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TikTok Becomes First Social Network to Auto Label AI-Generated Content

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TikTok this week announced that it has started automatically labeling AI-generated content created on third-party platforms, preventing AI images and videos from confusing and misleading viewers.

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Content made using TikTok’s AI creation tools has included an AI label for more than a year, but going forward, TikTok will also label AI images made through other platforms. TikTok’s tool will read Content Credentials, a technology from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Content Credentials are designed to attach metadata to AI content, facilitating AI labeling.

TikTok’s AI labeling started rolling out today on images and videos, and it will soon be coming to audio-only content. Content created with AI will have a label that says “AI-generated” under an account’s TikTok username.

Labeling may be gradual, as content needs to have Content Credentials included for it to be identified and labeled. As other platforms adopt credentials, AI identification will increase across all social networks.

In the future, TikTok will add Content Credentials to TikTok content that will remain when images and videos are downloaded, so people and other social networks can use the C2PA Verify tools to identify AI content that was made on TikTok.

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Apple Announces New iPad Pro With M4 Chip, OLED Display, and More

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Apple Event Live Blog: New iPad Pro, iPad Air, and More

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Apple Says iOS 17.5 Coming ‘Soon’ With These New Features for iPhones

Apple today announced that iOS 17.5 will be released to the public “soon,” following over a month of beta testing. While the software update is relatively minor, it does have a few new features and changes, as outlined in the list below. “The new Pride Radiance watch face and iPhone and iPad wallpapers will be available soon with watchOS 10.5, iOS 17.5, and iPadOS 17.5,” said Apple, in its…



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TikTok Sues U.S. Government Over Bill Requiring Sale

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TikTok parent company ByteDance today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government in an effort to put a stop to the bill requiring TikTok to be sold off to a non-Chinese company in a matter of months, or face a U.S. ban.

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The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that passed in April requires ByteDance to divest its TikTok ownership within nine months, with the possibility of a three-month extension if a deal is in progress. If TikTok is not sold off, the bill will prevent app stores and companies in the U.S. from providing the TikTok app to users. As of now, TikTok will be forced to shut down on January 19, 2025.

ByteDance calls the act “obviously unconstitutional,” and says that there is no path for TikTok to continue operating in the United States. The 270-day timeline is “not possible,” and even if it were, the company claims that the act is still an “extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power.”

If upheld, it would allow the government to decide that a company may no longer own and publish the innovative and unique speech platform it created. If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down. And for TikTok, any such divestiture would disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community on a platform devoted to shared content — an outcome fundamentally at odds with the Constitution’s commitment to both free speech and individual liberty.

The lawsuit argues that the act violates the First Amendment, and it claims that “speculative and analytically flawed” concern over security and content manipulation is an insufficient reason for limiting the free speech of TikTok’s 170 million U.S. users.

ByteDance says that a U.S. TikTok platform would not be commercially viable because it would limit the pool of content, undermining “the value and viability of the U.S. TikTok business.” ByteDance also claims that it would be technologically impossible to give the TikTok source code to a new owner because it would take years for new engineers to become familiar enough with the code to perform routine maintenance, plus the code would need to be rearchitected not to use ByteDance’s software tools, which cannot be done in 270 days.

The Chinese government has said that it will “firmly oppose” any effort to sell TikTok to a U.S. company, and China would need to approve a sale. China has no intention of allowing the TikTok recommendation engine to be divested. ByteDance has already moved U.S. data to servers owned by Oracle, but U.S. lawmakers do not feel that is enough to protect users.

There are few U.S. companies that could afford to purchase TikTok, and the tech giants that could buy it would likely be restricted from doing so due to antitrust concerns.

ByteDance is asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment that the act violates the U.S. Constitution, preventing the U.S. Attorney General from enforcing it.

Note: Due to the political or social nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.



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TikTok May Be Breaking App Store Rules by Avoiding Commissions on Tips

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TikTok appears to be quietly showing some users an option to purchase “coins” on the web instead of through in-app purchases, circumventing the commission that Apple receives on digital purchases.

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As noted by David Tesler (via TechCrunch) TikTok has been offering a limited number of TikTok app users an option to purchase coins on TikTok.com instead of in the app. “Try recharging on tiktok.com to avoid in-app service fees,” reads the text. “You can save the service fee and get access to popular payment methods.”

