British regulator Ofcom has opened an investigation into X under the Online Safety Act. Engadget.com reports that this stems from the Grok AI chatbot on X being used to create and share undressed or skimpily dressed images of people…including sexualized images of children that it says may amount to child sexual abuse material. A couple of Asian countries including Malaysia have already banned Grok for the same reasons. If Ofcom deems that a company has broken the law, it can “require platforms to take specific steps to come into compliance or to remedy harm caused by the breach.” The regulator can additionally impose fines of up to £18 million ($24.3 million) or 10 percent of “qualifying” worldwide revenue, whichever of the two figures is higher. It can also seek a court order to stop payment providers or advertisers from working with a platform, or to require internet service providers to block a site in the UK. The UK government has said it would back any action that Ofcom takes against X.

A lot of us have played a bit with generative AI, and it is actually useful for some things. The problem is, the big tech firms behind AI are pretty determined to get us to use it for all sorts of things…things that we may be unwilling to use it for, or for which the learning curve is too high…or it’s too much of a pain to clean up after the wrong answers it gives out sometimes. Microsoft is in the thick of trying to get users to upgrade hardware in order to us their Copilot…which they are now touting as an AI-powered ‘agentic OS’ living within Windows 11. According to zdnet.com, Dell Vice Chairman Jeff Clarke spoke at CES and noted that the company had “an expectation of AI driving end-user demand, but it hasn’t quite been what we thought it was going to be a year ago.” Customers just aren’t seeing the value of AI PCs, and aren’t upgrading…some…particularly gamers…are not just refusing to upgrade from Windows 10 to the more intrusive Windows 11, but are ditching Microsoft all together for Linux. The agentic AI OS in computers may just not be quite ready for prime time yet. 

Google has pulled the AI overviews from some medical questions. Techcrunch.com says that after an investigation by The Guardian  which found that Google AI Overviews offered misleading information to certain health-related queries, the overviews disappeared. One of note was when users asked “what is the normal range for liver blood tests,” they would be presented with numbers that did not account for factors such as nationality, sex, ethnicity, or age, potentially leading them to think their results were healthy when they were not. After investigators tried several other queries, the AI Overviews were also gone. As has been noted before, it’s best not to just consult ‘Doctor Google,’ but to check with your actual physician when you are concerned about medical issues.

Walmart is adding to its on-demand drone delivery service. An added 150 stores will be making drone deliveries available, bringing the total to 270 locations…that Walmart says cover about 10% of the US population. Mashable.com notes that the drones come from Wing, which is a division of Google’s parent Alphabet. Walmart says it has completed over 150,000 successful drone deliveries since they started offering the service. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.