Google is generally happy to see people using generative AI tools to create content, and it’s doubly happy when they publish it on its platforms. But there are limits to everything. Two YouTube channels that attracted millions of subscribers with AI-generated movie trailers have been shuttered. Screen Culture and KH Studio flooded the site with fake but often believable trailers. The channels, which had a combined audience of more than…

Peacock subscribers will see ads immediately upon opening the streaming app or website next year. It’s a bold new strategy for attracting advertisers—something that’s been increasingly important to subscription-based streaming services—but it also risks alienating viewers As reported by Variety, the new type of ads will display on the profile selection page that shows when a subscriber launches Peacock. Starting next year, instead of the profile page just showing your…

For most of photography’s roughly 200-year history, altering a photo convincingly required either a darkroom, some Photoshop expertise, or, at minimum, a steady hand with scissors and glue. On Tuesday, OpenAI released a tool that reduces the process to typing a sentence. It’s not the first company to do so. While OpenAI had a conversational image-editing model in the works since GPT-4o in 2024, Google beat OpenAI to market in…

Browser extensions with more than 8 million installs are harvesting complete and extended conversations from users’ AI conversations and selling them for marketing purposes, according to data collected from the Google and Microsoft pages hosting them. Security firm Koi discovered the eight extensions, which as of late Tuesday night remained available in both Google’s and Microsoft’s extension stores. Seven of them carry “Featured” badges, which are endorsements meant to signal…

Apple doesn’t like to talk about its upcoming products before it’s ready, but sometimes the company’s software does the talking for it. So far this week we’ve had a couple of software-related leaks that have outed products Apple is currently testing—one a pre-release build of iOS 26, and the other some leaked files from a kernel debug kit (both via MacRumors). Most of the new devices referenced in these leaks…

Like most tools, generative AI models can be misused. And when the misuse gets bad enough that a major dictionary notices, you know it’s become a cultural phenomenon. On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. The dictionary…

Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in 2000, it made RC4 a sole means of securing the Windows component, which administrators use to configure and provision fellow administrator…

Google began offering “dark web reports” a while back, but the company has just announced the feature will be going away very soon. In an email to users of the service, Google says it will stop telling you about dark web data leaks in February. This probably won’t negatively impact your security or privacy because, as Google points out in its latest email, there’s really nothing you can do about…

With the popularity of AI coding tools rising among some software developers, their adoption has begun to touch every aspect of the process, including the improvement of AI coding tools themselves. In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. “I think the vast majority of Codex…

Smart TVs can feel like a dumb choice if you’re looking for privacy, reliability, and simplicity. Today’s TVs and streaming sticks are usually loaded up with advertisements and user tracking, making offline TVs seem very attractive. But ever since smart TV operating systems began making money, “dumb” TVs have been hard to find. In response, we created this non-smart TV guide that includes much more than dumb TVs. Since non-smart…