Following through and opting to purchase from TikTok.com brings up an interface for using payment options such as PayPal or a credit/debit card. “Save around 25% with a lower third-party service fee,” the app suggests. The purchase workflow can be completed entirely in the TikTok app with no requirement to use in-app purchase.

TikTok’s coins are used as a way for users to provide “Gifts” to creators. Users pay real money for a certain number of coins, and those coins are used for little gift emoji that can be provided to creators. TikTok says that gifts are used to determine the number of “diamonds” awarded to content creators, and diamonds can be redeemed for money. A TikTok coin is worth about half a diamond, and 100 diamonds is worth 50 cents, so TikTok is collecting quite a bit of money during the conversion.

Apple requires in-app purchase to be used for digital goods and services, and TikTok’s “coins” presumably count as a digital good. If TikTok is indeed offering customers a way to purchase coins without in-app purchase as suggested by the screenshots from Tesler, then TikTok is breaking Apple’s App Store rules.

TikTok coins would likely be considered tips, and Apple has forced other major social networks like Facebook to use in-app purchase for a creator tipping feature. What TikTok is doing is actually similar to the direct purchase options that Epic Games added to the Fortnite app back in 2020, a move that ultimately led to the banning of the Fortnite app and a multi-year legal battle.

Most TikTok users are only able to purchase coins through the in-app purchase interface, and the option to purchase direct from TikTok with a credit or debit card is allegedly a feature showing up only for a small number of users. The option is perhaps being limited to those who have spent a lot of money on coins in the past.



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Sale or No Sale, TikTok Will Never Be the Same

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The end of TikTok has begun. As the dust settles from a week of shockingly fast legislative action by the US Congress, it’s clear that TikTok next year will look much different from the TikTok we’re using today.

When President Joe Biden signed a $95 billion dollar foreign aid package on Wednesday, it brought to life a nightmare that has haunted TikTok for more than four years. If TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, refuses to divest its stakes in the company, the United States will ban the app nationwide. The signing started the clock, giving TikTok 270 days to find a new owner. (As The Washington Post’s Cristiano Lima-Strong noted, TikTok’s time will run out the day before Inauguration Day 2025.)

There are a few ways this could all shake out. An American company or private equity fund could buy TikTok and its powerful recommendation algorithm. Or, a buyer might have to accept just the bones of the platform without that algorithmic muscle; The Information reported on Thursday that ByteDance has already started gaming out what a sale without the algorithm would look like. Or, perhaps no buyer can be found and TikTok goes poof.

Unless TikTok or a horde of its users were to somehow win a lawsuit challenging the law signed this week—a lawsuit the company has already said it plans to file—all the potential outcomes lead to an app that is dramatically different.

If a US tech company were to, miraculously, buy out the app and algorithm from ByteDance, it’ll likely integrate the app into its own products and services. But I doubt we’ll ever see a “TikTok by Meta.” Meta and other tech giants have come under intense antitrust scrutiny in recent years. If any company with a big social platform were to gobble up one of its top competitors, that would set off alarms at the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.

Microsoft has suggested that it has an interest in buying TikTok, and it might be one of the app’s only viable choices for a buyer. Microsoft’s biggest subsidiary otherwise is, well, LinkedIn—and can we even call LinkedIn a TikTok rival with a straight face?

Separately, if, say, a private equity firm like Blackstone were to purchase TikTok without its much-envied algorithm, rebuilding the heart of the app could be difficult. A company without a deep bench of algorithmic wizards on hand likely wouldn’t have the expertise to quickly reengineer a feed-based social media platform from scratch. If they tried, I doubt the results would be pretty.

And if there’s no new owner? Well, I guess we’re left with YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. TikTok’s popularity in the US forced Google and Meta to invest in vertical video, but those platforms mostly cater to the younger “Skibidi Toilet” generation. They wouldn’t easily fill a TikTok-shaped gap on the US internet.

Still, the law passed this week may not stand for much longer. In a statement calling it unconstitutional, TikTok seemed confident that the law could be overturned. “We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail,” a TikTok spokesperson said on Wednesday. The company used a similar argument last year to win an injunction blocking a ban passed in Montana.

Regardless of how this lawsuit plays out, TikTok will be different. The question is just what kind of “different” that will be.

