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AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt

ai crawlers, ai poisoning, ai scraping, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, bots, Cybersecurity, facebook, Features, Google, iocaine, LLMs, Meta, nepenthes, openai, Policy, quixotic, tarpits / Shannon Garcia / January 28, 2025

Making AI crawlers squirm

Attackers explain how an anti-spam defense became an AI weapon.

Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.

And it wasn’t the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit’s CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were “a pain in the ass to block,” despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect “no scraping” robots.txt rules.

Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we’ll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers “clobbering” websites that he told Ars he hoped would give “teeth” to robots.txt.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

Tarpits were originally designed to waste spammers’ time and resources, but creators like Aaron have now evolved the tactic into an anti-AI weapon. As of this writing, Aaron confirmed that Nepenthes can effectively trap all the major web crawlers. So far, only OpenAI’s crawler has managed to escape.

It’s unclear how much damage tarpits or other AI attacks can ultimately do. Last May, Laxmi Korada, Microsoft’s director of partner technology, published a report detailing how leading AI companies were coping with poisoning, one of the earliest AI defense tactics deployed. He noted that all companies have developed poisoning countermeasures, while OpenAI “has been quite vigilant” and excels at detecting the “first signs of data poisoning attempts.”

Despite these efforts, he concluded that data poisoning was “a serious threat to machine learning models.” And in 2025, tarpitting represents a new threat, potentially increasing the costs of fresh data at a moment when AI companies are heavily investing and competing to innovate quickly while rarely turning significant profits.

“A link to a Nepenthes location from your site will flood out valid URLs within your site’s domain name, making it unlikely the crawler will access real content,” a Nepenthes explainer reads.

The only AI company that responded to Ars’ request to comment was OpenAI, whose spokesperson confirmed that OpenAI is already working on a way to fight tarpitting.

“We’re aware of efforts to disrupt AI web crawlers,” OpenAI’s spokesperson said. “We design our systems to be resilient while respecting robots.txt and standard web practices.”

But to Aaron, the fight is not about winning. Instead, it’s about resisting the AI industry further decaying the Internet with tech that no one asked for, like chatbots that replace customer service agents or the rise of inaccurate AI search summaries. By releasing Nepenthes, he hopes to do as much damage as possible, perhaps spiking companies’ AI training costs, dragging out training efforts, or even accelerating model collapse, with tarpits helping to delay the next wave of enshittification.

“Ultimately, it’s like the Internet that I grew up on and loved is long gone,” Aaron told Ars. “I’m just fed up, and you know what? Let’s fight back, even if it’s not successful. Be indigestible. Grow spikes.”

Nepenthes instantly inspires another tarpit

Nepenthes was released in mid-January but was instantly popularized beyond Aaron’s expectations after tech journalist Cory Doctorow boosted a tech commentator, Jürgen Geuter, praising the novel AI attack method on Mastodon. Very quickly, Aaron was shocked to see engagement with Nepenthes skyrocket.

“That’s when I realized, ‘oh this is going to be something,'” Aaron told Ars. “I’m kind of shocked by how much it’s blown up.”

It’s hard to tell how widely Nepenthes has been deployed. Site owners are discouraged from flagging when the malware has been deployed, forcing crawlers to face unknown “consequences” if they ignore robots.txt instructions.

Aaron told Ars that while “a handful” of site owners have reached out and “most people are being quiet about it,” his web server logs indicate that people are already deploying the tool. Likely, site owners want to protect their content, deter scraping, or mess with AI companies.

When software developer and hacker Gergely Nagy, who goes by the handle “algernon” online, saw Nepenthes, he was delighted. At that time, Nagy told Ars that nearly all of his server’s bandwidth was being “eaten” by AI crawlers.

Already blocking scraping and attempting to poison AI models through a simpler method, Nagy took his defense method further and created his own tarpit, Iocaine. He told Ars the tarpit immediately killed off about 94 percent of bot traffic to his site, which was primarily from AI crawlers. Soon, social media discussion drove users to inquire about Iocaine deployment, including not just individuals but also organizations wanting to take stronger steps to block scraping.

Iocaine takes ideas (not code) from Nepenthes, but it’s more intent on using the tarpit to poison AI models. Nagy used a reverse proxy to trap crawlers in an “infinite maze of garbage” in an attempt to slowly poison their data collection as much as possible for daring to ignore robots.txt.

Taking its name from “one of the deadliest poisons known to man” from The Princess Bride, Iocaine is jokingly depicted as the “deadliest poison known to AI.” While there’s no way of validating that claim, Nagy’s motto is that the more poisoning attacks that are out there, “the merrier.” He told Ars that his primary reasons for building Iocaine were to help rights holders wall off valuable content and stop AI crawlers from crawling with abandon.

Tarpits aren’t perfect weapons against AI

Running malware like Nepenthes can burden servers, too. Aaron likened the cost of running Nepenthes to running a cheap virtual machine on a Raspberry Pi, and Nagy said that serving crawlers Iocaine costs about the same as serving his website.

But Aaron told Ars that Nepenthes wasting resources is the chief objection he’s seen preventing its deployment. Critics fear that deploying Nepenthes widely will not only burden their servers but also increase the costs of powering all that AI crawling for nothing.

“That seems to be what they’re worried about more than anything,” Aaron told Ars. “The amount of power that AI models require is already astronomical, and I’m making it worse. And my view of that is, OK, so if I do nothing, AI models, they boil the planet. If I switch this on, they boil the planet. How is that my fault?”

Aaron also defends against this criticism by suggesting that a broader impact could slow down AI investment enough to possibly curb some of that energy consumption. Perhaps due to the resistance, AI companies will be pushed to seek permission first to scrape or agree to pay more content creators for training on their data.

