Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman urged theater owners to cut down the roughly 30 minutes of trailers and ads before movies. "Get off the ad crack," Rothman told the audience at CinemaCon this week. "Get rid of the endless advertising and substantially shorten the long pre-shows." Variety reports: He noted that frequent moviegoers now show up a half hour late to avoid all the spots (something that reserved seating has made easier than ever before). Rothman said that means many people "don't even see the trailers," which results in "enticements gone to waste." Rothman predicted that the 2026 box office, which has already benefitted from hits like "Super Mario Galaxy Movie" and "Project Hail Mary," will rebound in a big way. But he acknowledged that attendance still trails pre-pandemic levels.

Rothman has been a vociferous defender of the big screen, pushing studios to embrace longer windows so that movies will stay in cinemas longer. That was a theme that Rothman returned to at CinemaCon, pressing exhibitors to hold strong and agree not to show movies that quickly appear on streaming services or on-demand platforms. "Enforce longer windows," Rothman said. "Yes, even if that means you cannot play every film."

In addition to stumping for exhibition, Rothman has practically begged Hollywood to invest in new stories along with all the franchise fare. In a recent New York Times op-ed, for instance, Rothman, the longest-serving studio chief, wrote, "For all the success of films driven by existing intellectual property, originality is essential to movies. Neither movie theaters nor the art form itself can survive without at least some originality. After all, you can't make a sequel to nothing."

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how its product works.

The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There's a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking.

According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. "Google's failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Google's servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code 'sec-gpc: 1.' This means Google should not return cookies," the audit said. "However, when Google's server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the 'set-cookie' command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight."

The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta's failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. "Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals -- it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumer's privacy preferences," the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta's tracking data which contains no GPC check at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google is facing billions of dollars in potential damage claims as part of mass arbitration tied to the company's online search and advertising technology businesses, which courts have ruled were illegal monopolies. Advertisers are banding together to seek payouts through mass arbitration proceedings. While many companies that displayed ads purchased through Google -- including USA Today Co. and Advance Publications -- have sued for damages since the rulings in 2024, advertiser contracts with the search giant require mandatory arbitration over legal disputes.

In arbitration, legal disputes are handled by a mediator, a process that tends to favor companies in individual claims. Mass arbitration -- where 25 or more claims against the same company are pooled together -- have become more common and provide a greater likelihood of settlement awards for claimants. Ashley Keller, a Chicago lawyer whose firm has handled mass arbitrations against DoorDash, Postmates and TurboTax-maker Intuit, said he's already signed up a "significant number" of advertisers to participate in claims against Google. The first of those are expected to be filed this week.

"Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist," Keller said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It seems sensible to seek redress." Keller, who is also representing Texas and other states in a lawsuit against Google for monopolization of advertising technology, estimates potential claims for online search and display ads could reach $218 billion or more, based on calculations from an economist his firm has hired. Similar mass arbitrations have lasted 12 to 24 months between the filing of claims and resolution, he said. "Given the nature of these matters, we cannot estimate a possible loss," Google said in a recent corporate filing. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously."

BrianFagioli writes: Little Snitch, the well known macOS tool that shows which applications are connecting to the internet, is now being developed for Linux. The developer says the project started after experimenting with Linux and realizing how strange it felt not knowing what connections the system was making. Existing tools like OpenSnitch and various command line utilities exist, but none provided the same simple experience of seeing which process is connecting where and blocking it with a click. The Linux version uses eBPF for kernel level traffic interception, with core components written in Rust and a web based interface that can even monitor remote Linux servers.

During testing on Ubuntu, the developer noticed the system was relatively quiet on the network. Over the course of a week, only nine system processes made internet connections. By comparison, macOS reportedly showed more than one hundred processes communicating externally. Applications behave similarly across platforms though. Launching Firefox immediately triggered telemetry and advertising related connections, while LibreOffice made no network connections at all during testing. The early release is meant primarily as a transparency tool to show what software is doing on the network rather than a hardened security firewall.

Microsoft Copilot is reportedly injecting promotional "tips" into GitHub pull requests, with Neowin claiming more than 1.5 million PRs have been affected by messages advertising integrations like Raycast, Slack, Teams, and various IDEs. From the report: According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR's description to include this message: "Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast." A quick search of that phrase on GitHub shows that the same promotional text appears in over 11,000 pull requests across thousands of repositories. Even merge requests on GitLab aren't safe from the injection.

