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Dropbox is launching two different but related AI-powered services into its platform. The first is simple and obvious: a tool for summarizing and querying documents. This is neat and useful and the sort of feature youll see in most tools in this category over time.

The other thing Dropbox is launching is much more ambitious and interesting. Its a universal search engine that can access your files in Dropbox but also across the entire web. Its called Dash and comes from Dropboxs 2021 acquisition of a company called Command E. The idea behind Dash, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston tells me, is that your stuff isnt all files and folders anymore, and so Dropbox cant be, either. What used to be 100 files or icons on your desktop, he says, is now 100 tabs in your browser, with your Google Docs and your Airtables and Figmas and everything else. All the tools are better, but they resist useful organization. So youre just like, okay, I think someone sent that to me. Was it in an email? Was it Slack? Was it a text? Maybe it was pasted in the Zoom chat during the meeting. Dash aims to be the Google for your personal stuff app that so many others have tried and failed to pull off.

The Dash app comes in two parts. Theres a desktop app, which you can invoke from anywhere with the CMD-E keyboard shortcut, that acts as a universal search for everything on your device and in all your connected apps. (If youve ever used an app like Raycast or Alfred as a launcher, Dash will look very familiar.) Theres also a browser extension, which offers the same search but also turns your new tab page into a curated list of your stuff. One section of the Dash start page might include the docs Dropbox thinks youll need for the meeting starting in five minutes; another might pull together a bunch of similar documents youve been working on recently into what Dropbox calls a Stack. You can also create your own stacks, and as you create files and even browse the internet, Dash will suggest files and links you might add.

Tired: Folders. Wired: Stacks.

The term stacks is important, by the way. Dropbox has been a files-in-folders company since it was founded in 2007 and is making a conscious break with that paradigm as it leans into all things AI. Theres no real container that can hold a Google Doc and an Excel spreadsheet and a 10-gig 4K video, Houston says, and the old organizational systems break down even further as the platform begins to learn that all three of those things are about your house renovation project, and hey, here are some other documents about that project too!

Could you just call all that a folder? Sure! But the way Dropbox sees it, the concept of folders has so much history that its getting in the way. Folks are looking for an increased kind of flexibility, says Devin Mancuso, Dropboxs director of product design, or when it comes to tabs and apps, theyre thinking about grouping and arranging those in slightly different ways. You can have a file in multiple stacks, just to name one example, which doesnt work in a folders world. Houston and Mancuso both compare stacks instead to Spotify playlists in that theyre a mix of personally curated and algorithmically enhanced. Losing the f-word is both a practical design and a philosophical one.

When Houston gave me a demo of Dash working on his own account, his new-tab page pulled up both a bunch of information about me and The Verge (presumably tied to the calendar event that included us both) and built an automated stack of documents related to the planning offsite he and his executives were in the midst of that week. Its such a basic concept, right? he says, mousing around in his browser. Search that actually works, a collection concept for links and files and any kind of cloud content, bringing machine intelligence into the experience its more of a self-organizing Dropbox. Not everyone has to be their own librarian, filing things away.

Its more of a self-organizing Dropbox. Not everyone has to be their own librarian, filing things away.

This is, of course, not a new or unique idea. The idea of cross-platform, universal search for your personal data and documents has been around practically as long as the internet. Large language models can definitely make that search more powerful, which is why companies like Mem and Rewind and even Google have been investing in it in big ways.

Houston readily acknowledges that Dropbox isnt the first company to have this idea, but he thinks Dropbox has one big advantage over most of its competitors in this space: it already has plenty of users and companies uploading all their most important and most sensitive stuff to the platform. Integrating with the Figmas and Airtables of the world is a much easier problem, in some ways, than getting access to your existing file system. Its a very natural extension, Houston says, to be like, We started with your files, but now we support everything else. Maybe we should have been supporting everything else for a long time.

