Technology

Sonia Elyss, a 38-year-old beauty marketing specialist in New York City who has worked in influencer marketing for a decade, acknowledged the problem. “This isn’t the first time that I personally have witnessed influencer fatigue,” she said. “At peak influencer culture for Instagram, before TikTok was even a thing, we had the same scenario.”The difference now, Ms. Elyss pointed out, is the scale of influence made possible by TikTok, which has more than 150 million users in the United States, according to the company. On Instagram, people typically seek out or follow influencers. On TikTok, influencers’ content is more likely to pop up in your feed.Rachel Ferraro, a 25-year-old law student at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., described the Tarte campaign as “tone deaf,” adding that it w...

It would be easy to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI as a case of sour grapes.Mr. Musk sued OpenAI this week, accusing the company of breaching the terms of its founding agreement and violating its founding principles. In his telling, OpenAI was established as a nonprofit that would build powerful A.I. systems for the good of humanity and give its research away freely to the public. But Mr. Musk argues that OpenAI broke that promise by starting a for-profit subsidiary that took on billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft.An OpenAI spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit. In a memo sent to employees on Friday, Jason Kwon, the company’s chief strategy officer, denied Mr. Musk’s claims and said, “We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon’s regrets about not ...

OpenAI, the influential artificial intelligence company that ousted and then reinstated its high-profile chief executive three months ago, faces a new drama: a lawsuit from Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world and a co-founder of the A.I. lab.Mr. Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence ahead of the public good. A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI developed with Microsoft, Mr. Musk said, represented an abandonment of a founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit filed...

President Biden issued an executive order Wednesday seeking to restrict the sale of sensitive American data to China, Russia and four more countries, a first-of-its-kind attempt to keep personally identifying information from being obtained for blackmail, scams or other harm.The president asked the Justice Department to write rules restricting the sale of information about Americans’ locations, health and genetics to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as any entities linked to those countries. The restrictions would also cover financial information, biometric data and other types of information that could identify individuals and sensitive information related to the government.The White House said this kind of sensitive data could be used for blackmail, “especial...

OpenAI filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss some key elements of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company.The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing them of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.In the motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants argue that ChatGPT “is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times.”“In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose,” the filing said. “Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use Chat...

The December day in 2021 that set off a revolution across the videogame industry appeared to start innocuously enough. Managers at a Wisconsin studio called Raven began meeting one by one with quality assurance testers, who vet video games for bugs, to announce that the company was overhauling their department. Going forward, managers said, the lucky testers would be permanent employees, not temps. They would earn an extra $1.50 an hour.It was only later in the morning, a Friday, that the catch became apparent: One-third of the studio’s roughly 35 testers were being let go as part of the overhaul. The workers were stunned. Raven was owned by Activision Blizzard, one of the industry’s largest companies, and there appeared to be plenty of work to go around. Several testers had just worked la...