Tech Digest daily roundup: 6 months in jail for deepfake and revenge porn
People caught sharing or creating explicit images without consent could face time in jail in England and Wales. Amendments to the Online Safety Bill will introduce a six-month prison term for sharing deepfake and revenge porn. This would rise to two years if intent to cause distress, alarm or humiliation, or to obtain sexual gratification can be proved. Those who share an image for sexual gratification could also be placed on the sex offenders’ register.”Revenge porn” is sharing an intimate image without consent. “Deepfake porn” involves creating a fake explicit image or video of a person. BBC
Microsoft is in the process of adding a new feature to its Bing chatbot that will considerably increase the utility value of the AI, namely image recognition. Bing Vision is being tested with a small number of chatbot users at present, as Neowin reports, and it lets those folks upload an image for a query. In other words, instead of typing text, you can sling the AI a picture, and it’ll identify it and provide information on the image. Neowin flags up some of the people on Twitter who’ve got to play with Bing Vision, and their results include the chatbot identifying an Egyptian temple from a photo. Tech Radar
Pixel smartphones are good, but they aren’t the best Android smartphones on the market. For the most part, Pixels are held back by their hardware, but elevated by their software, with Google delivering innovative and unique software features that can only be found on its devices. While updates and Feature Drops are frequent, bringing interesting enhancements, sometimes these updates can also cause unintended problems. That seems to be the case with June update, where many users are experiencing faster-than-normal battery drain on their Pixel smartphones. XDA Developers
TikTok has launched the ability for parents and guardians to filter out videos they don’t want their children to see. The feature is an addition to the app’s family pairing functionality, which allows adults to link their account to their teenager’s for control of settings like screen time limits. TikTok‘s users could already dictate content filters for themselves, allowing them to avoid videos associated with specific words or hashtags. Julie de Bailliencourt, global head of product policy, told Sky News that giving parents the ability to set them up was more with user safety in mind. Sky News
Volkswagen has introduced measures to temporarily scale back production of electric models at one of its German plants. According to the German car maker’s work council, a shift at Volkswagen’s Emden plant in Lower Saxony has been cancelled for the next two weeks in a lead-up to an extended four-week summer holiday period for workers on electric vehicle lines in July and August. Details of the shortening of shifts were provided by Manfred Wulff, head of the works council for the Emden plant. “We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,” he said. Autocar
For a prolific art collector, Nicolai Tangen is remarkably relaxed about the prospect of masterpieces created by robots. The threat of AI-made paintings, impossible to distinguish from human brushstrokes, has sparked soul-searching and paranoia in the art world, but not with Tangen. “Hey, if it creates better art that’s fantastic,” says the Norwegian philanthropist, art historian and boss of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund. The Guardian
