The Archive

OpenAI hires ex-Meta executive Charles Porch as VP Global Creative Partnerships to improve AI's cultural perception via celebrity partnerships.

Meta launches Style Sketch, AI fashion app integrating with Instagram for outfit generation and editing.

Meta's new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites "associated" with the businesses that use its platforms - including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, say Meta can use this outside content to "develop, improve, research," and "train" its AI products. The new policy applies to business accounts that promote their content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. As pointed out by Nieman Lab, these terms seem to allow Meta to bypass a licensing agreement and train its AI models on c...

In hindsight, the post on Instagram should have raised more red flags. The image purported to show actress Mia Goth, just days after filing for divorce from actor and filmmaker Shia LaBeouf, posing in a T-shirt with a pointed message: MY EX IS MY BIGGEST FAN. To really drive home the point, the song "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" by Beyoncé was added to the post. It would have been out of character for the star of Pearl, who doesn't have much of a social media presence, if any. But the Instagram account that posted it, @miagoth_, had more than a million followers and was marked with a blu...

Facebook is the latest social media platform to give users greater control over the algorithm that determines what appears in their feeds. Meta announced the launch of its new AI-powered feature, “Your Algorithm,” on Tuesday, a feature it first launched on Instagram. The new tool allows Facebook users to influence the content they see in […]

Facebook's new "Your Algorithm" feature will let you directly add and manage topics you want to see in your feed and Facebook Reels. Meta says your recommendations "respond right away" after you make updates using the new feature by hitting "interested" or "not interested" for different topics. Your Algorithm previously launched on Instagram earlier this year, and Meta also launched a similar "Dear Algo" feature on Threads. Facebook users will be able to access Your Algorithm or select "interested" or "not interested" from the three dots menu on individual posts. The "interested" and "not int...

Mia Goth at The 32nd Annual Actor Awards. | Variety via Getty Images Earlier this month, news broke that actress Mia Goth had filed for divorce from actor and filmmaker Shia LaBeouf. An Instagram post from the account miagoth_ - marked with a blue verified checkmark - quickly spread. The post shows Goth in a T-shirt that reads "MY EX IS MY BIGGEST FAN" in bold black letters. The Beyoncé song "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" had been added to the Instagram post. Hundreds of thousands of people - including some in the entertainment industry - liked the image, and entertainment outlets like OK...

Instagram is the latest social media platform to add built-in AI-powered features that will give users feedback on their posts. The company announced Wednesday that its standalone Edits app will now include an AI "creative assistant" that pulls in data from a user's Instagram account and offers suggestions on what to change. Using the new assistant, creators can ask open-ended questions about what's trending on Instagram, why one video worked and another didn't, or what piece of content resonated most with their audience. The tool pulls in data and metrics such as likes, views, retention on v...

The company behind Facebook and Instagram wants to keep consumers connected to the digital world via its ever-growing line of smart glasses.

ScrollEd turns textbooks into a scrollable, Instagram-like feed with video, audio, and quizzes. The Palo Alto startup, founded by student co-founders (and spouses) Utsav Gupta and Rebecca Neff, pitches at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Meta One bundles expanded access to the company’s AI tools with premium features across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Shortly after launching its new do-everything AI assistant Muse, Meta's launching subscription bundles that pair its standalone app subscriptions with extra AI usage. Some of the new Meta One bundles were in testing earlier this year, but are now available globally starting today, with several tiers for individual users, creators, and businesses. Meta says the "core experience" on its apps and Meta AI will still be free, and users can still get its subscriptions for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp without a bundle. It also says it plans to expand the bundles to include "Edits, AI glasses, a...

Meta says it's making changes to the prompts suggested by its AI chatbot after a viral video showed it digging for personal information about a woman's young daughters, as reported earlier by Futurism. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Dina El-Kassaby says the company "missed the mark," adding that "the feature never should have prompted the individual with questions like that." Last week, Instagram user Kalie Robins posted a video explaining how Meta AI presented her with an invasive suggestion after cross-posting a clip to Facebook. The AI prompt, "Who is the child passenger?" ...

Meta dragged its feet removing ads that nudify young girls' Instagram pics.

Instagram's visible AI labels are supposed to help people quickly spot synthetically generated content at a glance. Over the last few weeks, however, users have been reporting that the system has gone haywire. They say Meta has been automatically applying an "AI Content" label to images that they didn't create or edit using generative AI tools. Meanwhile, actual AI imagery is slipping through the cracks, leaving the impression that nothing can be trusted on Instagram at all. The precise causes of this tagging seem to vary. Many people said the label appeared on images that were edited using t...

As frustration over AI influencers has been growing, Instagram is limiting the reach of undisclosed AI profiles.

