IBM on Wednesday announced 3,900 layoffs as part of some asset divestments and missed its annual cash target, dampening cheer around beating revenue expectations in the fourth quarter. From a report: Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh told Reuters that the company was still “committed to hiring for client-facing research and development”. The layoffs — related to the spinoff of its Kyndryl business and a part of AI unit Watson Health — will cause a $300 million charge in the January-March period, IBM said.

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Source: Slashdot – IBM Cuts 3,900 Jobs

Federal agencies are questioning Snapchat’s role in the spread and sale of fentanyl-laced pills in the United States as part of a broader probe into the deadly counterfeit drugs crisis. The Los Angeles Times reports: FBI agents and Justice Department attorneys are zeroing in on fentanyl poisoning cases where the sales were arranged to young buyers via Snapchat […]. The agents have interviewed parents of children who died and are working to access their social media accounts to trace the suppliers of the lethal drugs, according to the people. In many cases, subpoenaed records from Snapchat have shown that the teenagers thought they were buying prescription painkillers, but the pill they swallowed was pure fentanyl — a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than morphine.

On Wednesday, the involvement of technology companies in the ongoing fentanyl crisis will be discussed on Capitol Hill at a House Energy and Commerce Committee roundtable. One of the listed speakers, Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, said Snapchat will be the focus. “The death of American children by fentanyl poisoning is not a social media issue — it’s a Snapchat issue,” she said. […] While dealers use many social media platforms to advertise their drugs, experts, lawyers and families say Snapchat is the platform of choice for arranging sales. Dealers prefer to use Snapchat because of its encrypted technology and disappearing messages — features that have given the platform an edge over its rivals for fully legitimate reasons and helped it become one of the world’s most popular social media apps for teens.

Former White House drug czar Jim Carroll said drug traffickers are always going to flock to where the young people are. “From everything I have read, I do believe that Snapchat has been more widely used for facilitating drug sales,” than other platforms, said Carroll, who serves on Snap’s safety advisory council and now works for Michael Best Consulting. “I think that’s because of its popularity among the young.” In December, Snap reported 363 million daily active users in its quarterly earnings report. That same month, the National Crime Prevention Council wrote a letter to Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland, urging the Justice Department to investigate Snap and its business practices. “Snapchat has become a digital open-air drug market allowing drug dealers to market and to sell fake pills to unsuspecting tweens and teens,” the letter said. Garland didn’t respond, but federal investigators have started to ask questions, multiple people said. Santa Monica-based Snap, which makes Snapchat, said it has worked with law enforcement for years to clamp down on illegal activity on its platform and has boosted moderation efforts to detect illegal drug sales. Last year, Snap said it removed more than 400,000 user accounts that posted drug-related content.

“We are committed to doing our part to fight the national fentanyl poisoning crisis, which includes using cutting-edge technology to help us proactively find and shut down drug dealers’ accounts,” Rachel Racusen, a Snap spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

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Source: Slashdot – FBI Probes Snapchat’s Role In Fentanyl Poisoning Deaths

Shutterstock, one of the internet’s biggest sources of stock photos and illustrations, is now offering its customers the option to generate their own AI images. Gizmodo reports: In October, the company announced a partnership with OpenAI, the creator of the wildly popular and controversial DALL-E AI tool. Now, the results of that deal are in beta testing and available to all paying Shutterstock users. The new platform is available in “every language the site offers,” and comes included with customers’ existing licensing packages, according to a press statement from the company. And, according to Gizmodo’s own test, every text prompt you feed Shutterstock’s machine results in four images, ostensibly tailored to your request. At the bottom of the page, the site also suggests “More AI-generated images from the Shutterstock library,” which offer unrelated glimpses into the void.

In an attempt to pre-empt concerns about copyright law and artistic ethics, Shutterstock has said it uses “datasets licensed from Shutterstock” to train its DALL-E and LG EXAONE-powered AI. The company also claims it will pay artists whose work is used in its AI-generation. Shutterstock plans to do so through a “Contributor Fund.” That fund “will directly compensate Shutterstock contributors if their IP was used in the development of AI-generative models, like the OpenAI model, through licensing of data from Shutterstock’s library,” the company explains in an FAQ section on its website. “Shutterstock will continue to compensate contributors for the future licensing of AI-generated content through the Shutterstock AI content generation tool,” it further says.

Further, Shutterstock includes a clever caveat in their use guidelines for AI images. “You must not use the generated image to infringe, misappropriate, or violate the intellectual property or other rights of any third party, to generate spam, false, misleading, deceptive, harmful, or violent imagery,” the company notes. And, though I am not a legal expert, it would seem this clause puts the onus on the customer to avoid ending up in trouble. If a generated image includes a recognizable bit of trademarked material, or spits out celebrity’s likeness — it’s on the user of Shutterstock’s tool to notice and avoid republishing the problem content.

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Source: Slashdot – Shutterstock Launches Generative AI Image Tool