“Any time one of these crawlers pulls from my tarpit, it’s resources they’ve consumed and will have to pay hard cash for, but, being bullshit, the money [they] have spent to get it won’t be paid back by revenue,” Aaron posted, explaining his tactic online. “It effectively raises their costs. And seeing how none of them have turned a profit yet, that’s a big problem for them. The investor money will not continue forever without the investors getting paid.”

Nagy agrees that the more anti-AI attacks there are, the greater the potential is for them to have an impact. And by releasing Iocaine, Nagy showed that social media chatter about new attacks can inspire new tools within a few days. Marcus Butler, an independent software developer, similarly built his poisoning attack called Quixotic over a few days, he told Ars. Soon afterward, he received messages from others who built their own versions of his tool.

Butler is not in the camp of wanting to destroy AI. He told Ars that he doesn’t think “tools like Quixotic (or Nepenthes) will ‘burn AI to the ground.'” Instead, he takes a more measured stance, suggesting that “these tools provide a little protection (a very little protection) against scrapers taking content and, say, reposting it or using it for training purposes.”

But for a certain sect of Internet users, every little bit of protection seemingly helps. Geuter linked Ars to a list of tools bent on sabotaging AI. Ultimately, he expects that tools like Nepenthes are “probably not gonna be useful in the long run” because AI companies can likely detect and drop gibberish from training data. But Nepenthes represents a sea change, Geuter told Ars, providing a useful tool for people who “feel helpless” in the face of endless scraping and showing that “the story of there being no alternative or choice is false.”

Criticism of tarpits as AI weapons

Critics debating Nepenthes’ utility on Hacker News suggested that most AI crawlers could easily avoid tarpits like Nepenthes, with one commenter describing the attack as being “very crawler 101.” Aaron said that was his “favorite comment” because if tarpits are considered elementary attacks, he has “2 million lines of access log that show that Google didn’t graduate.”

But efforts to poison AI or waste AI resources don’t just mess with the tech industry. Governments globally are seeking to leverage AI to solve societal problems, and attacks on AI’s resilience seemingly threaten to disrupt that progress.

Nathan VanHoudnos is a senior AI security research scientist in the federally funded CERT Division of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, which partners with academia, industry, law enforcement, and government to “improve the security and resilience of computer systems and networks.” He told Ars that new threats like tarpits seem to replicate a problem that AI companies are already well aware of: “that some of the stuff that you’re going to download from the Internet might not be good for you.”

“It sounds like these tarpit creators just mainly want to cause a little bit of trouble,” VanHoudnos said. “They want to make it a little harder for these folks to get” the “better or different” data “that they’re looking for.”

VanHoudnos co-authored a paper on “Counter AI” last August, pointing out that attackers like Aaron and Nagy are limited in how much they can mess with AI models. They may have “influence over what training data is collected but may not be able to control how the data are labeled, have access to the trained model, or have access to the Al system,” the paper said.

Further, AI companies are increasingly turning to the deep web for unique data, so any efforts to wall off valuable content with tarpits may be coming right when crawling on the surface web starts to slow, VanHoudnos suggested.

But according to VanHoudnos, AI crawlers are also “relatively cheap,” and companies may deprioritize fighting against new attacks on crawlers if “there are higher-priority assets” under attack. And tarpitting “does need to be taken seriously because it is a tool in a toolkit throughout the whole life cycle of these systems. There is no silver bullet, but this is an interesting tool in a toolkit,” he said.

Offering a choice to abstain from AI training

Aaron told Ars that he never intended Nepenthes to be a major project but that he occasionally puts in work to fix bugs or add new features. He said he’d consider working on integrations for real-time reactions to crawlers if there was enough demand.

Currently, Aaron predicts that Nepenthes might be most attractive to rights holders who want AI companies to pay to scrape their data. And many people seem enthusiastic about using it to reinforce robots.txt. But “some of the most exciting people are in the ‘let it burn’ category,” Aaron said. These people are drawn to tools like Nepenthes as an act of rebellion against AI making the Internet less useful and enjoyable for users.

Geuter told Ars that he considers Nepenthes “more of a sociopolitical statement than really a technological solution (because the problem it’s trying to address isn’t purely technical, it’s social, political, legal, and needs way bigger levers).”

To Geuter, a computer scientist who has been writing about the social, political, and structural impact of tech for two decades, AI is the “most aggressive” example of “technologies that are not done ‘for us’ but ‘to us.'”

“It feels a bit like the social contract that society and the tech sector/engineering have had (you build useful things, and we’re OK with you being well-off) has been canceled from one side,” Geuter said. “And that side now wants to have its toy eat the world. People feel threatened and want the threats to stop.”

As AI evolves, so do attacks, with one 2021 study showing that increasingly stronger data poisoning attacks, for example, were able to break data sanitization defenses. Whether these attacks can ever do meaningful destruction or not, Geuter sees tarpits as a “powerful symbol” of the resistance that Aaron and Nagy readily joined.

“It’s a great sign to see that people are challenging the notion that we all have to do AI now,” Geuter said. “Because we don’t. It’s a choice. A choice that mostly benefits monopolists.”

Tarpit creators like Nagy will likely be watching to see if poisoning attacks continue growing in sophistication. On the Iocaine site—which, yes, is protected from scraping by Iocaine—he posted this call to action: “Let’s make AI poisoning the norm. If we all do it, they won’t have anything to crawl.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Reddit won’t interfere with users revolting against X with subreddit bans

culture, elon musk, facebook, Meta, reddit, Social Media, Tech / Mike M. / January 22, 2025

A Reddit spokesperson told Ars that decisions to ban or not ban X links are user-driven. Subreddit members are allowed to suggest and institute subreddit rules, they added.