The big question, for Dropbox and everyone else working on this, is security. Here, too, Houston thinks Dropbox has a leg up. Nobody wants their stuff to be chopped up into little pieces and fed into some kind of advertising machine, he says. So the fact that Dropbox is a fundamentally private service, the fact that were subscription, the fact that our incentives are aligned, it all helps. Especially with all your data in the cloud, there are still plenty of questions about how data is accessed, who can see what, how personalized various systems should be, and much more.

As of today, Dropbox AI available to all Pro customers and a few teams, and theres a waitlist to get into the Dash beta as well. The next phase for Dropbox, Houston says, is to learn what people want and how they use the products. He says hes happy to be somewhat conservative at first in the name of not making huge mistakes you really cant have an AI hallucinating information out of your most sensitive work docs but he sees this stuff getting better fast.

In general, Dropbox has been thinking about AI integrations for a long time. Its one of a class of what you might call work-about-work companies, along with Asana, Slack, and others;theyre not the tools you use to get stuff done theyre the tools for keeping your files in order and your team in sync and your life together. For all these companies, step one was making it easier to manage everything. But that always implied a step two: teach the things to manage themselves. In the physical world, Houston says, the equivalent is to just imagine you have all these papers on your desk, and theyre neatly sorting themselves into piles. Thats great. Thats what were building.

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Dropbox AI and Dash make it easier to find your files from all over ... - The Verge

Body

Dear Editor:

On Monday, we mourned a Marion County mother who should not have died. A mother who was protecting her children from an unhinged neighbor. A mother doing what all mothers do; love their babies. This mother, A.J. Owens, knocked on a closed, locked, metal door and was shot to death through the door in front of her 9-year-old son. Her son now blames himself for the death of his mother, a tremendous weight that no child should ever carry. There were many victims that day. Four young children will grow up without a lifetime of special moments with their mother. A.J.s own mother, brother, and a number of beloved family members and friends are left to struggle through immense sadness, grief, and senseless loss.

Floridas Stand Your Ground law, along with other recent gun related legislation, enables a dangerous gun culture that abandons safety measures for all Floridians, and disproportionately affects gun violence victims of color.

The Democratic Womens Club of Florida calls for justice for A.J. Owens and her family. We further support all efforts to eliminate or amend Stand Your Ground and similarly reckless gun legislation.

We grieve for a mothers life cut short due to gun violence. We grieve with her children, family, and friends. Finally, we vow to support and affect gun legislation reform. Floridians have a right to enjoy safety in their communities. Sadly, A.J. and her children werent privy to that right.

Meri Forte-Namuj President The Democratic Womens Club of Florida

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR Justice for A.J. Owens - Osceola News-Gazette

A new report has revealed how child safety investigators are struggling to stop thousands of disturbing artificial intelligence (AI) generated child sex images that are being created and shared across the web.

According to a report published by The Washington Post on Monday, the rise of AI technology has sparked a dangerous explosion of lifelike images showing child sexual exploitation causing concern among child safety experts.

The report notes that thousands of AI-generated child-sex images have been found on forums across the dark web. Users are also sharing detailed instructions for how other pedophiles can make their own realistic AI images of children performing sex acts, commonly known as child pornography.

Childrens images, including the content of known victims, are being repurposed for this really evil output, Rebecca Portnoff, the director of data science at Thorn, a nonprofit child-safety group tells The Washington Post.

Since last fall, Thorn has seen month-over-month growth in AI images prevalence on the dark web.

The explosion of such images has the worrying potential to undermine efforts to find victims and combat real abuse as law enforcement will have to go to extra lengths to investigate whether a photograph is real or fake.

According to the publication, AI-generated child sex images could confound the central tracking system built to block such material from the web because it is designed only to catch known images of abuse, rather than detect newly-generated ones.

Law enforcement officials, who work to identify victimized children, may now be forced to spend time determining whether the images are real or AI-generated.

AI tools can also re-victimize any individual whose photographs of past child sex abuse are used to train models to generate fake images.

Victim identification is already a needle in a haystack problem, where law enforcement is trying to find a child in harms way, Portnoff explains.

The ease of using these tools is a significant shift, as well as the realism. It just makes everything more of a challenge.

The images have also fueled a debate on whether they even violate federal child-protection laws as the pictures often depict children who do not actually exist.

