The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on fraudulent tech advertising, which escalated substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing orders to eight social media and video streaming platforms seeking information on commercial practices that are deceptive or expose consumers to false health-care products, financial scams and counterfeit or fake goods. The action compels services including Meta Platforms’ Instagram, Alphabet’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok and Amazon’s Twitch to provide answers in 45 days so the FTC can analyze their practices. In addition to fact-finding, the order is intended to pressure the companies to self-regulate. Read more

Google has opened a public waitlist for its Bard AI chatbot to users in the U.S. and UK. The technology, which Google intends to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will be made available to increments of users on a rolling basis, the company said, with more countries and languages to come. Bard was announced last month. Powered by a lightweight, optimized version of Google’s LaMDA large language model, the company calls it an “early experiment” that will eventually be updated with more sophisticated models. The same can be said for ChatGPT, which already has more than 100 million users. Read more

Microsoft is bringing Bing Image Creator to the new Bing search engine and Edge browser. Powered by an advanced version of the DALL-E model from OpenAI, the new tools will allow users to generate images using word prompts to describe what they want to want to create. The news comes as Microsoft says its new Bing AI Copilot has had “more than 100 million chats to date,” with people using it to refine answers to complex questions or as entertainment or creative inspiration. Bing data indicates images are one of the most searched categories, second only to general web searches, according to Microsoft. Read more

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew plans to offer broad platform safety and security promises at his hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to testimony provided in advance of today’s event. The well-being of child users will be a point of focus, as will the Chinese-owned app’s proposed firewall to protect U.S. data from foreign access and government interference. “TikTok will remain a platform for free expression and will not be manipulated by any government,” Chew’s prepared remarks indicate, noting “there are more than 150 million Americans who love our platform.” Read more

New York-based Runway is releasing its Gen 2 system, which generates video clips of up to a few seconds from text or image-based user prompts. The company, which specializes in artificial intelligence-enhanced film and editing tools, has opened a waitlist for the new product that will be accessed through a private Discord channel by an audience grown over time. Last year, Meta Platforms and Google both previewed text-to-video software in the research stage, but neither detailed plans to make their platforms public. Bloomberg called Runway’s limited launch “the most high-profile instance of such text-to-video generation outside of a lab.” Read more