“Notably, many Reddit communities also prohibit Reddit links,” the Reddit representative pointed out. They noted that Reddit as a company doesn’t currently have any ban on links to X.

A ban against links to an entire platform isn’t outside of the ordinary for Reddit. Numerous subreddits ban social media links, Reddit’s spokesperson said. r/EarthPorn, a subreddit for landscape photography, for example, doesn’t allow website links because all posts “must be static images,” per the subreddit’s official rules. r/AskReddit, meanwhile, only allows for questions asked in the title of a Reddit post and doesn’t allow for use of the text box, including for sharing links.

“Reddit has a longstanding commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of association,” Reddit’s spokesperson said. They added that any person is free to make or moderate their own community. Those unsatisfied with a forum about Seahawks football that doesn’t have X links could feel free to make their own subreddit. Although, some of the subreddits considering X bans, like r/MadeMeSmile, already have millions of followers.

Meta bans also under discussion

As 404 Media noted, some Redditors are also pushing to block content from Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta properties in response to new Donald Trump-friendly policies instituted by owner Mark Zuckerberg, like Meta killing diversity programs and axing third-party fact-checkers.

Reddit won’t interfere with users revolting against X with subreddit bans Read More »

Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027

agi, AI, AI assistants, AI investment, Amazon, Anthropic, Anthropic Claude, chatgpt, Claude, Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Davos, Google, machine learning, Meta, openai, sam altman, superintelligence, Wall Street Journal / Shannon Garcia / January 22, 2025

He then shared his concerns about how human-level AI models and robotics that are capable of replacing all human labor may require a complete re-think of how humans value both labor and themselves.

“We’ve recognized that we’ve reached the point as a technological civilization where the idea, there’s huge abundance and huge economic value, but the idea that the way to distribute that value is for humans to produce economic labor, and this is where they feel their sense of self worth,” he added. “Once that idea gets invalidated, we’re all going to have to sit down and figure it out.”

The eye-catching comments, similar to comments about AGI made recently by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, come as Anthropic negotiates a $2 billion funding round that would value the company at $60 billion. Amodei disclosed that Anthropic’s revenue multiplied tenfold in 2024.

Amodei distances himself from “AGI” term

Even with his dramatic predictions, Amodei distanced himself from a term for this advanced labor-replacing AI favored by Altman, “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), calling it in a separate CNBC interview from the same event in Switzerland a marketing term.

Instead, he prefers to describe future AI systems as a “country of geniuses in a data center,” he told CNBC. Amodei wrote in an October 2024 essay that such systems would need to be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields.”

On Monday, Google announced an additional $1 billion investment in Anthropic, bringing its total commitment to $3 billion. This follows Amazon’s $8 billion investment over the past 18 months. Amazon plans to integrate Claude models into future versions of its Alexa speaker.

Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027 Read More »

Meta to cut 5% of employees deemed unfit for Zuckerberg’s AI-fueled future

AI, augmented reality, facebook, Instagram, layoffs, mark zuckerberg, Meta, Policy, smart glasses / Mike M. / January 14, 2025

Anticipating that 2025 will be an “intense year” requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5 percent of its workforce—targeting “lowest performers.”

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta’s internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to “move out low performers faster” so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management,” Zuckerberg said. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”

Cuts will likely impact more than 3,600 employees, as Meta’s most recent headcount in September totaled about 72,000 employees. It may not be as straightforward as letting go anyone with an unsatisfactory performance review, as Zuckerberg said that any employee not currently meeting expectations could be spared if Meta is “optimistic about their future performance,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Any employees affected will be notified by February 10 and receive “generous severance,” Zuckerberg’s memo promised.

This is the biggest round of cuts at Meta since 2023, when Meta laid off 10,000 employees during what Zuckerberg dubbed the “year of efficiency.” Those layoffs followed a prior round where 11,000 lost their jobs and Zuckerberg realized that “leaner is better.” He told employees in 2023 that a “surprising result” from reducing the workforce was “that many things have gone faster.”

“A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2023. “People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That’s why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible.”

Meta to cut 5% of employees deemed unfit for Zuckerberg’s AI-fueled future Read More »

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

decentralized social media, elon musk, European Union, facebook, Instagram, mark zuckerberg, mastodon, Meta, Policy, social networks / Beth Washington / January 13, 2025

And perhaps in a nod to Meta’s recent changes, Mastodon also vowed to “invest deeply in trust and safety” and ensure “everyone, especially marginalized communities,” feels “safe” on the platform.

To become a more user-focused paradise of “resilient, governable, open and safe digital spaces,” Mastodon is going to need a lot more funding. The blog called for donations to help fund an annual operating budget of $5.1 million (5 million euros) in 2025. That’s a massive leap from the $152,476 (149,400 euros) total operating expenses Mastodon reported in 2023.

Other social networks wary of EU regulations

Mastodon has decided to continue basing its operations in Europe, while still maintaining a separate US-based nonprofit entity as a “fundraising hub,” the blog said.

It will take time, Mastodon said, to “select the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe” before Mastodon can then “determine which other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and sustainability.”

While Mastodon is carefully getting re-settled as a nonprofit in Europe, Zuckerberg this week went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to call on Donald Trump to help US tech companies fight European Union fines, Politico reported.

Some critics suggest the recent policy changes on Meta platforms were intended to win Trump’s favor, partly to get Trump on Meta’s side in the fight against the EU’s strict digital laws. According to France24, Musk’s recent combativeness with EU officials suggests Musk might team up with Zuckerberg in that fight (unlike that cage fight pitting the wealthy tech titans against each other that never happened).

