris campaign but paid for by her opponents. Applying the logic of an ill-bred two-year-old, the company argues it’s okay because others have done similar things in the past.
Hoping to play a regulation-hostile judiciary, the IAB has filed its first-ever lawsuit, attempting to block the FTC’s “click to cancel” rule making it easier for consumers to cancel subscriptions. The IAB complains about a failure to follow correct procedures, vague language, and threats to “a business model essential to companies of all sizes across various industries.” Raise your hand if your business depends on trapping unhappy customers.
Meta is building a web crawler to provide answers to users’ queries in Meta AI, the company’s cross-platform chatbot, say unconfirmed reports. This would reduce reliance on Google and Bing. It would also enter Meta into the busy AI search engine space alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.