WhatsApp Tests Advanced Chat Privacy to Block Exports and Auto Media Downloads

According to a new report by WebBetaInfo, WhatsApp is testing a new feature that will let users put advanced privacy on their chats which will enable them to have full control over the decision to let people export their chats or save any media or not. This feature was recently spotted in the iOS Beta version and in the Android Beta version too. This feature can be enabled from the toggle in the settings for single and group chats.

When it is enabled, it stops users from exporting their entire chat history out of WhatsApp and they won't be able to auto automatically download images and videos from that chat as well. It is still unclear whether the media can be downloaded manually or not. This feature will prevent any type of media you send to get automatically saved in galleries. This is similar to how disappearing messages work when messages or media do not get saved automatically after they are sent.

When this advanced privacy setting is enabled in a group chat, all members get notified and Meta AI also gets disabled because of this setting. It is still possible to send individual messages or take screenshots when this setting is enabled, so this means that it will slow down efforts to save chats and not prevent it completely. This feature is only available for beta and there is no news about when it will be available for all users.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

They Look Real, Sound Smart, and Don’t Exist — AI Experts Are Fooling the News

AI generated material has become a problem even for giant media companies. They have been found to be treating AI generated characters as experts on different subjects. Media companies, like the BBC, the Sun, the Guardian, Newsweek, Medium, Fortune etc., have promoted fake characters by quoting them as reliable sources in their newspapers. But these experts do not even exist and are just the product of AI.

An investigation by the journalist Rob Waugh of the Press Gazette has revealed the infiltration of AI in mainstream media. He says that some famous newspapers published articles quoting AI generated characters as experts on various subjects. And they have been quoted again and again, indicating that the media outlets were totally unaware of their actual reality. This infiltration of AI has decreased the level of authenticity of even reliable media outlets and exposed the potential dangers of AI.

Providing details on LinkedIn, Rob Waugh writes that one of such fake experts was an alleged psychologist Barbara Santini. Claimed to have a degree from Oxford, Santini was quoted hundreds of times in the British media as an expert psychologist, giving her opinion on different psychological problems. Rob found her to be fake when he tried to talk to her on phone and to confirm her qualifications, but she refused. She wanted to communicate only through WhatsApp: messages on WhatsApp would have allowed her to remain hidden as an AI generated character.

He gives another example of Rebecca Leigh of Academized. She also presented herself as an expert commentator on various subjects and had been quoted in the famous newspapers like Fortune and Business. Her profile on the website described her as a biochemist and science educator with a 12-year experience. But when Waugh asked the expert to prove herself to be a human, she stopped communicating. It was revealed later that she was using a fake name, picture and profile. The company also accepted that the profile had fake details. But to save itself from blame, it argued that fake name and profile details are used to keep writers anonymous.

Surprisingly, the similar photo was being used by another tech writer on another media service, LeadDev, under the profile name Sara Sparrow. Either AI is copying data of authentic writers, or it is using the same data at more than one place.

AI might be infiltrating media outlets, but the role played by humans in it should not be ignored. Qwoted and ResponseSource, two networking services connecting journalists with expert sources, have been found using fake AI experts. Similarly, humans could be behind other such usage of AI in the media, including giant media outlets, to speed up the process.

But it is not hard to detect AI in journalism. Qwoted does warn its users of a possibly AI generated content if the response of a query on the website is too fast to be from a human. Moreover, it also provides the option of Check for AI which can detect text generated by any AI system. So it is far better to establish the truth of a source than to start believing it just because data is coming from famous media outlets. This is no longer true because the authenticity of media has been compromised by AI.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Ehtasham Ahmad via Digital Information World

From Juul to xAI: A Rollercoaster Ride of Billion-Dollar Tech Deals

In the past few years, we have seen many private tech deals as many startups attracted many investors and made deals worth billions. However, no other deal was as big as OpenAI’s $40 billion raise for AI technology. According to different sources from CNBC, PitchBook, and companies' official data, the biggest amount raised was for OpenAI which had the potential to change the AI landscape, and it did so successfully. The second-highest deal since 2018 was Ant Group’s $14 billion raise and we can see the difference in the amounts raised of the top two biggest tech deals.

$30 billion has been raised by OpenAI in funding and it is being led by Japan’s SoftBank and other companies like Microsoft have also made some contributions. This has made OpenAI one of the biggest private companies with a value of $300 billion, along with other companies like ByteDance and SpaceX. SoftBank has a condition as well that it will reduce its investment to $20 billion if OpenAI can't restructure itself into a for-profit company by the end of 2025.

In late 2018, there were headlines about Juul Labs securing a $13 billion investment from Altaria, the company behind Marlboro. The value of the deal was $38 billion which could change the future of smoking but the valuation dropped drastically in late 2022 because Juul had to go through different lawsuits and bans. In 2024, Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6 billion from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Fidelity, and combining the investment of $6 billion in early 2024, xAI’s total funding reached $12 billion and now has a valuation of approximately $50 billion.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Google Adds Multimodal Capabilities to its AI Mode, Including Asking Questions With Pictures

Google has just added some exciting capabilities to its latest AI Model offering. This includes letting users ask queries with the help of pictures. Furthermore, the Android maker shared how it’s extending the latest AI mode to millions of Labs users across the country.