Experts told France24 that EU officials may “perhaps wrongly” already be fearful about ruffling Trump’s feathers by targeting his tech allies and would likely need to use the “full legal arsenal” of EU digital laws to “stand up to Big Tech” once Trump’s next term starts.

As Big Tech prepares to continue battling EU regulators, Mastodon appears to be taking a different route, laying roots in Europe and “establishing the appropriate governance and leadership frameworks that reflect the nature and purpose of Mastodon as a whole” and “responsibly serve the community,” its blog said.

“Our core mission remains the same: to create the tools and digital spaces where people can build authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms, or corporate monopolies,” Mastodon’s blog said.

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg Read More »

Meta kills diversity programs, claiming DEI has become “too charged”

content moderation, dei, diversity, facebook, fact checking, hate speech, Instagram, Meta, Policy, threads / Mike M. / January 10, 2025

Meta has reportedly ended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that influenced staff hiring and training, as well as vendor decisions, effective immediately.

According to an internal memo viewed by Axios and verified by Ars, Meta’s vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, told Meta employees that the shift was due to “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.”

It’s another move by Meta that some view as part of the company’s larger effort to align with the incoming Trump administration’s politics. In December, Donald Trump promised to crack down on DEI initiatives at companies and on college campuses, The Guardian reported.

Earlier this week, Meta cut its fact-checking program, which was introduced in 2016 after Trump’s first election to prevent misinformation from spreading. In a statement announcing Meta’s pivot to X’s Community Notes-like approach to fact-checking, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and “destroyed trust” on Meta platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Trump has also long promised to renew his war on alleged social media censorship while in office. Meta faced backlash this week over leaked rule changes relaxing Meta’s hate speech policies, The Intercept reported, which Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Those changes included allowing anti-trans slurs previously banned, as well as permitting women to be called “property” and gay people to be called “mentally ill,” Mashable reported. In a statement, GLAAD said that rolling back safety guardrails risked turning Meta platforms into “unsafe landscapes filled with dangerous hate speech, violence, harassment, and misinformation” and alleged that Meta appeared to be willing to “normalize anti-LGBTQ hatred for profit.”

Meta kills diversity programs, claiming DEI has become “too charged” Read More »

Meta axes third-party fact-checkers in time for second Trump term

facebook, Instagram, Meta, Policy, Trump / 9u50fv / January 7, 2025

Zuckerberg says Meta will “work with President Trump” to fight censorship.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Meta announced today that it’s ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what’s used on Elon Musk’s X platform.

The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policies could help the company make friends in the Trump administration and in governments of conservative-leaning states that have tried to impose legal limits on content moderation. The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political,” Zuckerberg said. He said the recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”

“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”

Meta says the soon-to-be-discontinued fact-checking program includes over 90 third-party organizations that evaluate posts in over 60 languages. The US-based fact-checkers are AFP USA, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, TelevisaUnivision, The Dispatch, and USA Today.

The independent fact-checkers rate the accuracy of posts and apply ratings such as False, Altered, Partly False, Missing Context, Satire, and True. Meta adds notices to posts rated as false or misleading and notifies users before they try to share the content or if they shared it in the past.

Meta: Experts “have their own biases”

In the blog post that accompanied Zuckerberg’s video message, Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the 2016 decision to use independent fact-checkers seemed like “the best and most reasonable choice at the time… The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.”

But experts “have their own biases and perspectives,” and the program imposed “intrusive labels and reduced distribution” of content “that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.

The X-style Community Notes system lets the community “decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see… Just like they do on X, Community Notes [on Meta sites] will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Kaplan wrote.

The end of third-party fact-checking will be implemented in the US before other countries. Meta will also move its internal trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, Zuckerberg said. “Our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” he said. Meta will continue to take “legitimately bad stuff” like drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation “very seriously,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg pledges to work with Trump

Meta will “phase in a more comprehensive community notes system” over the next couple of months, Zuckerberg said. Meta, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, will also “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that “Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship,” that “Latin American countries have secret courts that can quietly order companies to take things down,” and that “China has censored apps from even working in the country.” Meta needs “the support of the US government” to push back against other countries’ content-restriction orders, he said.

“That’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the Biden administration. “By going after US and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.”

Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, praised Meta’s policy changes. Carr has promised to shift the FCC’s focus from regulating telecom companies to cracking down on Big Tech and media companies that he alleges are part of a “censorship cartel.”

“President Trump’s resolute and strong support for the free speech rights of everyday Americans is already paying dividends,” Carr wrote on X today. “Facebook’s announcements is [sic] a good step in the right direction. I look forward to monitoring these developments and their implementation. The work continues until the censorship cartel is completely dismantled and destroyed.”

Group: Meta is “saying the truth doesn’t matter”

Meta’s changes were criticized by Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader. “Asking users to fact-check themselves is tantamount to Meta saying the truth doesn’t matter,” Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said. “Misinformation will flow more freely with this policy change, as we cannot assume that corrections will be made when false information proliferates. The American people deserve accurate information about our elections, health risks, the environment, and much more.”

Media advocacy group Free Press said that “Zuckerberg is one of many billionaires who are cozying up to dangerous demagogues like Trump and pushing initiatives that favor their bottom lines at the expense of everything and everyone else.” Meta appears to be abandoning its “responsibility to protect its many users, and align[ing] the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability,” Free Press Senior Counsel Nora Benavidez said.

X’s Community Notes system was criticized in a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which said it “found that 74 percent of accurate community notes on US election misinformation never get shown to users.” (X previously sued the CCDH, but the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge.)

Previewing other changes, Zuckerberg said that Meta will eliminate content restrictions “that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and change how it enforces policies “to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.”

