Good morning. We’re almost at the end of the week, folks. Let’s catch up on the tech news
1. CBA wants you to go electric (but there’s a catch)
Electric vehicles are expensive. Even the cheapest EV available in Australia, the BYD Dolphin, starts at $38,890, and the Tesla Model 3, the Musk company’s more ‘budget’ offering will set you back $63,100. But, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia wants to get you into an EV sooner than your cash reserves would allow, partnering with Tesla for car loans. As part of the agreement announced yesterday, CBA’s business and retail customers will be able to access financing through the bank directly from the Tesla website.
2. Pizza Hut Australia suffers a data breach
On Wednesday, an email sent by Pizza Hut Australia to customers detailed a cyber security incident, in which personal information like names, phone numbers, and home addresses, had been compromised. Credit card information has not been compromised, according to the Pizza chain, and the company is warning customers to be on the lookout for phone calls, messages, and emails that could be malicious.
3. DALL-E 3 makes its debut
The AI company behind ChatGPT is placing the wildly popular chatbot into the next version of its image generation tool, DALL-E 3. While it’s cramming ChatGPT into the image generator, the company also appears to be reigning the AI in. Notably, DALL-E 3 will reject prompts in which users ask the AI to create a piece of art that is modelled after a living artist’s style while dead artists are fair game. At the same time, artists will also be able to opt out of having their own work used to train future iterations of the generative AI—at least that’s what OpenAI claims. These new limits come as legal pressure against copyrighting AI work mounts in U.S. courts while AI art generators also face lawsuits over their training data.
4. Speaking of AI…
As reported by The Verge, more authors are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. The Authors Guild, along with 17 authors including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult are suing OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, for copyright infringement, with the hope of getting the filing classified as a class action. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of copying authors’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration.
5. New zombie parasite just dropped
As reported by Ars Technica, a ‘zombie’ parasite has been studied, and it has been revealed that it can infect and control ants with a temperature-based on/off switch. The lancet liver fluke has been known to infect snails, ants, grazing animals, and humans, but it can “zombify” ants to alter their brain behaviour. Just in case the Cordyceps from The Last of Us weren’t enough for you.
BONUS ITEM: The Swifties broke Google.
Swifties, the vault is jammed! But don’t worry, there are no blank spaces inside. We’re in our fix-it era and will be out of the woods soon 🩵 https://t.co/2Ija1pbnnf
— Google (@Google) September 19, 2023
Have a lovely day.
Image: Commonwealth Bank
