Minister indicates sympathy for artists in debate over AI and copyright

People rightly want to get get paid for their work, says Liz Kendall, in apparent change of tack to predecessor The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, has indicated she is sympathetic to artists’ demands not to have their copyrighted works scraped by AI companies without payment and said she wanted to “reset” the debate.In remarks that suggest a change in approach from her predecessor, Peter Kyle, who had hoped to require artists to actively opt out of having their work ingested by generative AI systems, she said “people rightly want to get paid for the work that they do” and “we have to find a way that both sectors can grow and thrive in future”.The government has been consulting on a new intellectual property framework for AI which, in the case of the most common large language models (LLMs), requires vast amounts of training data to work effectively.The issue has sparked impassioned protests from some of Britain’s most famous artists. This month Paul McCartney released a silent two-minute 45 second track of an empty studio on an album protesting against copyright grabs by AI firms as part of a campaign also backed by Kate Bush, Sam Fender, the Pet Shop Boys and Hans Zimmer

Americans are feeling the pain of the affordability crisis: ‘There’s not any wiggle room’

Frozen dinners were useful when no one was home to cook. A fancy cheese or apple roll felt like a family treat. But not any more. “We can’t afford to do those little luxuries any more because they’re just too expensive to feed five with,” says Cat Hill. “There’s not any wiggle room

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts sayKrista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the “no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”, which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.“I sat there considering how many times I may have made the same mistake and not caught myself,” said Pawloski

Bro boost: women say their LinkedIn traffic increases if they pretend to be men

Do your LinkedIn followers consider you a “thought leader”? Do hordes of commenters applaud your tips on how to “scale” your startup? Do recruiters slide into your DMs to “explore potential synergies”?If not, it could be because you’re not a man.Dozens of women joined a collective LinkedIn experiment this week after a series of viral posts suggested that, for some, changing their gender to “male” boosted their visibility on the network.Others rewrote their profiles to be, as they put it, “bro-coded” – inserting action-oriented online business buzzwords such as “drive”, “transform” and “accelerate”. Anecdotally, their visibility also increased.The uptick in engagement has led some to speculate that an in-built sexism in LinkedIn’s algorithm means that men who speak in online business jargon are more visible on its platform

NFL Week 12: Chiefs hit back to beat Colts in overtime, Lions tame Giants and Packers crush Vikings

What a finish. Double overtime madness. The final scores and records now the dust has settled.(6-5) Baltimore Ravens 23-10 New York Jets (2-9)(8-3) Chicago Bears 31-28 Pittsburgh Steelers (6-5)(3-8) Cincinnati Bengals 20-26 New England Patriots (10-2)(7-4) Detroit Lions 34-27 New York Giants (2-10)(7-3-1) Green Bay Packers 23-6 Minnesota Vikings (4-7)(6-5) Kansas City Chiefs 23-20 Indianapolis Colts (8-3)(1-10) Tennessee Titans 24-30 Seattle Seahawks (8-3)That was an incredible comeback from Kansas City. The defense just completely shut the Colts out in the second half

Contepomi accuses ‘bully’ Curry of reckless tackle and shoving Argentina coach

Tom Curry found himself at the centre of a storm after England’s win against Argentina, as Felipe Contepomi accused the flanker not only of a “reckless” tackle on Juan Cruz Mallía but of shoving him, the Pumas’ coach, in the tunnel afterwards. Mallía, the full-back, was forced off late on with what is thought to be an anterior cruciate ligament injury, which meant Argentina, who had used all their replacements, had to finish the match with 14 men.“How old is he?” said Contepomi of Curry. “Twenty-seven? And strong. And I am 48 and he comes and just [shoves me]