“We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,” he said. “The problem is the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”

Meta to relax filters, recommend more political content

Zuckerberg said Meta will re-tune content filters “to require much higher confidence before taking down content.” He said this means Meta will “catch less bad stuff” but will “also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Meta has “built a lot of complex systems to moderate content,” he noted. Even if these systems “accidentally censor just 1 percent of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said.

Kaplan wrote that Meta has censored too much harmless content and that “too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail.'”

“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content,” Kaplan wrote. “This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.”

Another upcoming change is that Meta will recommend more political posts. “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts,” Zuckerberg said. “But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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2024: The year AI drove everyone crazy

AI, AI jabberwocky, air canada, Anthropic, Biz & IT, chatgpt, confabulation, Features, Google, GPT-4o, jabberwocky, machine learning, Meta, openai, OpenAI o1, rat genitals, Wonka / Mike M. / December 26, 2024

What do eating rocks, rat genitals, and Willy Wonka have in common? AI, of course.

It’s been a wild year in tech thanks to the intersection between humans and artificial intelligence. 2024 brought a parade of AI oddities, mishaps, and wacky moments that inspired odd behavior from both machines and man. From AI-generated rat genitals to search engines telling people to eat rocks, this year proved that AI has been having a weird impact on the world.

Why the weirdness? If we had to guess, it may be due to the novelty of it all. Generative AI and applications built upon Transformer-based AI models are still so new that people are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. People have been struggling to grasp both the implications and potential applications of the new technology. Riding along with the hype, different types of AI that may end up being ill-advised, such as automated military targeting systems, have also been introduced.

It’s worth mentioning that aside from crazy news, we saw fewer weird AI advances in 2024 as well. For example, Claude 3.5 Sonnet launched in June held off the competition as a top model for most of the year, while OpenAI’s o1 used runtime compute to expand GPT-4o’s capabilities with simulated reasoning. Advanced Voice Mode and NotebookLM also emerged as novel applications of AI tech, and the year saw the rise of more capable music synthesis models and also better AI video generators, including several from China.

But for now, let’s get down to the weirdness.

ChatGPT goes insane

Early in the year, things got off to an exciting start when OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced a significant technical malfunction that caused the AI model to generate increasingly incoherent responses, prompting users on Reddit to describe the system as “having a stroke” or “going insane.” During the glitch, ChatGPT’s responses would begin normally but then deteriorate into nonsensical text, sometimes mimicking Shakespearean language.

OpenAI later revealed that a bug in how the model processed language caused it to select the wrong words during text generation, leading to nonsense outputs (basically the text version of what we at Ars now call “jabberwockies“). The company fixed the issue within 24 hours, but the incident led to frustrations about the black box nature of commercial AI systems and users’ tendency to anthropomorphize AI behavior when it malfunctions.

The great Wonka incident

A photo of the Willy's Chocolate Experience, which did not match AI-generated promises. — A photo of “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” (inset), which did not match AI-generated promises, shown in the background. Credit: Stuart Sinclair

The collision between AI-generated imagery and consumer expectations fueled human frustrations in February when Scottish families discovered that “Willy’s Chocolate Experience,” an unlicensed Wonka-ripoff event promoted using AI-generated wonderland images, turned out to be little more than a sparse warehouse with a few modest decorations.

Parents who paid £35 per ticket encountered a situation so dire they called the police, with children reportedly crying at the sight of a person in what attendees described as a “terrifying outfit.” The event, created by House of Illuminati in Glasgow, promised fantastical spaces like an “Enchanted Garden” and “Twilight Tunnel” but delivered an underwhelming experience that forced organizers to shut down mid-way through its first day and issue refunds.

While the show was a bust, it brought us an iconic new meme for job disillusionment in the form of a photo: the green-haired Willy’s Chocolate Experience employee who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else on earth at that moment.

Mutant rat genitals expose peer review flaws

An actual laboratory rat, who is intrigued. Credit: Getty | Photothek

In February, Ars Technica senior health reporter Beth Mole covered a peer-reviewed paper published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology that created an uproar in the scientific community when researchers discovered it contained nonsensical AI-generated images, including an anatomically incorrect rat with oversized genitals. The paper, authored by scientists at Xi’an Honghui Hospital in China, openly acknowledged using Midjourney to create figures that contained gibberish text labels like “Stemm cells” and “iollotte sserotgomar.”

The publisher, Frontiers, posted an expression of concern about the article titled “Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway” and launched an investigation into how the obviously flawed imagery passed through peer review. Scientists across social media platforms expressed dismay at the incident, which mirrored concerns about AI-generated content infiltrating academic publishing.

Chatbot makes erroneous refund promises for Air Canada

If, say, ChatGPT gives you the wrong name for one of the seven dwarves, it’s not such a big deal. But in February, Ars senior policy reporter Ashley Belanger covered a case of costly AI confabulation in the wild. In the course of online text conversations, Air Canada’s customer service chatbot told customers inaccurate refund policy information. The airline faced legal consequences later when a tribunal ruled the airline must honor commitments made by the automated system. Tribunal adjudicator Christopher Rivers determined that Air Canada bore responsibility for all information on its website, regardless of whether it came from a static page or AI interface.

The case set a precedent for how companies deploying AI customer service tools could face legal obligations for automated systems’ responses, particularly when they fail to warn users about potential inaccuracies. Ironically, the airline had reportedly spent more on the initial AI implementation than it would have cost to maintain human workers for simple queries, according to Air Canada executive Steve Crocker.