According to The Washington Post, Justice Department officials who combat child exploitation say such images are still illegal even if the child depicted is AI-generated.

However, there is no previous case in the U.S. of a suspect had been charged for creating deepfake child pornography.

In April, a man in Quebec, Canada was recently sentenced to three years in prison for using AI to generate images of child pornography the first ruling of its kind in the country.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.

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Report Uncovers Thousands of AI-Generated Child Abuse Images ... - PetaPixel

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Left: Family of Ajike Owens/Right: Marion County Sheriff's Office

The white woman who shot and killed a Black woman who confronted her after she had thrown an object at her children has been arrested and charged with manslaughter culpable negligence, battery and two counts of assault.

The incident had made national headlines due to Floridas controversial stand your ground law, which gives individuals the right to use reasonable force, including deadly force, to protect themselves.

The suspect in question, Susan Lorincz, 58, had killed Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old mother of four, after a long-standing feud between the two, who had been neighbors for over two years, according to Marion County Sheriffs Office.

Ashley Remy lives next door to Ajike AJ Owens and her children.

Remy tells REVOLT Black News that everyone knew Susan Lorincz as a Karen.She says that Lorincz would often call the children in the neighbor derogatory names such as the n-word, Bastards, Black slaves, etc pic.twitter.com/r6TIRr2FIA

In avideo posted on Facebookthe towns sheriff Billy Woods said that the shooting was not a case of stand your ground, but simply a killing.

Now many of you were struggling to understand why there was not an immediate arrest, Woods said. The laws here in the state of Florida are clear. Now I may not like them. I may not agree with them. But however, those laws I will follow.

The video also showed two detectives and a deputy escorting Lorincz while her hands were behind her back.

The sheriffs office further revealed that Lorincz had grown frustrated because Owens children would play in a field close to her apartment.

On Friday night at around 9 PM, deputies responded to a trespassing call in the neighborhood, but upon arrival, they discovered that Owens suffered from a gunshot wound.

Deputies provided her with first aid before rushing her to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead.

According to Woods, Owens had feuded with the neighbor for quite some time and there was a lot of aggressivenesswhether it be banging on the doors, banging on the walls and threats being made.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has been hired to represent Owens family in the shooting and stated that the shooter HASNT been arrested or charged with anything by law enforcement for the unjust killing, according to astatementhe posted on Facebook at the time of the shooting.

Meanwhile, the local sheriff said at the time that the case is complex in nature due to Floridas stand your ground law.

On Monday, Owens family, their attorneys and community leaders gathered at a news conference in Ocalas to express their disappointment in the way the case has been handled following her death.

She was rendered voiceless, Owens mother, Pamela Dias said. We are here on her behalf. We are here on behalf of the four kids that are left behind, without a mother. She further added that her 9-year-old grandson was standing next to his mother when she was gunned down.

Anytime something this tragic happens, there are always a lot of questions, Woods said at the news conference. A lot of people dont understand how the laws in the state of Florida sometimes work.

Following the suspects arrest, Woods said that he wanted to thank Ms. Owens family for their patience as we conducted the diligent investigation that we were bound by law to conduct. Ms. Lorinczs fate is now in the hands of the judicial system which I trust will deliver justice in due course. As I go to bed tonight, I will be saying a prayer for Ms. Owens children and the rest of her family. Id ask all of you to do the same.

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White Woman Who Murdered Black Woman in What She Felt Was ... - Shine My Crown

Theres something a little on the nose about making the credits to a TV show called Secret Invasion with AI. For a while now, AI has been creeping into our artistic endeavours, invading it. This path has been walked by NFTs before it, a thing that looks like art and walks like art, but is in fact a zebra. Where the cash scam of NFTs could be spotted from a mile off and was difficult to understand, AI is a much easier sell to the general public. That makes it far more dangerous.

How AI has been pitched to the public is you type in some words, and a picture comes out. Its how many people wish art worked - you tell an artist exactly what to draw, and they soullessly recreate it for free. Its an instant gratification machine - you type in some prompts, and you get a funny picture. But theres more to it than that, as Marvels latest disrespect for artists demonstrates.

