Meta’s AI Studio Sparks Concern Over Hyper-Sexualized and Minor-Resembling AI Characters

Meta launched its AI Studio in 2024 which helps users create whatever AIs they want, giving them specific characters and details. These models also have policies and protections so people do not misuse them for harmful purposes. The AI Studio by Meta is built with LLama 3.1 large language model and users can use it to generate, memes, advice and communicate on various other topics. A recent review by Fast Company has found that AI characters made through AI Studio become very hyper-sexual and act like minors which is concerning.

The AI characters that are featured on Instagram’s homepage are “girlfriends” which are ready to act flirtatious and engage in sexual conversations with the users. Some of these characters are even kids and are made to be minors. Meta should take measures to stop users engaging with this type of harmful and illegal content.

When any kind of inappropriate content is uploaded on Instagram, it gets removed instantly because of Meta’s quick moderation capabilities. But Meta isn’t using these capabilities to its AI characters even though it is against Meta’s policies about sexually explicit content. One of the researchers, Buse Cetin, said that Meta is probably not applying those policies to the AI characters yet because they want their services to become more well known.

Even though AI has a small policy about sexual content, it can get overlooked with some manipulation by using synonymous words to inappropriate terms. Meta is also removing AI characters which have broken their policies but the company hasn't specified if the characters were removed by human content moderators or AI ones. When a user enters some term on AI which is against its policy terms, it tells that the content is generated by AI so it can be inappropriate or inaccurate.

In 2023, Meta created some AI profiles which resemble celebrities and fictional characters. But it received a lot of controversies and backlash so the company removed it and added AI Studio in 2024 which was well received by the users. Users can converse with them in Instagram dms and these AI characters resemble whatever the user wants them to be. But there are also some sexually suggestive and inappropriate characters which engage in sexual conversations with the users, while some of these characters are also children who are sexualized.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Is Musk’s X Making Hate Speech Worse? New Study Raises Alarming Questions

According to a new study published in PLOS ONE, hate speech on X (formerly known as Twitter) increased 50% for at least eight months after Elon Musk purchased the platform. The study focused on how many racist, homophobic and transphobic slurs users used on the platform and how there was a spread in hate speech on the platform which used to help friends and families stay in touch and can give some rise to offline hate crimes now as well. Elon Musk officially bought Twitter on October 27, 2022 for $44 billion and he promised the users that he will reduce hate speech, bots and other inauthentic content from the platform.

But Musk made a lot of changes to the platform in order to reduce content moderation and also fired the full time workforce of the company in November 2022. Some outsourced content moderators tracking abuse on the platform were also fired even though many researchers have shown that there is less hate speech on platforms which have high levels of content moderation. In the same month, Elon Musk disbanded X's Trust and Safety Council, a volunteer group of human rights leaders and academics created in 2016 to address hate speech and other issues on the platform.

The study analyzed 4.7 million English language posts on X during the ten months when Elon was about to buy the platform and eight months after he bought it. The study measured clear hate speech with tweets using toxic language or attacking identity groups only. The study also analyzed how much users engaged with these tweets by liking them but the researchers’ access to X’s data was cut off because of policy change by the platform and the payment access was unaffordable.

But overall, the results of the study showed that there was an increase in average numbers of posts containing hate speech after Musk took over X. Before Elon Musk bought X, the average number of hate tweets per week was 2179 but jumped to 3246 tweets per week after Musk bought the platform. The highest increase was seen in transphobic slurs, with an increase of 115 tweets per week about it to 418. There was also a 70% increase in user engagement on tweets containing hate speech under Musk’s watch. The research says that either the hate speech doesn't get taken down or the algorithm promotes hate speech unintentionally, and that's why the user engagement has gotten higher.

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Meta Paused Discussions with Book Publishers on Licensing Deals to Supply AI Models with Training Data

New court filings are shedding light on the fact that tech giant Meta did pause its discussions with book publishers for licensing agreements to supply its Generative AI models with training data.