Today, I’m talking with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and I’ll just warn you — this episode moves really fast. It’s an election year, after all, with a shocking amount of tech policy at stake, and Governor Hochul has taken strong positions on almost every major tech issue there is. For example, Meta just reached a settlement with dozens of states, including New York, which will restrict how teens use platforms like Instagram in very specific ways. Governor Hochul is a strong supporter of those restrictions and more, as you’ll hear. But those come with a cost — widespread age verification me...

“AI creator” accounts like Aitana Lopez will get a new “AI-generated profile” label. | Image: Aitana Lopez Instagram is finally taking steps to address the rise of fake AI-influencer accounts that have gotten harder to spot. It's also renaming the "AI creator" label to "AI-generated profile" to make it clear when a profile features an AI-generated person that's not a real human being. "We've heard that people don't like seeing a profile that seems human, only to find out later that the person featured is AI-generated," said Instagram in a blog post. "They want to know when a profile features ...

Robin Williams' children are taking over their father's Instagram account after his daughter spoke out against the use of his AI likeness, as reported earlier by The Wrap. In a post on Tuesday, Zak, Zelda, and Cody Williams write that they want the late actor's Instagram profile to be a "safe, trusted place where the stories, photos, videos, and memories shared reflect his legacy with authenticity, warmth, and care." A story posted to Zelda Williams' own Instagram account expands on the decision to bring back her father's profile, saying that it's meant to help combat "rampant AI abuse," acco...

Instagram's wordmark is iconic. Well, was iconic. Apparently Instagram thought it looked old, so the company rolled out a new one this week. It doesn't look like the old Instagram wordmark. It doesn't even look like it spells Instagram anymore. And we cannot figure out why Instagram decided to do this. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay start by discussing the new logo, the executive urge to redesign everything all the time, and whether new is always better. After that, they get into the other big Meta release of the week: Mark Zuckerberg's many-thousand-word missive on the fut...

Opinion: Some remarks about the new wordmark accidentally being perfectly awful.

Maybe don’t let the AI shred next time. | Image: D’Addario After weeks of controversy and speculation, music company D'Addario has admitted that AI, specifically Suno, was used as part of a recent promotional video. For nearly two weeks, the company has denied the allegations, even as evidence piled up against it. It offered various explanations, from low-quality exports, to combinations of plugins like Autotune introducing digital noise, and the use of AI-assisted mastering tools from LANDR and Logic. But now the company has edited its original Instagram post denying the use of generative AI...

That cover art is almost certainly AI too. | Image: Fenix Flexin It took long enough, but now LA rapper Fenix Flexin appears to have admitted using AI for the 80s synth pop-themed song "Rubberz." His comments follow the producer Medasin's videos claiming that an AI tool called Treblo (formerly Sonauto) was used to make the song, and the company releasing an AI detector that identifies it as Treblo AI-created. In a reply to a comment pointing out that Tyga admitted to relying on AI for his own controversial '80s-influenced album $tarface, on one of his Instagram posts, Fenix said: never said I...

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing Stop me if you've heard this one before : An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. Meta says the breach occurred because of an inadvertent error during testing of the model, similar to previously disclosed incidents with OpenAI and Anthropic. “A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company Meta uses, inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation,” the ...

Meta says AI is making it dramatically easier to build and launch new consumer apps, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling investors the company has more new consumer products on the way following a recent wave of releases for Facebook Groups, Marketplace sellers, Instagram, and gaming.

1010Benja won’t apologize for using AI. | Image: 1010Benja / Instagram I would never go so far as to say there's no place for AI in music (I'm a fan of Holly Herndon, after all). But I generally find music made with generative AI to be offensively boring, especially the outputs of Suno. So I'm having a bit of a tough time processing the fact that I actually quite enjoy 1010Benja's "Semiramis' Dream." Benja has been unapologetic about his use of generative AI on his latest EP, Time Has Nothing To Do With What You Choose… The other three tracks can't quite hold a candle to what you find on 2024...

Instagram head Adam Mosseri believes companies will eventually need to manage AI token spending the same way they manage payroll or other operating expenses, predicting that engineers could soon face limits on how much they spend using AI tools.

Meta told Dylan Byers, of Puck News, that it had nixed the feature after backlash from its user base.

Following significant backlash, Meta is turning off the feature it announced this week that let users generate AI images based on content from public Instagram accounts just by tagging them. The feature, as originally set up, meant that content from any public Instagram account could be used in AI creations without the account owner's permission. "Earlier this week, we announced that one way for people to generate images in Meta AI is by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they want to reference," Meta says in an update to a blog post about its new Muse Image AI model. "Our intent was...

Though Instagram head Adam Mosseri doesn't want to filter out AI content on the platform, he argues that you "shouldn't have it in your feed" if you don't like it. "I don't think we should filter out AI content," Mosseri said during an interview on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast. "I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not." At the same time, Mosseri seems to be drawing a distinction between content-based sorting and banning AI from the platform entirely. In fact, he believes people who love AI content "should be able to have a feed that's just AI town." Instagram, like many ot...