Will Smith lampoons his digital double

The real Will Smith eating spaghetti, parodying an AI-generated video from 2023. Credit: Will Smith / Getty Images / Benj Edwards

In March 2023, a terrible AI-generated video of Will Smith’s AI doppelganger eating spaghetti began making the rounds online. The AI-generated version of the actor gobbled down the noodles in an unnatural and disturbing way. Almost a year later, in February 2024, Will Smith himself posted a parody response video to the viral jabberwocky on Instagram, featuring AI-like deliberately exaggerated pasta consumption, complete with hair-nibbling and finger-slurping antics.

Given the rapid evolution of AI video technology, particularly since OpenAI had just unveiled its Sora video model four days earlier, Smith’s post sparked discussion in his Instagram comments where some viewers initially struggled to distinguish between the genuine footage and AI generation. It was an early sign of “deep doubt” in action as the tech increasingly blurs the line between synthetic and authentic video content.

Robot dogs learn to hunt people with AI-guided rifles

A still image of a robotic quadruped armed with a remote weapons system, captured from a video provided by Onyx Industries. Credit: Onyx Industries

At some point in recent history—somewhere around 2022—someone took a look at robotic quadrupeds and thought it would be a great idea to attach guns to them. A few years later, the US Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) began evaluating armed robotic quadrupeds developed by Ghost Robotics. The robot “dogs” integrated Onyx Industries’ SENTRY remote weapon systems, which featured AI-enabled targeting that could detect and track people, drones, and vehicles, though the systems require human operators to authorize any weapons discharge.

The military’s interest in armed robotic dogs followed a broader trend of weaponized quadrupeds entering public awareness. This included viral videos of consumer robots carrying firearms, and later, commercial sales of flame-throwing models. While MARSOC emphasized that weapons were just one potential use case under review, experts noted that the increasing integration of AI into military robotics raised questions about how long humans would remain in control of lethal force decisions.

Microsoft Windows AI is watching

A screenshot of Microsoft's new — A screenshot of Microsoft’s new “Recall” feature in action. Credit: Microsoft

In an era where many people already feel like they have no privacy due to tech encroachments, Microsoft dialed it up to an extreme degree in May. That’s when Microsoft unveiled a controversial Windows 11 feature called “Recall” that continuously captures screenshots of users’ PC activities every few seconds for later AI-powered search and retrieval. The feature, designed for new Copilot+ PCs using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips, promised to help users find past activities, including app usage, meeting content, and web browsing history.

While Microsoft emphasized that Recall would store encrypted snapshots locally and allow users to exclude specific apps or websites, the announcement raised immediate privacy concerns, as Ars senior technology reporter Andrew Cunningham covered. It also came with a technical toll, requiring significant hardware resources, including 256GB of storage space, with 25GB dedicated to storing approximately three months of user activity. After Microsoft pulled the initial test version due to public backlash, Recall later entered public preview in November with reportedly enhanced security measures. But secure spyware is still spyware—Recall, when enabled, still watches nearly everything you do on your computer and keeps a record of it.

Google Search told people to eat rocks

In May, Ars senior gaming reporter Kyle Orland (who assisted commendably with the AI beat throughout the year) covered Google’s newly launched AI Overview feature. It faced immediate criticism when users discovered that it frequently provided false and potentially dangerous information in its search result summaries. Among its most alarming responses, the system advised humans could safely consume rocks, incorrectly citing scientific sources about the geological diet of marine organisms. The system’s other errors included recommending nonexistent car maintenance products, suggesting unsafe food preparation techniques, and confusing historical figures who shared names.

The problems stemmed from several issues, including the AI treating joke posts as factual sources and misinterpreting context from original web content. But most of all, the system relies on web results as indicators of authority, which we called a flawed design. While Google defended the system, stating these errors occurred mainly with uncommon queries, a company spokesperson acknowledged they would use these “isolated examples” to refine their systems. But to this day, AI Overview still makes frequent mistakes.

Stable Diffusion generates body horror

An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass. Credit: HorneyMetalBeing

In June, Stability AI’s release of the image synthesis model Stable Diffusion 3 Medium drew criticism online for its poor handling of human anatomy in AI-generated images. Users across social media platforms shared examples of the model producing what we now like to call jabberwockies—AI generation failures with distorted bodies, misshapen hands, and surreal anatomical errors, and many in the AI image-generation community viewed it as a significant step backward from previous image-synthesis capabilities.

Reddit users attributed these failures to Stability AI’s aggressive filtering of adult content from the training data, which apparently impaired the model’s ability to accurately render human figures. The troubled release coincided with broader organizational challenges at Stability AI, including the March departure of CEO Emad Mostaque, multiple staff layoffs, and the exit of three key engineers who had helped develop the technology. Some of those engineers founded Black Forest Labs in August and released Flux, which has become the latest open-weights AI image model to beat.

ChatGPT Advanced Voice imitates human voice in testing

An illustration of a computer synthesizer spewing out letters.

AI voice-synthesis models are master imitators these days, and they are capable of much more than many people realize. In August, we covered a story where OpenAI’s ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode feature unexpectedly imitated a user’s voice during the company’s internal testing, revealed by OpenAI after the fact in safety testing documentation. To prevent future instances of an AI assistant suddenly speaking in your own voice (which, let’s be honest, would probably freak people out), the company created an output classifier system to prevent unauthorized voice imitation. OpenAI says that Advanced Voice Mode now catches all meaningful deviations from approved system voices.

Independent AI researcher Simon Willison discussed the implications with Ars Technica, noting that while OpenAI restricted its model’s full voice synthesis capabilities, similar technology would likely emerge from other sources within the year. Meanwhile, the rapid advancement of AI voice replication has caused general concern about its potential misuse, although companies like ElevenLabs have already been offering voice cloning services for some time.