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Time Travel

In December, WIRED contributor Dexter Thomas sat down with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during the app’s first-ever music festival, in Arizona. In that interview and others like it, Chew declares his belief that skepticism over TikTok’s security will diminish as the app earns the trust of lawmakers.

Chew turned out to be wrong. But even after Biden signed the bill mandating divestiture this week, TikTok posted a video of Chew addressing his users and promising to continue to invest in making the platform better and more secure. I do wonder, however, whether that gentle optimism will morph into something more aggressive over the course of the next year as the new law’s deadline looms closer.



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Senate passes the bill that could ban TikTok

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The Senate approved a measure that will require ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban, in a vote of 79 to 18. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act next goes to President Biden. The president has already said he’ll sign the bill into law. (Yes, as predicted, I’m writing about this again.)

TikTok has faced the ire of US politicians for a few years now, but this bill has picked up support across both political parties. It sailed through the House of Representatives before being approved (bundled with a package for foreign aid) by the Senate on Tuesday.

The bill states that TikTok would have up to 12 months to divest from its parent company ByteDance, or face a ban in US app stores and web hosting services. The company, naturally, has protested this push, calling the bill unconstitutional and vowing to mount a legal challenge if the bill is signed into law. If it does so, it could bounce around courts for years before any eventual ban, if the company declines to sell. A few years is a long time in social media. Ask Snap, or worse, Vine.

And who would buy TikTok? While many major tech companies might love to grab the social network’s engaged young audience, many politicians would balk at making a Big Tech company even bigger. Steve Mnuchin, who was Treasury secretary in the Trump administration, told CNBC he was putting together an investor group. What could go wrong?

— Mat Smith

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Microsoft has unveiled its latest light AI model, called the Phi-3 Mini, for smartphones and other local devices. The aim is to provide a cheaper alternative to cloud-powered large language models (LLMs), allowing smaller organizations to adopt AI, with presumably lower energy burdens and without heady processing costs. According to Microsoft, the new model handily outperforms its previous Phi-2 small model and is on par with larger models like Llama 2. In fact, the company says the Phi-3 Mini responds close to the level of a model 10 times its size. The trick is apparently in the data Microsoft used to train its tiny model.

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Tesla teased ride-hailing features coming to its app ahead of an August robotaxi unveiling. The company released mock-ups of the upcoming feature, which showed the ability to “summon” a ride from the Tesla app. The company has been promising self-driving taxi services . Tesla didn’t offer many details, but it seems to have Uber-like functionality and the ability to remotely set the car’s temperature before arrival.

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Meta

After a few months of testing, Meta is bringing multimodal AI to its smart glasses. Multimodal AI means the system can process multiple types of information, including photos, videos, text and audio. You might have seen feature showcases of AI-connected devices that can view what a device is looking at and offer extra information — that kind of thing. Meta also announced hands-free video call integration with WhatsApp and Messenger and a few more frame designs.

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TikTok Facing Potential US Ban as Congress Passes Bill Requiring Sale

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The U.S. Senate voted on Tuesday to pass a bill that will either ban TikTok from app stores operating in the country or force Chinese company ByteDance to sell the short-form video app.

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The landmark bill has now passed both chambers of Congress, having already been approved by the House of Representatives. President Biden says he will sign the bill into law on Wednesday.

Once that happens, TikTok will be banned in the United States if ByteDance does not divest ownership within nine months, with a possible three-month extension to that deadline if a deal is in progress. China would need to approve any sale, but the Chinese government has already made it clear that it will “firmly oppose” such a move.

ByteDance is also expected to launch a legal challenge against the bill by arguing that it will deprive the app’s 170 million U.S. users of their First Amendment rights protecting freedom of speech.

U.S. lawmakers want TikTok to be sold to a company outside of China over concerns that the Chinese government could force ByteDance to hand over data from users located in the United States. If Beijing made the request, ByteDance would not be able to refuse. There have also been suggestions that Chinese authorities could use TikTok to spread political propaganda.

ByteDance has attempted to alleviate these fears by storing data from U.S. users on servers owned by Oracle, but the White House and lawmakers do not believe that is enough. There are a limited number of companies that would be able to afford TikTok, while most tech giants would likely be prevented from acquiring it due to antitrust concerns.

