Mattel partnered with Adobe to use supposedly copyright-cleared AI-generated imagery for the backgrounds in some of their collector edition Barbie boxes last year.

They were spanked so hard by the collecting community over it that they followed a now-deleted suggestion from one Redditor to start explicitly crediting the packaging designer on each information page for new collector releases.

Mattel has a strange history with balancing what the people want with what their shareholders want.

Edited to correct word choice

I hadn’t realized the “lucky” button was still in use. The first result in Google searches is so much less likely to be of value now than it had been back when search was still unenshittified that I guessed they’d have done away with the ‘one result’ option.

If they left the lucky option as a fully functional silver arrow, they lose some revenue they’d otherwise have gotten by forcing you to sift through bad results.

From NPR:

…using several AI tools, Wales’ husband and Yentzer managed to create a convincing video using about a 4.5-minute-video of Pelkey, his funeral photo and a script that Wales prepared

Emphasis mine.

This was not testimony. It was part of the victim impact statement and was scripted by his sister. AI was only used to recreate the voice and visage. I am usually a fan of 404 Media, but that should be explicitly stated.

The use of the word “testimony” is not entirely accurate in the sense that that term is used in court.

Reminds me of this research from a few years ago, though the technical aspects of that are hard to find online. It seems much less interactive than this, but contains some precursor concepts about manipulating a shared projection of a physical object.

My reply was addressing what you’d said here:

So we know they paid some money to settle that, but we don’t know what was going on (beyond research like the one in the linked article by the OP that says it’s unlikely anybody is sending secret voice data).

We do know what was going on. It wasn’t user-end research. A contractor whose job was to determine the efficacy of Siri approached the media because they could tell the audio capture for quite a bit of what they were hearing wasn’t intentional.

To your earlier points, I hope Apple is terrified, and I don’t think that voice activation can be implemented in a way that protects its users from privacy violations.

I don’t know what about my reply led you to believe I am ok with any of this, but to clarify, I am a proponent of strict privacy laws that protect consumers before businesses.

I think “accidents” precede intentional action and I only trust Apple (or any other big tech company) as far as I can throw it.

Nearly every settlement with a major corporation is settled without the company admitting wrongdoing. I don’t doubt that there was an accidental glitch involved. What confuses me is why that makes it ok to you.

It’s generally a safe bet with cases like this that it would not have made it at far as it did in courts or been as hefty in compensation if the evidence hadn’t been damning.

Here’s the original article in the Guardian that set the whole thing in motion. Apple formally apologized for it.

In other words, we kinda do know what happened. There was a whistleblower on the contractor side.

People worried about “digital eavesdropping” aren’t paranoid. There’s an entire class-action lawsuit based on Apple’s Siri getting caught being activated without the trigger command and data that was captured being sent to third party providers.