San Francisco’s robotic car horn symphony

A Waymo self-driving car in front of Google's San Francisco headquarters, San Francisco, California, June 7, 2024. — A Waymo self-driving car in front of Google’s San Francisco headquarters, San Francisco, California, June 7, 2024. Credit: Getty Images

In August, San Francisco residents got a noisy taste of robo-dystopia when Waymo’s self-driving cars began creating an unexpected nightly disturbance in the South of Market district. In a parking lot off 2nd Street, the cars congregated autonomously every night during rider lulls at 4 am and began engaging in extended honking matches at each other while attempting to park.

Local resident Christopher Cherry’s initial optimism about the robotic fleet’s presence dissolved as the mechanical chorus grew louder each night, affecting residents in nearby high-rises. The nocturnal tech disruption served as a lesson in the unintentional effects of autonomous systems when run in aggregate.

Larry Ellison dreams of all-seeing AI cameras

A colorized photo of CCTV cameras in London, 2024.

In September, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison painted a bleak vision of ubiquitous AI surveillance during a company financial meeting. The 80-year-old database billionaire described a future where AI would monitor citizens through networks of cameras and drones, asserting that the oversight would ensure lawful behavior from both police and the public.

His surveillance predictions reminded us of parallels to existing systems in China, where authorities already used AI to sort surveillance data on citizens as part of the country’s “sharp eyes” campaign from 2015 to 2020. Ellison’s statement reflected the sort of worst-case tech surveillance state scenario—likely antithetical to any sort of free society—that dozens of sci-fi novels of the 20th century warned us about.

A dead father sends new letters home

An AI-generated image featuring Dad's Uppercase handwriting. — An AI-generated image featuring my late father’s handwriting. Credit: Benj Edwards / Flux

AI has made many of us do weird things in 2024, including this writer. In October, I used an AI synthesis model called Flux to reproduce my late father’s handwriting with striking accuracy. After scanning 30 samples from his engineering notebooks, I trained the model using computing time that cost less than five dollars. The resulting text captured his distinctive uppercase style, which he developed during his career as an electronics engineer.

I enjoyed creating images showing his handwriting in various contexts, from folder labels to skywriting, and made the trained model freely available online for others to use. While I approached it as a tribute to my father (who would have appreciated the technical achievement), many people found the whole experience weird and somewhat disturbing. The things we unhinged Bing Chat-like journalists do to bring awareness to a topic are sometimes unconventional. So I guess it counts for this list!

For 2025? Expect even more AI

Thanks for reading Ars Technica this past year and following along with our team coverage of this rapidly emerging and expanding field. We appreciate your kind words of support. Ars Technica’s 2024 AI words of the year were: vibemarking, deep doubt, and the aforementioned jabberwocky. The old stalwart “confabulation” also made several notable appearances. Tune in again next year when we continue to try to figure out how to concisely describe novel scenarios in emerging technology by labeling them.

Looking back, our prediction for 2024 in AI last year was “buckle up.” It seems fitting, given the weirdness detailed above. Especially the part about the robot dogs with guns. For 2025, AI will likely inspire more chaos ahead, but also potentially get put to serious work as a productivity tool, so this time, our prediction is “buckle down.”

Finally, we’d like to ask: What was the craziest story about AI in 2024 from your perspective? Whether you love AI or hate it, feel free to suggest your own additions to our list in the comments. Happy New Year!

Benj Edwards is Ars Technica’s Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site’s dedicated AI beat in 2022. He’s also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

2024: The year AI drove everyone crazy Read More »

eu-fines-meta-e800-million-for-breaking-law-with-marketplace

EU fines Meta €800 million for breaking law with Marketplace

EU, facebook, Meta, syndication, Tech / Mike M. / November 14, 2024

During her tenure, Vestager has repeatedly targeted the world’s biggest tech companies, with some of the toughest actions against tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

The EU Commission on Thursday said Meta is “dominant in the market for personal social networks (…) as well as in the national markets for online display advertising on social media.”

Facebook Marketplace, launched in 2016, is a popular platform to buy and sell second-hand goods, especially household items such as furniture.

Meta has argued that it operates in a highly competitive environment. In a post published on Thursday, the tech giant said marketplaces in Europe continue “to grow and dominate in the EU,” pointing to platforms such as eBay, Leboncoin in France, and Marktplaats in the Netherlands, as “formidable competitors.”

Meta’s fine comes at a period of political transition both in the EU and the US.

Brussels officials have been aggressive both in their rhetoric and their antitrust probes against Big Tech giants as they sought to open markets for local start-ups.

In the past five years, EU regulators have also passed a landmark piece of legislation—the Digital Markets Act—with the aim to slow down dominant tech players and boost the local tech industry.

However, some observers expect the new commission, which is set to start a new 5-year term in weeks, to strike a more conciliatory tone over fears of retaliation from the incoming Trump administration.

EU fines Meta €800 million for breaking law with Marketplace Read More »

Claude AI to process secret government data through new Palantir deal

AI, AI ethics, Amazon, Anthropic, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, Claude, Claude 3, Claude 3.5, confabulation, ethical ai, futurism, government contracts, large language models, LLaMA, machine learning, Meta, military AI, openai, palantir, US Defense Department, US intelligence agencies, Victor Tangermann / 9u50fv / November 8, 2024

An ethical minefield

Since its founders started Anthropic in 2021, the company has marketed itself as one that takes an ethics- and safety-focused approach to AI development. The company differentiates itself from competitors like OpenAI by adopting what it calls responsible development practices and self-imposed ethical constraints on its models, such as its “Constitutional AI” system.

