A new survey released on Tuesday found that Americans used over 100 trillion megabytes of wireless data last year -- a 36% increase from the previous year and the largest single-year increase in the history of wireless data consumption. Reuters reports: The increase -- 26 trillion MBs over 2022 -- comes as a growing number of 5G wireless devices are being used, said wireless industry association CTIA that represents major wireless carriers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and technology firms. The total number of wireless connections rose to 558 million last year, up 6% over 2022, the survey found. Demand for spectrum use is soaring, driven in part by more wireless use in advancements including drones, self-driving vehicles, space missions and precision agriculture. The survey said the number of minutes Americans spent talking on the phone fell slightly from 2.5 trillion in 2022 to 2.4 trillion in 2023 and text messages were about the same at 2.1 trillion in 2023 over the prior year.

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Mistral AI has launched Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model with language and vision processing capabilities, positioning it to compete with AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. You can download its source code from Hugging Face, GitHub, or via a torrent link. VentureBeat reports: While the official details of the new model, including the data it was trained upon, remain under wraps, the core idea appears that Pixtral 12B will allow users to analyze images while combining text prompts with them. So, ideally, one would be able to upload an image or provide a link to one and ask questions about the subjects in the file. The move is a first for Mistral, but it is important to note that multiple other models, including those from competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic, already have image-processing capabilities. When an X user asked [Sophia Yang, the head of developer relations at the company] what makes the Pixtral 12-billion parameter model unique, she said it will natively support an arbitrary number of images of arbitrary sizes. As shared by initial testers on X, the 24GB model's architecture appears to have 40 layers, 14,336 hidden dimension sizes and 32 attention heads for extensive computational processing. On the vision front, it has a dedicated vision encoder with 1024x1024 image resolution support and 24 hidden layers for advanced image processing. This, however, can change when the company makes it available via API.

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Bluesky, the decentralized social networking startup, has introduced support for videos up to 60 seconds long in its latest update, version 1.91. The Verge reports: The videos will autoplay by default, but Bluesky says you can turn this feature off in the settings menu. You can also add subtitles to your videos, as well as apply labels for things like adult content. There are some limitations to Bluesky's video feature, as the platform will only allow up to 25 video uploads (or 10GB of video) per day. To protect Bluesky from harmful content or spam, it will require users to verify their email addresses before posting a video. Bluesky may also take away someone's ability to post videos if they repeatedly violate its community guidelines. The platform will also run videos through Hive, an AI moderation solution, and Thorn, a nonprofit that fights child sexual abuse, to check for illegal content or media that needs a warning.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The home of the Golden State Warriors was packed on Tuesday evening this week, but it wasn't to watch Steph Curry. Thousands of fans gathered at the Chase Center in downtown San Francisco to watch one of Silicon Valley's biggest ballers, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sit down for a conversation with the hosts of the Acquired podcast, David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert. Shortly after hopping onstage, Zuckerberg joked that he might need to schedule his next appearance in order to apologize for whatever he was about to say. After a beat, he added that he was just kidding and that, in fact, his days of apologizing are over. Zuckerberg has had something of a rebrand recently. He raises cattle in Hawaii now, has long bouncy curls and a gold chain, and commissions Roman-style statues of his wife. Onstage, the Facebook founder wore a boxy T-shirt he designed himself alongside fashion designer Mike Amiri that read "learning through suffering" in Greek letters. The tongue-in-cheek comment about apologizing was a reference to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who himself addressed a flub he'd made on the Acquired podcast earlier this year, via a pre-recorded video on a screen hanging over the crowd. Huang's original comment -- that he never would have started Nvidia if he knew what he did today -- was grossly taken out of context, he said. In the video, he clarified that he absolutely would start Nvidia again, and that his comment was more about the blissful ignorance of startup founders. While Zuckerberg's opening comment was just a friendly jab at Huang, it set the tone for Zuckerberg's new attitude toward life and business. The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook's content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a "political miscalculation" that he described as a "20-year mistake." Specifically, he said, he'd taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook's control. "Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don't actually think we were," said Zuckerberg. "When it's a political problem there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame."

