China Pressure Canceled World’s Largest Digital Human Rights Conference

The Chinese government pressured Zambia to cancel RightsCon, the world’s largest digital human rights conference, at the last minute, according to the conference’s organizers. Beijing was upset that the speaker’s list included prominent figures from Taiwanese civil society, AccessNow, the group that organizes RightsCon, wrote Friday. On Wednesday, guests and speakers from across the planet…

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a16z-Backed AI Site Civitai Is Mostly Porn, Despite Claiming Otherwise

In the two years that I’ve been reporting about Civitai, a platform for sharing AI image generation models that has been instrumental in the production of AI generated non-consensual porn, Civitai has consistently argued that the amount of adult content on the site has been overstated. But new research shows that, if anything, the amount…

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Steam Bends to Payment Processors on Porn Games

Steam, the dominant digital storefront for PC games operated by Valve, updated its guidelines to forbid “certain kinds of adult content” and blamed restrictions from payment processors and financial institutions. The update was initially spotted by Steam.DB, a platform that tracks and publishes data about Steam, and reported by the Japanese gaming site Gamespark. The…

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OpenAI chief Altman says DeepSeek’s R1 model ‘impressive’

DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence model, grabbed global attention last month when it stated in a paper that training its DeepSeek-V3 model required less than $6 million in computing power using the lower-capability Nvidia H800 chips. “DeepSeek’s r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price,” Altman said…

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