Note: Due to the political or social nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

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House votes in favor of bill that could ban TikTok

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The US House of Representatives passed a bill on Saturday that could ban TikTok in the country or force its parent company to sell it. Under the revised version, ByteDance would have up to a year to divest, up from six months, originally. The bill now moves to the Senate, which could vote on it in just a matter of days — maybe even this Tuesday.

For that reason, I’m keeping this intro short, because I’ll probably be writing about this TikTok saga, all over again, later this week.

— Mat Smith

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It’s an app, apparently.

Apple’s calculator for Macs is reportedly getting a massive update with macOS 15 to turn it into a note-taking, currency-converting hybrid app. To start with, AppleInsider said the calculator will get a design overhaul, which swaps its number boxes with round buttons. (Innovation!). There will also be a rich history feature to keep track of your calculations. Hopefully, you can still be juvenile and solve for 55378008.

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It’s ending the referral program too.

Another round of price cuts has shaved $2,000 off the starting prices of Tesla’s Model Y, Model X and Model S for buyers in the US. Tesla’s Model Y now starts at $42,990 for the rear-wheel drive base model, while the base Model S has dropped to $72,990 and the Model X starts at $77,990. The company will be hoping these subsequent price cuts will help with all that . Its controversial full self-driving software update has had a too.

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Pareto principles and Princess Peach.

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Nintendo

Data scientist Antoine Mayerowitz has tackled that age-old question: Who is the best character for Mario Kart? Objectively, the answer is a few different combinations. Mayerowitz’s Pareto front analysis lets you narrow your possibilities down to the 14 most efficient. One of them, with the most ideal balance of speed, acceleration and mini-turbo, is Cat Peach driving the Teddy Buggy with roller tires and cloud glider. Yes, write that down. Or check out the project’s website for other racer recommendations.

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The US takes another big step towards banning TikTok – here’s what you need to know

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A TikTok ban in the United States is closer than it’s ever been, with the US House of Representatives voting through the relevant legislation on Saturday – meaning it could become law in just a few days.

As reported by Android Authority and others, the short-form video and social media app needs to cut ties with Chinese owner ByteDance within the next six months (with a possible three-month extension) if it’s to continue operating in the US.

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The bill to ban TikTok is barreling ahead.

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The bill that could ban TikTok in the United States inches closer to becoming law. The legislation passed the House of Representatives last month, then had to face the Senate — and opposition from a few prominent lawmakers. The House is to vote on a package of bills this weekend, which includes a slightly revised version of the TikTok bill. In the latest version, ByteDance would have up to 12 months to divest TikTok, instead of the six months initially pitched.

That change alone was apparently key to winning support from some skeptical members of the Senate, including Sen. Maria Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. What will happen if the bill passes into law? TikTok (and potentially other apps “controlled by a foreign adversary”) would face a ban in US app stores if it declined to sell to a new owner.

— Mat Smith

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Chinese regulators cited national security concerns.

… and in what you might believe is something of a tit-for-tat move for blocking TikTok, Apple has pulled . The country’s internet regulator says the removal was required and justified on national security grounds. Apple is always willing to comply, lest it harm relations with one of its largest markets.

At the exact same time as her new album drops.

Taylor Swift has a new album out.

. .

A second chance for an underappreciated console.

Image of an Analogue Duo console on an unfinished pine tabletop.Image of an Analogue Duo console on an unfinished pine tabletop.

Tim Stevens for Engadget

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I miss the old Instagram – but the last thing I need is a clone from TikTok

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I remember when Instagram first launched back in 2010, and all my mates at school were crowded around my friend’s iPhone 4 making our Instagram accounts and brainstorming cool handle ideas. Things have changed so much since then, and I truly miss the ‘old’ Instagram. That being said, I don’t think I miss it enough to have TikTok step in and try to fill in the gap.

A notification on the app stated that TikTok is gearing up to release a photo-sharing app for users to post their pictures, called TikTok Notes, which will also convert “existing and future public TikTok photo posts” into posts on the new platform. Currently, Tiktok users can post photo slideshows against music tracks, so it’s safe to assume these will be translated to Instagram-esque posts on the new platform. 

According to The Verge, TikTok states that it’s “exploring ways to empower our community to create and share their creativity with photos and text in a dedicated space for those formats”. So, from that, we can assume you’ll also be able to add captions to your Notes posts as well. 

Could TikTok actually take Instagram on? 

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