The filing corresponds to a lawsuit against Meta regarding AI copyrights. This one was launched by Kadrey who accused Meta Platforms of not respecting the copyright ownership of authors and various other intellectual property holders. So many AI firms claim that it’s fair to use such material but the plaintiffs disagree as it’s a clear violation of their copyrights.

The latest filings were rolled out to the court that entail partial transcripts of various Meta employees that prove how strongly many staff members felt about AI training data licensing for books not being a very viable option for the firm.

As per one transcript, Meta’s outreach to different publishers was met with a slower update in both engagement and interest. While they cannot recall the entire list, they speak about scouring various top publishers of the internet as per the transcript obtained. They also didn’t get many contacts or feedback from cold calls to try and establish the right kind of contacts.

While quite a few did engage, it was not the same case for all. The court transcripts show how Meta paused quite a few AI-based book licenses during the start of 2023 after coming across major logistical and timing setbacks. Many fiction book publishers didn’t have rights to content that Meta was entering into a licensing deal with.

It was soon pointed out that this was very true for the fiction category where many people representing themselves were doing it for rights they didn’t have in the first place, Meta’s spokesperson mentioned. So as per the company, there was no need to engage with such authors.

Meta has in the past also paused its licensing efforts linked to AI development as per this transcript. The company is well aware of licensing efforts that were paused once in the past before but that’s because they wished to design their own solution.

The complaint argued how Meta makes use of shadow libraries featuring pirated e-books for training different company AI models. This includes its Llama open model series. As per the complaint, Meta could have secured some of these libraries through torrenting. The latter has to do with distributing files through the web and needs torrents to seed or upload files they’re trying to obtain at the same time. However, the plaintiffs argued that it was a form of copyright infringement.

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Read next: TikTok Returns To App Stores Of Apple and Google In America After President Trump Delays Ban
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

TikTok Returns To App Stores Of Apple and Google In America After President Trump Delays Ban

TikTok fans have another reason to celebrate in the US as the app has returned to both the App Store and Google Play Store today. The news comes after President Trump decided to delay the ban on the app in the country.

TikTok which comes under the ownership of ByteDance was deleted from both app stores on January 18 in compliance with the law that requires the company to divest or face a ban. A spokesperson for Google refused to comment on the issue on Friday and Apple is yet to return comments on the matter.

The popular platform has nearly 170M users in America who were suspended in the past for less than 24 hours before the service was restored. This meant those having previous accounts and the app on their phones could use it but others who uninstalled the app would no longer have access to it.

The reason was simple, both Apple and Google wanted to comply with the law and not face the consequences that came in the form of a high penalty. This led to thousands of people migrating to other alternatives that offered similar TikTok-like services such as RedNote. They called themselves TikTok refugees.

The platform was soon available to download in America again after one month. The news made many anxiously awaiting fans happy as the ban has now been extended to April 5. For years, the app has come under scrutiny by lawmakers in America.

The American Government felt Chinese ownership was a huge threat and data belonging to millions of Americans made it a complete national security risk.

For now, the app has denied all allegations on this front, arguing how such clauses violate the First Amendment rights of those based in America. During his first term in office, Trump made it very clear that he was all in favor of TikTok continuing its operations in the country, clearly showing he had a warm spot for the app. We even saw TikTok’s CEO attend his inauguration ceremony.

The President has rolled out suggestions about TikTok coming under joint ownership with 50% of rights belonging to the US and the rest to China. He’s even suggested some great potential buyers including Oracle’s CEO and Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk but no other news has been shared on this front.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Study Reveals How User Incentives and Search Engine Awareness Could Challenge Google’s Dominance

Even with the rise of AI and people using AI for search, Google is still dominating the search market even though it has recently faced an antitrust ruling too. A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) analyzed which are the main reasons Google has such a big hold on search space. For the study, the researchers gathered 2,000 people and looked at their searching habits for two weeks. They also offered cash rewards to some participants by asking them to use Microsoft Bing while asking some to actively choose their search engine instead of sticking to a default one.

