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Erase your mistakes: One of Google Pixel’s best photo-editing features, “Magic Eraser,” is now making its way to other Android and iOS devices. But it won’t be free. This week, Google announced that the popular tool, which uses AI to remove unwanted content from images, will become available to Google One subscribers and to existing Pixel owners. Google One subscribers will receive a small handful of other editing tools as well, like a new HDR video effect, exclusive collage Styles and more.
Facebook jail: Sarah reports that Meta will be reforming its penalty system based on the recommendations from the Oversight Board, the independent body of experts, academics, civic leaders and lawyers who now weigh in on appeals decisions made by Meta. The social network says it will reform its system to focus less on penalizing users by restricting their ability to post and more on explaining the reasoning behind its content removals, which it believes will be a fairer and more effective means of moderating content on its platform.
TikTok in cars: TikTok is making its way into vehicles, starting with the new Mercedes-Benz E-Class that’s coming to market in fall 2023. The car’s newly updated MBUX infotainment system, which will feature a “superscreen” that spans the entire dashboard, will allow drivers to click on the TikTok app and watch videos when the vehicle is parked. How’s that for TikTok overload?
AI in my Spotify: Spotify this week launched a new AI feature called “DJ” to better personalize the music-listening experience for its users. Similar to a radio DJ, Spotify’s DJ feature will deliver a curated selection of music alongside AI-powered spoken commentary about the tracks and artists you like, using what Spotify says is a “stunningly realistic voice.” Neat!
Price drop: Netflix decreased its subscription costs in more than 100 territories over the past week as customers continue to contemplate which streaming services to keep amid price hikes. The company has been under fire lately after rolling out password-sharing rules to Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain, but another potential reason for the price decrease is to fare better against competition such as Paramount+, Apple TV+, Disney+ and Hulu.
Military secrets: On Monday, the U.S. Department of Defense secured an exposed server that had been spilling internal U.S. military emails to the open internet for the past two weeks. The server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data.
Compute by OpenAI: OpenAI is quietly launching a new developer platform that lets customers run the company’s newer machine learning models, like GPT-3.5, on dedicated capacity. In screenshots of documentation published to Twitter by users with early access, OpenAI describes the forthcoming offering, called Foundry, as “designed for cutting-edge customers running larger workloads.”
YouTube goes multilingual: YouTube announced this week that it’s rolling out support for multilanguage audio tracks, which will allow creators to add dubbing to their new and existing videos, helping them to reach an international audience. The company says the technology to support multilanguage audio tracks was built in-house at YouTube, but creators will need to partner directly with third-party dubbing providers to create their audio tracks.
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