So what's happening? Well, Raycast has a Copilot extension that can do things like create pull requests from a natural language command. The ad directly names Raycast, so you might think that Raycast is injecting the promo into the PRs to market its own app. But it is more likely that Microsoft is the one doing the injecting. If you look at the raw markdown of the affected pull requests, there is a hidden HTML comment, "START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS" placed right just before the ad tip. This suggests Microsoft is using the comment to insert a "tip" that points back to its own developer ecosystem or partner integrations. UPDATE: Following backlash from developers, Microsoft has removed Copilot's ability to insert "tips" into pull requests. Tim Rogers, principal product manager for Copilot at GitHub, said the move was intended "to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow."

"On reflection," Rogers said he has since realized that letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI's ChatGPT ads pilot in the United States has crossed the $100 million annualized revenue mark within six weeks of launch, a company spokesperson said on Thursday, pointing to robust early demand for the AI startup's nascent advertising business. [...] While roughly 85% of users are currently eligible to see ads, fewer than 20% are shown ads daily, with considerable room to grow ad monetization within the existing user pool, the spokesperson said.

"We're seeing no impact on consumer trust metrics, low dismissal rates of ads, and ongoing improvements in the relevance of ads as we learn from feedback," OpenAI said. The company plans to expand the test globally in additional countries in the coming weeks, including in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. OpenAI has now expanded to over 600 advertisers, with nearly 80% of small- and medium-sized businesses signaling interest in ChatGPT ads, the spokesperson said. The ChatGPT maker is set to launch self-serve advertiser capabilities in April to broaden access and drive further growth. CEO Sam Altman announced plans to begin testing ads on ChatGPT back in January after previously rejecting the idea. "I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," Altman said in 2024.

Further reading: OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An appeals court invalidated the Biden-era Federal Trade Commission's attempt to punish Intuit for allegedly deceptive ads that pitched TurboTax as free. Under then-Chair Lina Khan, the FTC determined in 2024 that the TurboTax maker violated US law with deceptive advertising and ordered it to stop telling consumers, without more obvious disclaimers, that TurboTax or other products are free. The FTC's chief administrative law judge had previously found that Intuit's ads violated prohibitions on deceptive advertising because the firm "advertised to consumers that they could file their taxes online for free using TurboTax, when in truth, for approximately two-thirds of taxpayers, the advertised claim was false."

Intuit appealed in the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and got a resounding victory on Friday in a 3-0 ruling issued (PDF) by a panel of judges. "Following the Supreme Court's decision in SEC v. Jarkesy, we hold that adjudication of a deceptive advertising claim before an administrative law judge violated the constitutional separation of powers," the 5th Circuit panel said. The Supreme Court's June 2024 ruling (PDF) in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy held that the SEC system for issuing fines violated the right to a jury trial. The 5th Circuit panel said the Jarkesy decision confirms that the FTC must pursue deceptive advertising claims in courts rather than its own administrative process. [...]

The 5th Circuit ruling acknowledged that most people can't use TurboTax for free. "TurboTax 'Free Edition' has been part of the TurboTax range for more than a decade, available to taxpayers for what Intuit refers to as 'simple tax returns,'" the ruling said. "Most American taxpayers do not have 'simple tax returns.' The TurboTax website is designed so that any individual taxpayer can begin preparing a tax return in TurboTax Free Edition, but those who enter disqualifying information are prompted before filing to upgrade to a paid product." Although the court noted that Intuit stopped the specific ads challenged by the FTC, the ruling said the cease-and-desist order issued by the agency could have far-reaching effects on Intuit marketing. "The cease-and-desist order is remarkably broad: it prohibits Intuit for the next twenty years from advertising 'any goods or services' as free unless specific, extensive, and arguably unworkable requirements are satisfied. The order is not confined to tax-preparation solutions and extends to all products sold by Intuit," the ruling said.

The 5th Circuit said the FTC's deceptive advertising claims are "traditional actions at law and equity and thus involve private rights that demand adjudication in an Article III court." The court rejected the FTC's argument that the claims involve public rights that may be adjudicated by administrative agencies. "In sum, there is overwhelming evidence that Section 5 of the FTC Act did not create a new duty for merchants to refrain from deceptive advertising," the 5th Circuit said. "That duty long predated the FTC Act and could be enforced by private parties in actions at common law or equity for fraud, deceit, or unfair competition."