Related: AI Will Be Gaming's Downfall

Most people who use AI were never going to pay an artist anyway. They arent using it for professional needs, or for artwork they otherwise would have commissioned. Its just a way to while away the time. Generally Id advise against it, as feeding the machine only helps it grow, and tells businesses that we prefer AI art rendered in seconds with zero thought process rather than something deliberately created. But even if we say casual use is harmless, Marvel is not using it for casual use.

On the face of it, Marvel is using it for the opening credits, which it otherwise would have used real art for. But thats not quite the whole story. Its the opening credits of a show it only expects to do middling numbers, which has had limited marketing, and which only serves to obligate viewers to watch yet another TV show ahead of The Marvels in November. This is a show designed to go slightly under the radar, and so with it Marvel can make AI usage normal in a show with limited stakes. If it gets away with it here, we will see it used in bigger projects too.

Weve seen CGI get significantly worse recently, and thats because of increased workload. With only Warner Bros., Disney, and Sony making the big superhero movies that require VFX work, they can apply pressure to contractors. Dont hit the deadline? Thats one third of your potential work gone, forever. Studios push themselves harder and harder so other studios can pay them less and make more money. The only alternative is to make no money at all. Enter AI.

While you can save money by churning out shows and movies that rely entirely on IP, cutting corners by cheaping out on VFX, even cheaping out can be expensive. More expensive than free, certainly. Using AI for the credit doesnt mean cutting a corner fine, it means driving right on through it. All of the artists past and present who have been crucial in Marvel and Disneys rise (two corporations more than any other built on the backs of artists) are having their legacy thrown out. If the Walt Disney Corporation doesnt value people who can draw, what business on Earth will?

Ive always been reluctant to use the attack line that AI art looks bad, because eventually itll look good. Or at least, something that will pass for good. The core problem is that its completely unoriginal, and there is zero thought behind what it does. Think of something like Across the Spider-Verse, where every single frame includes a deliberate choice. Then look at Marvels Secret Invasion, where each second of the opening credits has an ugly fluttering of colours. It lingers on some images as if to imbue them with importance, but the joy of speculation is robbed from us when we know it was created by robots who know nothing.

Director and executive producer Ali Selim says its deliberate, and meant to mimic Skrull artwork When we reached out to the AI vendors, that was part of it it just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity, you know? Who did this? Who is this?. First off, AI vendors has replaced content as my least favourite phrase used to bastardise art. Taking data and prompts from other people, repackaging it as cheap sludge, and selling it on.

Secondly, what are the chances that Skrull artwork resembles the moronic ugly shit tech bros try to claim is the next big art movement? Id say pretty damn low, unless I was making a Marvel show while being asked to save money and roadtest AI, in which case Id come up with a similar bullshit lie. The irony is a real artist could have come up with a fresh artstyle that captured the look of the Skrull people, rather than the same slop weve seen a million times before.

Im not an absolutist with AI materials. In video games, AI is needed so the enemies know when to shoot at you, and Spider-Verse artists used it as a tool to handle the underlying complications of their robust animation style. But the line in the sand has always been using AI for creative purposes, and the MCU has just flagrantly crossed it. I doubt it will be the last time.

It wouldnt surprise me if the whole thing turns out to be stolen anyway. Thats literally all AI art does, and if an artist spots something that resembles their own work in the credits, Marvel could be in trouble. Given the bridges Marvel has repeatedly burned with artists, there will be a lot of solidarity around. Its a cold, lonely future for Marvel, and before long that will go for movie theatres too. The general public may not care as much about issues like this, but it cares about shit. And this is shit.

The team that worked on the original Iron Man movie created a far more appealing visual palette in a cave with a box of scraps. Every project since Endgame has increasingly proven that these days, Marvel is not Tony Stark.

Next: No Hard Feelings Jennifer Lawrence Full Frontal Is 2023s Wildest Scene

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Marvel Secret Invasion's AI Credits Are A Soulless Insult To Artists - TheGamer