The results showed that participants who were paid to use Bing had positive reviews about it and some even continued using it after two weeks were finished. On the other hand, when users were asked to actively choose their search engine instead of some default one also increased Bing’s usage by 1.1%. The researchers said that if users have a clear understanding of the quality of each search engine and do not find it inconvenient to switch to other search engines, Microsoft Bing could have a 15% increase of market share than what it holds now.

This study was done because the court had decided how they wanted to address illegal tricks of Google in the search markets, with them proposing solutions like stopping Chrome from operating under Google, sharing its data with its rival companies for 10 years and ending default search deals with some companies. The study also suggests that policies should ask users to try alternative search engines like Bing to challenge Google.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

End of an Era? CPU Performance Drops in 2025—What’s Really Happening?

According to new data from PassMark Software, which has offered PC benchmark testing tools since 1998, average CPU performance has started to decline with every new model that comes. Many of us would assume that when we buy the latest computer, they will have faster performance but this isn’t the case, according to the data. PassMark submitted a graph about average performance of CPUs over the course of 20 years and it was found that average CPU performance did climb up a lot in the past two decades, but suddenly started declining from 2024 to 2025.

PassMark tweeted that this is the first time in history that CPU performance is about to drop in 2025. They also said that most of the people are ready to buy cheaper hardware because they do not find it important to invest in a more powerful hardware. The data also revealed that performance benchmarks are based on PCs with no more than 8 cores and the same amount of people are using 8 cores as they were doing in 2020.

AMD's 96-core Threadripper PRO 7995WX which was from 2023 is the most powerful chip on the desktop side. Many of the chip makers like Intel and AMD are now focusing on AI applications and power efficiency rather than raw CPU performance with low power CPU cores. Intel’s latest desktop chips have also removed hyper-threading but the latest PC chips still offer year-over-year improvements in processing power. Now we have to wait and see whether this decline in CPU power is just for a short while or if it’s going to become long term. PassMark also says that users using Windows 10 and 11 can also be a factor for the performance decline but it will change as Microsoft is going to end its support on Windows 10 soon.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

TikTok and Facebook Pledge to Increase Fight Against Disinformation in the EU but X is Nowhere To Be Seen

Tech giants Facebook and TikTok are pledging to build up the fight against disinformation in the European Union. The news comes just days after the latest US administration was able to condemn the online content regulations put forward by the region.

However, it was clear that among the many big tech names enlisted, Elon Musk who is the owner of X was not present there. The billionaire chose to withdraw his app from the original code launched in 2023. He has continued to fight against the EU for its stringent content moderation rules enlisted in the Digital Services Act.

The DSA forces all digital companies to regulate online content and stop the growing rise in misinformation and disinformation. Similarly, the EU has been probing X under this law since the start of 2023. That includes a host of efforts to battle disinformation on this app.

The latest law is actually at the center of a wide range of tensions between American tech giants and the current administration against the EU. We’ve already witnessed American Vice President JD Vance mention how the DSA was stopping adult males and females from accessing data that the government felt was incorrect information. But the EU Refused to comment on this statement.

But announcing the formalization of this code of conduct under the latest laws means the DSA is here to stay and lawmakers want to make sure the EU is as safe of an online working space as possible. This is to stop people from getting manipulated. As per the EU officials, they always needed a regulatory framework to fight against these matters.

The code will remain the most meaningful order for determining the DSA’s compliance when it applies to start the month of July as per the EC. For instance, the EU feels fact-checking is the most effective form of moderating content online and that’s why it’s a part of the code. But it’s not forcing any company to do anything.

Meta continues to stay a part of the code despite Zuckerberg being close to the White House and speaking against the growing rise in censorship by the EU. Let’s not forget he put an end to fact-checking on Facebook which was met with great skepticism.

One official from the EU says that if tech giant Meta wished to withdraw from commitments under this code, they can and no one will be forced to remain. The EU has made it clear that just signing codes like this does not mean the platforms are innocent. They needed to do more in terms of greater steps for fighting disinformation.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World