Apple is reportedly preparing to add search ads to Apple Maps, "and it could start to roll out to users by the summer," reports AppleInsider, citing sources from Bloomberg (paywalled). From the report: Apple will make an announcement as soon as March. This will bring ads to search queries within the navigation app, which will operate similar to Google's advertising system. Retailers and brands will be able to bid for ad spots located against search queries for specific terms, such as types of food or services. The winning bid will be able to show an ad at the top of the results, pointing to a related location for that business. Apple also announced in January that it would add more ads within the App Store, starting March in the UK and Japan.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: According to the research firm Gartner, 50% of U.S. consumers say they would prefer to do business with brands that avoid using GenAI in consumer facing content such as advertising and promotional messaging. The survey of 1,539 Americans, conducted in October 2025, also found growing skepticism about the reliability of online information, with 61% saying they frequently question whether information they use for everyday decisions is trustworthy... Gartner found that 68% of consumers often wonder whether the content they see online is real, while fewer people now rely on intuition alone to judge credibility [only 27%]. Instead, more consumers are actively verifying information and checking sources.
Gartner's senior principal analyst offered suggests discretion for brands trying to use AI. "The brands that win will be the ones that use AI in ways customers can immediately recognize as helpful, while being transparent about when AI is used, what it's doing, and giving customers a clear choice to opt out."

A German court ruled that TCL misled consumers by marketing certain TVs as "QLED" when they "do not deliver the color reproduction expected from QLED TVs." It has ordered the company to stop advertising or selling those models in Germany. TechRadar reports: The case was filed by Samsung, which claimed that TCL was running deceptive advertising, and more court cases on the same topic are coming in other countries, including the US. The lawsuits all make the same claim: that what TCL calls a QLED isn't a QLED as it's commonly understood, and that consumers are being mis-sold TVs as a result. The court found that TCL's quantum dot TVs, such as the QLED870 series available in Germany, didn't deliver the characteristics of a quantum dot LED, and that consumers were being misled as a result.

The tests were commissioned by Seoul chemicals company Hansol Chemical (which, it's worth noting, works with Samsung, a key TCL rival, and which heavily promoted the results of these tests alongside launching the court case) and carried out by Geneva's SGS and the UK's Intertek. According to ET News (via Google Translate), "no indium (In) or cadmium (Cd) was detected in three TCL QD TV models. Indium and cadmium are essential materials that cannot be omitted for QD implementation... if neither is present, QD technology cannot be said to have been applied." You can see the test results here.

TCL disputed the findings -- "The QD content may vary depending on the supplier, but it definitely contains cadmium," it responded -- and published its own tests, including a test by SGS, the same firm that conducted tests for Hansol. The results contradicted Hansol Chemical's tests, but those tests used a different methodology: where TCL's tests focused on TCL's quantum dot films, Hansol's commissioned tests were on finished TCL TVs. [...] Hansol Chemical has filed a complaint against TCL with the US Federal Trade Commission, alleging false advertising, and TCL is also facing class action lawsuits in several US states making the same claim. TCL isn't alone here: Hisense has also been targeted in the US.

Last November, Amazon sued Perplexity demanding that the AI search startup stop allowing its AI browser agent, Comet, to make purchases for users online. Today, a judge ruled in favor of the tech giant, granting it a temporary court injunction blocking the scraping of Amazon's website. According to court filings, the judge found strong evidence the tool accessed the retailer's systems "without authorization." CNBC reports: In a ruling dated Monday, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney wrote that Amazon has provided "strong evidence" that Perplexity's Comet browser accessed its website at the user's direction, but "without authorization" from the e-commerce giant. Chesney said Amazon submitted "essentially undisputed evidence" that it spent more than $5,000 to respond to the issue, including "numerous hours" where its employees worked to develop tools to block Comet from accessing its private customer tools and to prevent the tool from "future unauthorized access." "Given such evidence, the Court finds Amazon has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim," Chesney wrote.

Chesney's ruling includes a weeklong stay to allow Perplexity to appeal the order. Amazon wrote in its original complaint that Perplexity's agents posed security risks to customer data because they "can act within protected computer systems, including private customer accounts requiring a password." The company also said Perplexity's agents created challenges for the company's advertising business, because when AI systems generate ad traffic, the impressions have to be detected and filtered out before advertisers can be billed. "This requires modifications to Amazon's advertising systems, including developing new detection mechanisms to identify and exclude automated traffic," Amazon wrote in its complaint. "These system adaptations are necessary to maintain contractual obligations with advertisers who pay only for legitimate human impressions."