For starters, let’s see what this new AI mode with pictures is all about. Users give people the chance to put out pictures through uploads or the camera. Users can ask queries through pictures, and it’s part of the latest multimodal offerings. The latter rolled out several years back in different domains of Search, but now it’s on AI Mode too.

Users get the chance to click images or upload pictures, ask anything about the matter, and expect to get a diverse and comprehensive reply in return. They’re also provided with a lot more links to get even deeper information.

AI Mode is really taking off as Google’s years of hard work related to visual search. It takes things to the next level. AI Mode can comprehend entire scenes across pictures, including the relevance of objects located nearby.

Google Lens has the ability to identify every object inside a picture. Right after that, the AI Mode issues different questions about the picture in general and the objects seen in the image. It gets a depth of data, and the result is very nuanced and relevant, so you can move on to the next step.

In this manner, Google confirmed how millions of users are getting access to the latest AI Mode. The company hopes to extend access even further to Labs users who might not get entry into the company’s Google One AI Premium tier that launched several weeks back. In the past, Google was seen getting invited to another batch of users through the AI Mode. This means another round of invites was sent out.

We do feel strongly that the latest AI Model is the future of search in different ways. This is why it’s so important that users get the option to try it as soon as possible, and watch it transform. Soon, users will be on the hunt to use the AI Mode to get traffic as compared to the classic Google Search and AI Overviews.

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Gen Z Interest in Influencers Drops 5% but Buying Power Remains Strong

According to a recent survey by Morning Consult, many younger consumers are losing interest in social media influencers in 2024. As compared to 2023, there was a 5% drop in interest in influencers in 2024. The survey was based on 2,205 US adults and 1,002 Gen-Z between the ages of 13-21. The respondents also included 832 Gen-Z and 1,117 US adults who follow influencers on different social media websites.

The report said that in today's times, anybody can be a social media star. If you want to become a social media influencer, all you need is to make entertaining content that can engage the users. If the content goes viral and resonates with the audience, the influencers gain followers and fans. Despite people slowly losing interest in influencers, they are still interested in making purchases after recommendations of influencers.

45% of the social media users in the survey admitted that they are likely to purchase something if it is recommended by an influencer on social media. The survey also found that there is no one favorite influencer of social media users, as they liked multiple influencers at once.

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The Hidden Health Cost of Convenience: Are Delivery Apps Sabotaging Your BMI?

Nowadays most of us want to save their time by not cooking at home and getting food delivered at their footsteps but researchers from University of Bonn have found out that food delivery apps are increasing our Body Mass Index (BMI). There are a lot of super apps which help us save our time and are extremely convenient to us like grocery apps, food delivery apps, traveling apps and shopping apps. The researchers found that these types of apps are increasing our BMI and can be impactful for already obese or overweight people.

There is no doubt that food delivery apps like Doordash, Ubereats and Deliveroo are more prominent in cities and rural areas and people who are employed are the ones who use these apps the most. This is because they don't want to waste their time shopping, preparing and cooking healthy meals and delivery apps seem the most convenient to them. They can do several other things in the time they save by ordering food online.

This shortcut makes them less active because people who frequently use delivery apps aren't getting any physical exercise by buying or cooking the food themselves. Most delivery foods are also high in calories and contain a lot of sugar, unhealthy oils, starches and salt. In other words, we are spending more time on eating highly processed unhealthy food instead of moving ourselves just so that we can enjoy some time sitting at our favorite place or even during work.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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68% to Increase Social Spend in 2025, 63% Say GenAI Will Shape Consumer Behavior

According to a recent report by MediaOcean based on a survey of 688 marketers, social media and digital display/video are the top media channels on which marketers want to increase their spend this year. 68% of the respondents say that they are going to increase their spend on social media in 2025 while 67% said that they are going to increase their spend on digital display/video in 2025. Digital marketers are also going to spend more on CTV (67%), Search (54%) and Retail Media (37%) in 2025.

When the marketers were asked what are the most important consumer trends going forward in 2025, 63% answered generative AI, 56% said connected TV/streaming and 51% answered TikTok/social video. 62% of the respondents said that performance driven paid media is an important advertising capability and media investment in current macroeconomic conditions, followed by 50% who said measurement and attribution capabilities and 45% who said brand advertising.

Marketers were also asked how they used generative AI in marketing and they responded with data analysis (47%), market research (38%) and copywriting (32%). The largest areas of concerns marketers are facing in media and marketing initiatives are decline in ability to measure campaign effectiveness on tech platforms and open web (45%), consumer ad avoidance/ad blindness (41%) and poor ability to manage reach and frequency across CTV and digital channels.

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