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Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman reports: There are many reasons why you may want to sideload apps on your Android phone, but there are also good reasons why developers would want to block sideloading. A sideloaded app won't contribute to the developer's Play Store metrics, for one, but it also prevents the developer from curating which devices can use their app. Improperly sideloaded apps can also crash due to missing assets or code, or they might be missing certain features because you installed the wrong version for your device. Whatever the reason may be, developers who want to stop you from sideloading their apps now have an easier way to do so thanks to the Play Integrity API. The Google Play Integrity API is an interface that helps developers "check that interactions and server requests are coming from [their] genuine app binary running on a genuine Android device." It looks for evidence that the app has been tampered with, that the app is running in an "untrustworthy" software environment, that the device has Google Play Protect enabled, and more. If you've heard of or dealt with SafetyNet Attestation before on a rooted phone, then you're probably already familiar with Play Integrity, even if not by that name. Play Integrity is the successor to SafetyNet Attestation, only it comes with even more features for developers. As is the case with SafetyNet Attestation, developers call the Play Integrity API at any point in their app, receive what's called an integrity verdict, and then decide what they want to do from there. Some apps call the Play Integrity API when they launch and block access entirely depending on what the verdict is, while others only call the API when you're about to perform a sensitive action, so they can warn you that you shouldn't proceed. The Play Integrity API makes it easy for apps to offload the determination of whether the device and its software environment are "genuine," and with the latest update to the API, apps can now easily determine whether the person who installed them is "genuine" as well. "As Google continues to bolster Play Integrity's detection mechanisms and add new features, it's going to become harder and harder for power users to justify rooting Android," concludes Rahman. "At the same time, regular users will be better protected from potentially risky and fraudulent interactions, so it's clear that Play Integrity will continue to be adopted by more and more apps."

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Waymo's driverless cars have a much lower crash rate than human drivers, with fewer than one injury-causing crash per million miles driven, compared to an estimated 64 crashes by human drivers over the same distance. As Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee notes, a significant portion of Waymo's most severe crashes involved human drivers rear-ending the Waymo vehicles. From the report: Twenty injuries might sound like a lot, but Waymo's driverless cars have traveled more than 22 million miles. So driverless Waymo taxis have been involved in fewer than one injury-causing crash for every million miles of driving -- a much better rate than a typical human driver. Last week Waymo released a new website to help the public put statistics like this in perspective. Waymo estimates that typical drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix -- Waymo's two biggest markets -- would have caused 64 crashes over those 22 million miles. So Waymo vehicles get into injury-causing crashes less than one-third as often, per mile, as human-driven vehicles. Waymo claims an even more dramatic improvement for crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag. Driverless Waymos have experienced just five crashes like that, and Waymo estimates that typical human drivers in Phoenix and San Francisco would have experienced 31 airbag crashes over 22 million miles. That implies driverless Waymos are one-sixth as likely as human drivers to experience this type of crash. The new data comes at a critical time for Waymo, which is rapidly scaling up its robotaxi service. A year ago, Waymo was providing 10,000 rides per week. Last month, Waymo announced it was providing 100,000 rides per week. We can expect more growth in the coming months. So it really matters whether Waymo is making our roads safer or more dangerous. And all the evidence so far suggests that it's making them safer. It's not just the small number of crashes Waymo vehicles experience -- it's also the nature of those crashes. Out of the 23 most serious Waymo crashes, 16 involved a human driver rear-ending a Waymo. Three others involved a human-driven car running a red light before hitting a Waymo. There were no serious crashes where a Waymo ran a red light, rear-ended another car, or engaged in other clear-cut misbehavior.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Rolling out starting today, Google Search results will now directly link to The Internet Archive to add historical context for the links in your results. [...] Google has partnered with The Internet Archive, a non-profit research library that, in part, stores and preserves massive portions of the web to be easily referenced later. This is done through the "Wayback Machine" which can show a website or specific page as it existed on a previous date. Through this new partnership, Google will link directly to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for pages that you find in Search. To access The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine links through Google Search you'll need to click the three-dots menu button that appears alongside all search results and then tap on "More about this page." This new feature is still actively rolling out, but Google was able to provide an image to show what the integration looks like. In a post regarding the announcement, The Internet Archive said that this partnership "underscores the importance of web archiving."