As Futurism points out, this new defense partnership appears to conflict with Anthropic’s public “good guy” persona, and pro-AI pundits on social media are noticing. Frequent AI commentator Nabeel S. Qureshi wrote on X, “Imagine telling the safety-concerned, effective altruist founders of Anthropic in 2021 that a mere three years after founding the company, they’d be signing partnerships to deploy their ~AGI model straight to the military frontlines.“

Aside from the implications of working with defense and intelligence agencies, the deal connects Anthropic with Palantir, a controversial company which recently won a $480 million contract to develop an AI-powered target identification system called Maven Smart System for the US Army. Project Maven has sparked criticism within the tech sector over military applications of AI technology.

It’s worth noting that Anthropic’s terms of service do outline specific rules and limitations for government use. These terms permit activities like foreign intelligence analysis and identifying covert influence campaigns, while prohibiting uses such as disinformation, weapons development, censorship, and domestic surveillance. Government agencies that maintain regular communication with Anthropic about their use of Claude may receive broader permissions to use the AI models.

Even if Claude is never used to target a human or as part of a weapons system, other issues remain. While its Claude models are highly regarded in the AI community, they (like all LLMs) have the tendency to confabulate, potentially generating incorrect information in a way that is difficult to detect.

That’s a huge potential problem that could impact Claude’s effectiveness with secret government data, and that fact, along with the other associations, has Futurism’s Victor Tangermann worried. As he puts it, “It’s a disconcerting partnership that sets up the AI industry’s growing ties with the US military-industrial complex, a worrying trend that should raise all kinds of alarm bells given the tech’s many inherent flaws—and even more so when lives could be at stake.”

Claude AI to process secret government data through new Palantir deal Read More »

Meta beats suit over tool that lets Facebook users unfollow everything

facebook, Meta, middleware, Policy, Section 230, third-party, unfollow everything / Kelly Newman / November 8, 2024

Meta has defeated a lawsuit—for now—that attempted to invoke Section 230 protections for a third-party tool that would have made it easy for Facebook users to toggle on and off their news feeds as they pleased.

The lawsuit was filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He feared that Meta might sue to block his tool, Unfollow Everything 2.0, because Meta threatened to sue to block the original tool when it was released by another developer. In May, Zuckerman told Ars that he was “suing Facebook to make it better” and planned to use Section 230’s shield to do it.

Zuckerman’s novel legal theory argued that Congress always intended for Section 230 to protect third-party tools designed to empower users to take control over potentially toxic online environments. In his complaint, Zuckerman tried to convince a US district court in California that:

Section 230(c)(2)(B) immunizes from legal liability “a provider of software or enabling tools that filter, screen, allow, or disallow content that the provider or user considers obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” Through this provision, Congress intended to promote the development of filtering tools that enable users to curate their online experiences and avoid content they would rather not see.

Digital rights advocates, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, supported Zuckerman’s case, urging that the court protect middleware. But on Thursday, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley granted Meta’s motion to dismiss at a hearing.

Corley has not yet posted her order on the motion to dismiss, but Zuckerman’s lawyers at the Knight Institute confirmed to Ars that their Section 230 argument did not factor into her decision. In a statement, lawyers said that Corley left the door open on the Section 230 claims, and EFF senior staff attorney Sophia Cope, who was at the hearing, told Ars Corley agreed that on “the merits the case raises important issues.”

Meta beats suit over tool that lets Facebook users unfollow everything Read More »

Meta’s new “Movie Gen” AI system can deepfake video from a single photo

AI, Biz & IT, Deepfakes, machine learning, Meta, Meta Movie Gen, openai, video synthesis / Shannon Garcia / October 5, 2024

On Friday, Meta announced a preview of Movie Gen, a new suite of AI models designed to create and manipulate video, audio, and images, including creating a realistic video from a single photo of a person. The company claims the models outperform other video-synthesis models when evaluated by humans, pushing us closer to a future where anyone can synthesize a full video of any subject on demand.

The company does not yet have plans of when or how it will release these capabilities to the public, but Meta says Movie Gen is a tool that may allow people to “enhance their inherent creativity” rather than replace human artists and animators. The company envisions future applications such as easily creating and editing “day in the life” videos for social media platforms or generating personalized animated birthday greetings.

Movie Gen builds on Meta’s previous work in video synthesis, following 2022’s Make-A-Scene video generator and the Emu image-synthesis model. Using text prompts for guidance, this latest system can generate custom videos with sounds for the first time, edit and insert changes into existing videos, and transform images of people into realistic personalized videos.

An AI-generated video of a baby hippo swimming around, created with Meta Movie Gen.

Meta isn’t the only game in town when it comes to AI video synthesis. Google showed off a new model called “Veo” in May, and Meta says that in human preference tests, its Movie Gen outputs beat OpenAI’s Sora, Runway Gen-3, and Chinese video model Kling.

Movie Gen’s video-generation model can create 1080p high-definition videos up to 16 seconds long at 16 frames per second from text descriptions or an image input. Meta claims the model can handle complex concepts like object motion, subject-object interactions, and camera movements.

AI-generated video from Meta Movie Gen with the prompt: “A ghost in a white bedsheet faces a mirror. The ghost’s reflection can be seen in the mirror. The ghost is in a dusty attic, filled with old beams, cloth-covered furniture. The attic is reflected in the mirror. The light is cool and natural. The ghost dances in front of the mirror.”

Even so, as we’ve seen with previous AI video generators, Movie Gen’s ability to generate coherent scenes on a particular topic is likely dependent on the concepts found in the example videos that Meta used to train its video-synthesis model. It’s worth keeping in mind that cherry-picked results from video generators often differ dramatically from typical results and getting a coherent result may require lots of trial and error.

Meta’s new “Movie Gen” AI system can deepfake video from a single photo Read More »