German publishers and advertising groups are urging regulators to fine Apple over its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) system, arguing it unfairly restricts access to advertising data while allowing Apple to remain the central gatekeeper -- without subjecting its own apps to the same restrictions. If Germany's antitrust authority does rule against Apple, the company could face fines of up to 10% of its global revenue. 9to5Mac reports: One of the countries investigating whether ATT is anticompetitive is Germany. Last year, in an attempt to appease the country's antitrust watchdog, the company proposed several changes to the framework's rules. From Reuters' original coverage of Apple's changes proposals: "Apple had agreed to introduce neutral consent prompts for both its own services and third-party apps, and to largely align the wording, content and visual design of these messages, said Andreas Mundt, head of Germany's Bundeskartellamt. The company also proposed simplifying the consent process so developers can obtain user permission for advertising-related data processing in a way that complies with data protection law." [...] At the time, German regulators launched a consultation with industry publications to determine whether the proposals addressed their concerns. As it turns out, the answer was a hard no.

As Reuters reported today: "Apple's proposed changes to its app tracking rules do not resolve antitrust issues in the mobile advertising market, associations representing German publishers and advertisers said on Tuesday as they urged the country's antitrust authority to slap a fine on the U.S. tech giant. [...] 'The proposed commitments would not change the negative effects of the App Tracking Transparency Framework,' Bernd Nauen, chief executive of the German Advertising Federation, said in a joint letter signed by the trade bodies. 'Apple would remain the data gatekeeper and would continue to decide who gets access to advertising-relevant data and how companies can communicate with their end customers,' he said."

Today, Apple updated the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with support for its new M5 chips. It also unveiled a pair of all-new Studio Display XDR monitors. Longtime Slashdot reader jizmonkey shares details about the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which look to be fairly major updates from the previous generation: Apple announced its newest CPUs today, which it claims has the fastest single-threaded performance in the world. Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max have eighteen-core designs, versus twelve or fourteen in the M4 Pro and fourteen or sixteen in the M4 Max. However, the number of higher-performing cores has been reduced significantly. In the older M4 designs, the chips had eight, ten, or twelve "performance" cores and four "efficiency" cores. In the M5 design, there are now only six higher-performing cores (now called "super" cores) and twelve lower-performing cores (now called "performance" cores). [Apple positions this "reduction" as a redesigned architecture with new core types.] The maximum amount of RAM remains the same at 128GB for the M5 Max (64GB for the M5 Pro), and GPU performance has increased. [The M5 Pro features up to a 20-core GPU, while the M5 Max scales up to 40 cores, each equipped with a Neural Accelerator. Apple also says the new architecture delivers over 4x peak GPU compute for AI compared to the previous generation, along with up to 35 percent faster performance in ray-traced graphics workloads.] Laptops with the new chips are available to order starting tomorrow and will be delivered starting March 11. As for the new XDR monitors, MacRumors highlights some of the key features in its reporting: Apple today introduced an all-new Studio Display XDR monitor with a 27-inch screen, mini-LED backlighting, 5K resolution, peak brightness of 2,000 nits for HDR content, up to a 120Hz refresh rate, Thunderbolt 5, and more. The new Studio Display XDR replaces Apple's former Pro Display XDR, which has been discontinued. Going forward, there are now two Studio Display models.

Both new Studio Display models have the same overall design as the original model. Both models have a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, but it now supports Desk View on the new models. Both models also feature an upgraded six-speaker system, with Apple advertising "30 percent deeper bass" compared to the previous model. Only the higher-end Studio Display XDR received a 120Hz refresh rate, mini-LED backlighting, increased brightness, and faster 140W pass-through charging. The regular Studio Display still has a 60Hz refresh rate and up to 600 nits of brightness. Both models have 27-inch displays with a 5K resolution.

The new Studio Displays can be pre-ordered starting Wednesday, March 4, ahead of a Wednesday, March 11 launch. In the U.S., the regular Studio Display continues to start at $1,599, while the Studio Display XDR starts at $3,299.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content.

The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism.

Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party company which manages the 20-minute, advertising-driven pre-show before a theater's lights go down. Screenvision -- which co-organized the festival along with Modern Uprising Studios -- provides content to multiple theatrical chains, not just AMC. After The Hollywood Reporter reached out to AMC about the brewing controversy, the company issued this statement to THR on Thursday: "This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC's U.S. locations. AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate."

A bare-bones Chinese app called "Are You Dead?" -- whose entire premise is that solo-living users tap daily to confirm they're still alive, triggering an alert to an emergency contact after two missed check-ins -- has rocketed to the top of China's app store charts and gone viral globally without spending a dime on advertising.