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An anonymous reader shares a column: The PS5 Pro's announcement yesterday wasn't a surprise. What was a surprise was the price: at $699.99, it debuts as Sony's most expensive console ever. It brought back memories of the PS3â(TM)s controversial price tag, a console that when adjusted for inflation is the same $779 price point of a PS5 Pro with the additional disc drive. It's a very expensive PlayStation, and I fear it's a test of what's to come for next-gen console pricing. For years, console gamers have been used to purchasing hardware at a significantly reduced price compared to what you could build yourself in the PC gaming space. Yes, you can find components that match the PS5 or Xbox Series X on paper, but it's still difficult to hit the price points that consoles sell for, especially when they're discounted during promotions. Besides, the easy plug-and-play model, simplified UI, and hassle-free warranty process are all big benefits over having to build or find a good prebuilt PC and then deal with Windows and driver updates. Consoles sell in their millions because they're far more consumer-friendly than PCs.

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Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent. From a report: Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was pressed at an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, and initially rejected that claim. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that". But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge. Shoebridge: "The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That's the reality, isn't it? Claybaugh: "Correct." Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google co-founder and ex-Alphabet president Sergey Brin said he's back working at Google "pretty much every day" because he hasn't seen anything as exciting as the recent progress in AI -- and doesn't want to miss out. "It's a big, fast-moving field," Brin said at All-In Summit of AI, adding that there is "tremendous value to humanity," before explaining why he doesn't think training more capable AI will require massively scaling up compute. "I've read some articles that extrapolate [compute] ... and I don't know if I'm quite a believer," he said, "partly because the algorithmic improvements that have come over the last few years maybe are actually even outpacing the increased compute that's being put into these models."

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A security researcher has exposed a critical vulnerability in the WHOIS system. Benjamin Harris, CEO of watchTowr, gained unprecedented access by registering an expired domain once used for .mobi's authoritative WHOIS server. His rogue server received millions of queries from thousands of systems, including government agencies, certificate authorities, and major tech companies. ArsTechnica adds: The humor aside, the rogue WHOIS server gave him powers he never should have had. One of the greatest was the ability to dictate the email address certificate authority GlobalSign used to determine if a party applying for a TLS certificate was the rightful owner of the domain name the certificate would apply to. Like the vast majority of its competitors, GlobalSign uses an automated process. An application for example.com, for instance, will prompt the certificate authority to send an email to the administrative email address listed in the authoritative WHOIS for that domain. If the party on the other end clicks a link, the certificate is automatically approved. When Harris generated a certificate signing request for microsoft.mobi, he promptly received an email from GlobalSign. The email gave him the option of receiving a verification link at whois@watchtowr.com. For ethical reasons, he stopped the experiment at this point. The vulnerability stems from outdated WHOIS client configurations, which underscores systemic weaknesses in internet infrastructure management.

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Nvidia is banking on its software expertise and broad GPU ecosystem to stay ahead in the fiercely competitive AI chip market, CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with Goldman Sachs Wednesday. Huang pointed to NVIDIA's large base of installed GPUs and their software compatibility as key strengths. Huang highlighted three key elements of Nvidia's competitive moat: a large installed base of GPUs across multiple platforms, the ability to enhance hardware with software like domain-specific libraries, and expertise in building rack-level systems. The CEO said Nvidia's chip design prowess, noting the company has developed seven different chips for its upcoming Blackwell platform. These comments come as Nvidia faces increasing competition from rivals. Addressing supply chain concerns, Huang said NVIDIA has sufficient in-house intellectual property to shift manufacturing if necessary without significant disruption. The company plans to begin shipping Blackwell-based products in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, with volume production ramping up in fiscal 2026, according to Huang. From the note that Goldman Sachs sent to its clients: 1) Accelerated Computing: Mr. Huang highlighted his long-held view that Moore's Law was no longer delivering the rate of innovation it had in the past and, as such, was driving computation inflation in Data Centers. Further, he noted that the densification and acceleration of the $1 trillion data center infrastructure installed base alone would drive growth over the next 10 years, as it would deliver material performance improvement and/or cost savings. 2) Customer ROI: Mr. Huang noted that we have hit the end of transistor scaling that enabled better utilization rates and cost reductions in the previous virtualization and cloud computing cycles. He explained that, while using a GPU to augment a CPU will drive an increase in cost in absolute terms (~2x) in the case of Spark (distributed processing system and analytics engine for big data), the net cost benefit could be as large as ~10x for an application like Spark given the speed up of ~20x. From a revenue generation perspective, Mr. Huang shared that hyperscale customers can generate $5 in rental revenue for every $1 spent on Nvidia's infrastructure, given sustained strength in the demand for accelerated computing.

