Artist Elmer Saflor, who goes by the online handle “Superelmer,” loves that millions of people have shared his “Running Away Balloon” comic since it became a popular meme in 2017.

However, just because lots of people have copied it, that doesn’t mean it’s OK for an AI meme generator to commercialize his copyrighted meme as a template for who knows how many ads, he told Ars. That’s why he’s fighting to stop one of the biggest meme generators currently leveraging AI to rapidly scale the allegedly illegal use.

In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, Saflor, a digital creator and artist in the Philippines, alleged that Memes Apps, LCC—which operates the content creation platforms Memes.ai and Memes AI Studio—violated copyright law by selling paid subscriptions to an ad generator that spits out copies of his comic without permission.

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On Thursday, Google became the third tech giant slapped with massive Digital Markets Act (DMA) fines, ordered to pay more than $1 billion for two serious violations that the European Commission (EC) found went unchecked for way too long.

In a press release, the EC explained that the fines were due to Google “self-preferencing its own services on Google Search” ($522 million) and for anti-steering practices, like charging fees or restricting app developers from directing consumers to cheaper purchase options outside of Google Play ($488 million).

Google has 60 days to make changes to its services, or else risk even more daily fines. To comply with the DMA, the EC has asked Google to "treat third-party services that feature on Google's search results in a fair and non-discriminatory manner” compared to its own services in categories like shopping, hotels, and flights. And Google must also allow app developers, “both technically and contractually,” to freely sign up users and promote offers outside of Google Play.

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On Monday, a judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors, ending the largest copyright class-action ever certified and granting the largest copyright settlement ever reached.

Back in May, some authors fought to block the settlement, which was proposed after the court ruled that Anthropic training AI on books was fair use; however, its piracy of works was likely not.

Authors opposing the settlement argued that lawyers’ fees were too high and authors’ payouts were too low. Hoping to avoid accepting the estimated $3,000-per-work payout and file separate lawsuits to seek higher damages, a handful of authors tried to opt out past the deadline.

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Yesterday, the European Commission slapped AliExpress with the largest fine yet under the Digital Services Act (DSA), exceeding $625 million.

In a press release, the EC said that AliExpress failed to “diligently assess and mitigate risks relating to the sale of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products on its e-commerce platform.”

Officials found that AliExpress not only failed to staff teams dedicated to removing counterfeit and dangerous items from the platform, but it also made it easy for bad actors to evade detection.

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This week, San Francisco’s attorney general, David Chiu, sent cease-and-desist letters, demanding that Apple and Google remove 13 so-called nudification apps from their app stores, Wired reported.

Nudification apps can make it trivially easy to transform ordinary photos of real people into explicit images. The harmful AI tools allow bad actors to remove clothing, change a person’s features, place them in sexualized positions, and swap victims’ faces onto other people’s naked bodies.

Chiu's letter warned that app stores were violating "California’s laws that prohibit supporting services that create deepfake pornography," Wired reported.

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Facing mounting pressure to acknowledge that Grok can still be used to generate non-consensual sexualized images of adults and minors, xAI filed a lawsuit Tuesday, suing the first user that Elon Musk’s firm has accused of using its chatbot to create illegal content.

The complaint targets Terry Wayne Harwood, who was arrested earlier this year for possession and distribution of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), the South Carolina attorney’s office announced.

As xAI alleged, the company assisted in that arrest after discovering that Harwood had been using two xAI accounts for months to undress or “nudify” non-sexual images of multiple victims, including a young girl who appeared to be as young as 10.

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On Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released preliminary findings verifying Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s claims that a driver involved in a fatal Texas crash that killed a grandmother overrode Full Self Driving in the moments ahead of impact.

Last month, 44-year-old Michael Butler told police that the autopilot feature was engaged at the time of the crash. On X, Musk disputed the claim, writing that Butler must have overridden the feature because “FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets, and this was a high-speed crash!” Moving to back Musk’s claim, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, said that internal data showed “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent of the accel pedal in this residential area.”

NTSB’s preliminary report, which does not yet determine what caused the crash, confirmed Tesla’s claims. Its probe found that FSD was engaged at the time of the crash, but electronic data showed “the driver manually overrode FSD (Supervised) by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100 percent.”

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This week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) won a key battle in its fight to reverse a visa-restriction policy that the Trump administration had used to attempt to revoke green cards and deport non-US citizens who work on misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

In an opinion published Tuesday, US District Judge James Boasberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the State Department from enforcing the policy until the CITR’s lawsuit is resolved.

On its face, the policy does not require visa denials or deportations. Instead, it authorizes immigration investigations into individuals suspected of helping foreign adversaries attempt to manipulate public opinion by suppressing US speech.

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New York became the first state to pause all construction of massive new data centers after Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul announced a one-year moratorium on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

The state-wide ban applies to data centers using 50 megawatts or more, officials told Reuters, and it won’t be lifted until the state figures out what "consistent standards" for responsible data center development in New York should look like.

Across the US, calls to halt data center construction have multiplied, as Americans grow increasingly concerned about risks of pollution, rising energy costs, and diminishing water supplies. At the federal level, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have introduced legislation seeking a possible nationwide construction ban. But Republicans are seemingly unlikely to embrace that legislation, given Donald Trump's claim that such moratoriums would threaten America's lead in the AI race.

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Apple is gunning for OpenAI, demanding steep penalties after stumbling on a “rare” bug that temporarily allowed a poached employee that joined OpenAI to maintain access to confidential information on Apple servers for weeks after his termination.

In a lawsuit filed Friday, Apple sought several injunctions blocking OpenAI from using confidential information allegedly stolen by former employees. According to Apple’s complaint, OpenAI conspired with former Apple employees as part of a grand scheme to “take an unlawful shortcut” and launch a line of AI-powered devices as marketable as Apple’s iPhone.

Apple explained that it found a bug while investigating internal messages between a then-current employee, Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, and an engineer who spent eight years “working on some of Apple’s most sensitive product development programs,” Chang Liu.

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The European Union is ramping up pressure on Meta to make big changes to Facebook and Instagram after the European Commission preliminarily found that features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and highly personalized content recommendations were addictive.

On Thursday, the EC said its investigation indicated that “Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults.”

“These features fuel the user's urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into ‘autopilot mode,' contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsive use,” the commission said.

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OpenAI is facing calls for "serious sanctions" after fighting to keep news organizations from snooping through millions of logs to find evidence of users skirting their paywalls by prompting ChatGPT to regurgitate their articles.

This evidence is considered among the most important to both sides, potentially either dooming OpenAI as an infringer or exonerating its chatbot technology as a transformative fair use of news sites' content.

In a sanctions motion Thursday, news organizations suing OpenAI—led by The New York Times—accused the AI firm of repeatedly lying for years to conceal evidence of infringement that could hobble OpenAI's defense.

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One of the most horrific cases of allegedly Grok-generated child sex images was shared in a proposed class action lawsuit that was expanded Tuesday. Now, young girls not only accuse X and xAI of building toxic AI "nudify" tools but also of shielding child predators by obstructing police investigations into Grok-generated child sex abuse materials (CSAM).

In March, a girl’s stepfather took his own life after cops discovered that he had used Grok to create 7,000 sexually explicit images using one photo taken when his stepdaughter was 11 years old, the amended complaint alleged.

Grok allowed the man to generate extreme images depicting incest and rape without flagging any harmful behavior, the complaint said. Seemingly, xAI’s child safety system only intervened after the man input a prompt for “gang rape.” That request sent a CyberTip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which alerted law enforcement to the AI CSAM.

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