The app wasn't built for the elderly, as many assumed; its creators are Gen-Z developers who said they were inspired by the isolation of urban life in a country where one-person households are expected to hit 200 million by 2030. Its rise coincided with China's birth rate plunging to a record low. Beijing quietly removed the app from Chinese stores last month, and the developers are now crowdsourcing a new name on social media after their first rebrand attempt, "Demumu," failed to catch on.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found.

The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot were leading to a "material, verifiable, and substantial" reduction in planet-heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry's tactics were "diversionary" and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to "greenwashing."

He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. "These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business," said Joshi. "Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it." [...] Joshi said the discourse around AI's climate benefits needed to be "brought back to reality." "The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacenter expansion," he said.

A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China. From a report: The case filed by Almeida Law Group on behalf of San Francisco-based "Spencer Christy, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated" centers on the Data Security Program regulations implemented by the DOJ last year. According to the suit, these were "implemented to prevent adversarial countries from acquiring large quantities of behavioral data which could be used to surveil, analyze, or exploit American citizens' behavior."

The complaint states the DOJ rule "makes clear that sending American consumers' information to Chinese entities through automated advertising systems and associated databases with the requisite controls is prohibited." The case states the threshold for "covered personal identifiers" is 100,000 US persons or more and lists a range of potential identifiers, from government and financial account numbers to IMEIs, MAC, and SIM numbers, demographic data, and advertising IDs.

Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn't ask before making "Meta AI" an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

"The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — raises an important question about what's in it for the internet companies..." Behind the scenes, the companies are laying the groundwork for a digital advertising economy that could drive the future of the internet. The underlying technology that enables chatbots to write essays and generate pictures for consumers is being used by advertisers to find people to target and automatically tailor ads and discounts to them....

Last month, OpenAI said it would begin showing ads in the free version of ChatGPT based on what people were asking the chatbot and what they had looked for in the past. In response, a Google executive mocked OpenAI, adding that Google had no plans to show ads inside its Gemini chatbot. What he didn't mention, however, was that Google, whose profits are largely derived from online ads, shows advertising on Google.com based on user interactions with the AI chatbot built into its search engine.

For the past six years, as regulators have cracked down on data privacy, the tech giants and online ad industry have moved away from tracking people's activities across mobile apps and websites to determine what ads to show them. Companies including Meta and Google had to come up with methods to target people with relevant ads without sharing users' personal data with third-party marketers. When ChatGPT and other AI chatbots emerged about four years ago, the companies saw an opportunity: The conversational interface of a chatty companion encouraged users to voluntarily share data about themselves, such as their hobbies, health conditions and products they were shopping for.

The strategy already appears to be working. Web search queries are up industrywide, including for Google and Bing, which have been incorporating AI chatbots into their search tools. That's in large part because people prod chatbot-powered search engines with more questions and follow-up requests, revealing their intentions and interests much more explicitly than when they typed a few keywords for a traditional internet search.

Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way. From a report: The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world's most popular apps. Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing its recommender systems. The demand follows the Commission's declaration that TikTok's design is addictive to users -- especially children.

The fact that the Commission said TikTok should change the basic design of its service is "ground-breaking for the business model fueled by surveillance and advertising," said Katarzyna Szymielewicz, president of the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish civil society group. That doesn't bode well for other platforms, particularly Meta's Facebook and Instagram. The two social media giants are also under investigation over the addictiveness of their design.

Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after Sunday's Super Bowl ad mocking ChatGPT's advertising, reports CNBC (citing data analyzed by French financial services company BNP Paribas).

The Claude gain, which took it into the top 10 free apps on the Apple App Store, beat out chatbot and AI competitors OpenAI, Google Gemini and Meta. Daily active users also saw an 11% jump post-game, the most significant within the firm's AI coverage. [Just in the U.S., 125 million people were watching Sunday's Super Bowl.]

OpenAI's ChatGPT had a 2.7% bump in daily active users after the Super Bowl and Gemini added 1.4%. Claude's user base is still much smaller than ChatGPT and Gemini...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attacked Anthropic's Super Bowl ad campaign. In a post to social media platform X, Altman called the commercials "deceptive" and "clearly dishonest."
OpenAI's Altman admitted in his social media post (February 4) that Anthropic's ads "are funny, and I laughed." But in several paragraphs he made his own OpenAI-Anthropic comparisons:

• "We believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the U.S... Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions.

• "If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads."

• "Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI — they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be."