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Google is adding some new features to Chrome that aim to help users organize and keep track of their browser tabs across both desktop and mobile devices. From a report: The search giant announced in a new blog post that tab groups -- which enable Android and desktop Chrome users to keep related pages together in custom-labeled groups -- will start rolling out to Chrome for iOS starting today. Once Chrome is updated, iPhone and iPad users can access the feature by opening the tab grid, long-pressing on a tab, and selecting "Add Tab to New Group." Custom names and colors can then be assigned to the created tab groups to help keep them organized and easily identifiable. Another feature that's rolling out across Android and desktop Chrome apps is the ability to sync those saved tab groups across multiple devices.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A giant unregulated currency is undermining America's fight against arms dealers, sanctions busters and scammers. Almost as much money flowed through its network last year as through Visa cards. And it has recently minted more profit than BlackRock, with a tiny fraction of the workforce. Its name: tether. The cryptocurrency has grown into an important cog in the global financial system, with as much as $190 billion changing hands daily. In essence, tether is a digital U.S. dollar -- though one privately controlled in the British Virgin Islands by a secretive crew of owners, with its activities largely hidden from governments. Known as a stablecoin for its 1:1 peg to the dollar, tether gained early use among crypto aficionados. But it has spread deep into the financial underworld, enabling a parallel economy that operates beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. Wherever the U.S. government has restricted access to the dollar financial system -- Iran, Venezuela, Russia -- tether thrives as a sort of incognito dollar used to move money across borders. Russian oligarchs and weapons dealers shuttle tether abroad to buy property and pay suppliers for sanctioned goods. Venezuela's sanctioned state oil firm takes payment in tether for cargoes. Drug cartels, fraud rings and terrorist groups such as Hamas use it to launder income. Yet in dysfunctional economies such as Argentina and Turkey, beset by hyperinflation and a shortage of hard currency, tether is also a lifeline for people who use it for quotidian payments and as a way to protect their savings. Tether is arguably the first successful real-world product to emerge from the cryptocurrency revolution that began over a decade ago. It has made its owners immensely rich. Tether has $120 billion in assets, mostly risk-free U.S. Treasury bills, along with positions in bitcoin and gold. Last year it generated $6.2 billion in profit, outearning BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, by $700 million.

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Television has ceased to be the main source of news in the UK for the first time since the 1960s as Britons turn increasingly to online news and social media apps, according to research by the media regulator. From a report: Ofcom said on Tuesday that viewing of TV news had continued to fall steeply, with online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and digital versions of broadcasters now slightly more widely used as a source of news.ÂIn its annual study of audience habits, the watchdog said 71 per cent of adults obtained news online, compared with 70 per cent via TV -- a finding it described as "marking a generational shift in the balance of news media." The reach of TV news has fallen from 75 per cent last year. More than four-fifths of people between the ages of 16 and 24 obtained their news from social media, Ofcom found. The report underlines the pressure on more traditional linear broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 to accelerate moves to digital platforms, which include their own streaming sites as well as social media apps such as TikTok.Â

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Ford is seeking a patent for technology that would allow it to tailor in-car advertising by listening to conversations among vehicle occupants, as well as by analyzing a car's historical location and other data, according to a patent application published late last month. The Record: "In one example, the controller may monitor user dialogue to detect when individuals are in a conversation," the patent application says. "The conversations can be parsed for keywords or phrases that may indicate where the occupants are traveling to." The tech -- labeled as "in-vehicle advertisement presentation" -- will determine where a car is located, how fast it is traveling, what type of road it is driving on and whether it is in traffic. It also will predict routes, speeds and destinations to customize ads to drivers, the application said. The system could pull data from "audio signals within the vehicle and/or historical user data, selecting a number of the advertisements to present to the user during the trip," the patent application said. By monitoring dialogue between vehicle occupants the ad controller system can determine when to deliver audio versus visual ads, providing ads to drivers as they travel "through a human-machine interface (HMI) of the vehicle," the application said.

