Hub AI and society

Artificial Intelligence is a key technology that can help us solve major societal challenges such as climate change, energy supply, healthcare, education or logistics. AI can solve specific problems more effectively by supporting us in decision-making, automating solutions and thus scaling them, or discovering completely new solutions. But the use of AI also poses new risks, for example when it comes to surveillance or questions of social justice.

What is our society doing with AI – and what is AI doing to our society? We shed light on this question in our AI and Society Content Hub.

AI and society

OpenAI restructures under new foundation, Microsoft takes 27 percent stake

AI and society

The long-predicted deepfake dystopia has arrived with Sora 2

AI and society

Google downplays AI's environmental impact in new study

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AI and society
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OpenAI and Nvidia are preparing a multibillion-dollar investment in UK AI infrastructure together with London-based data center operator Nscale Global Holdings, according to Bloomberg. The announcement is expected next week, coinciding with Donald Trump's visit to Britain. OpenAI plans to contribute several billion dollars to the project. The investment will form part of the company's Stargate program, which is expanding its data center footprint worldwide. Nscale already revealed plans in January for a facility in Loughton that could house up to 45,000 Nvidia chips. OpenAI is also an anchor customer at an Nscale site in Norway.

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AI and society
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LLM hype critic Gary Marcus argues in a conversation with chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov that large language models only create the appearance of understanding, not genuine intelligence.

"It's one of the most profound illusions of our time that most people see these systems and attribute an understanding to them that they don't really have."

Gary Marcus

He explains that while language models can, for example, mimic the rules of chess by generating text based on examples, they can't actually play the game because they lack any real internal sense of what's happening on the board.

"They will repeat the rules, because in the way that they create text based on other texts, they'll be there. [...] But when it actually comes to playing the game, it doesn't have an internal model of what's going on."

For Marcus, this gap between surface-level performance and true comprehension is at the heart of the AI "illusion of intelligence."

AI and society
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Apple is facing a lawsuit in California from authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, who claim the company violated their copyrights by using their books to train AI models like OpenELM and Apple Intelligence. The lawsuit alleges Apple used the Books3 dataset, a collection of more than 196,000 pirated books that includes works by both authors. The complaint also accuses Apple of using its Applebot web crawler to copy website content and pull material from so-called shadow libraries.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages and a court order barring Apple from using their works. This case follows a recent lawsuit against Anthropic, which ended in a settlement after similar copyright claims.

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AI and society
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Warner Bros. Discovery is suing AI image generator company Midjourney for copyright infringement in federal court in California. The studio accuses Midjourney of building its business on the mass theft of content and using copyrighted characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Bugs Bunny, and Rick and Morty. Warner Bros. Discovery is joining Disney and Universal, which filed similar lawsuits earlier this year. The complaint includes side-by-side comparisons of Midjourney outputs and original film images, such as Christian Bale's Batman from "The Dark Knight." According to Warner Bros. Discovery, the AI tool generates Warner-owned characters even for prompts as generic as "classic comic superhero battle." Midjourney offers four paid subscription tiers ranging from $10 to $120 per month. The company has not commented on the allegations. Warner Bros. Discovery is seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work.

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AI and society
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OpenAI and Microsoft call AGI pointless, then make it the linchpin of billion-dollar deals

AI in practice

Google leans on token metrics, not revenue, adding to bubble talk about AI growth

AI and society

OpenAI restructures under new foundation, Microsoft takes 27 percent stake

Google News