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Samsung Electronics, the world's top maker of smartphones, TVs and memory chips, is cutting up to 30% of its overseas staff at some divisions, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing sources with direct knowledge of the matter. From the report: South Korea-based Samsung has instructed subsidiaries worldwide to reduce sales and marketing staff by about 15% and the administrative staff by up to 30%, two of the sources said. The plan will be implemented by the end of this year and would impact jobs across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, one person said. [...] It is not clear how many people would be let go and which countries and business units would be most affected. In a statement, Samsung said workforce adjustments conducted at some overseas operations were routine, and aimed at improving efficiency. Samsung employed a total of 267,800 people as of the end of 2023, and more than half, or 147,000 employees, are based overseas, according to its latest sustainability report.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content like news and recipes may amount to anticompetitive practices. In a letter to the agencies, the senators, led by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), explained their position that the latest AI features are hitting creators and publishers while they're down. As journalistic outlets experience unprecedented consolidation and layoffs, "dominant online platforms, such as Google and Meta, generate billions of dollars per year in advertising revenue from news and other original content created by others. New generative AI features threaten to exacerbate these problems." The letter continues: "While a traditional search result or news feed links may lead users to the publisher's website, an AI-generated summary keeps the users on the original search platform, where that platform alone can profit from the user's attention through advertising and data collection. [] Moreover, some generative AI features misappropriate third-party content and pass it off as novel content generated by the platform's AI. Publishers who wish to avoid having their content summarized in the form of AI-generated search results can only do so if they opt out of being indexed for search completely, which would result in a materially significant drop in referral traffic. In short, these tools may pit content creators against themselves without any recourse to profit from AI-generated content that was composed using their original content. This raises significant competitive concerns in the online marketplace for content and advertising revenues." Essentially, the senators are saying that a handful of major companies control the market for monetizing original content via advertising, and that those companies are rigging that market in their favor. Either you consent to having your articles, recipes, stories, and podcast transcripts indexed and used as raw material for an AI, or you're cut out of the loop. The letter goes on to ask the FTC and DOJ to investigate whether these new methods are "a form of exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition in violation of the antitrust laws." [...] The letter was co-signed by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Tina Smith (D-MN).

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Scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have observed the first neutrino interactions in the Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND), marking a significant milestone in their efforts to explore neutrino oscillations and search for a potential fourth neutrino flavor that could challenge the Standard Model of particle physics. Phys.org reports: SBND is the final element that completes Fermilab's Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program and will play a critical role in solving a decades-old mystery in particle physics. Getting SBND to this point has been an international effort. The detector was built by an international collaboration of 250 physicists and engineers from Brazil, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. [...] The Short Baseline Neutrino Program at Fermilab will perform searches for neutrino oscillation and look for evidence that could point to this fourth neutrino. SBND is the near detector for the Short Baseline Neutrino Program while ICARUS, which started collecting data in 2021, is the far detector. A third detector called MicroBooNE finished recording particle collisions with the same neutrino beamline that same year. The Short Baseline Neutrino Program at Fermilab differs from previous short-baseline measurements with accelerator-made neutrinos because it features both a near detector and far detector. SBND will measure the neutrinos as they were produced in the Fermilab beam and ICARUS will measure the neutrinos after they've potentially oscillated. So, where previous experiments had to make assumptions about the original composition of the neutrino beam, the SBN Program will definitively know. "Understanding the anomalies seen by previous experiments has been a major goal in the field for the last 25 years," said Schmitz. "Together SBND and ICARUS will have outstanding ability to test the existence of these new neutrinos."

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After tonight's ABC presidential debate, Taylor Swift announced her support for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election after AI-generated images falsely depicted her endorsing Donald Trump. "Recently I was made aware that AI of 'me' falsely endorsing Donald Trump's presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation," Swift wrote in an Instagram post. "It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth." The Verge reports: Her post references an incident in late August, in which Trump shared a collection of images to Truth Social intended to show support for his presidential campaign. Some of the photos depict "Swifties for Trump," and another obviously AI-generated image shows Swift herself in an Uncle Sam-type image with text reading, "Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump." The former president captioned the post, "I accept!" [...] This wasn't the first time AI images of Swift were circulated on social media. Earlier this year, nonconsensual sexualized images of her made using AI were shared on X. That incident prompted the White House to call for legislation to "deal" with the issue.

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