Cohere asks U.S. court to toss complaint from media alleging copyright infringement

TORONTO - Cohere is asking a U.S. court to throw out complaints from media outlets that have accused the artificial intelligence company of infringing on their copyright.

In a dismissal motion filed in a New York court on Thursday, Cohere accused publishers including the Toronto Star, Condé Nast, McClatchy, Forbes Media and Guardian News of deliberately using its software to "manufacture a case."

The Toronto-based company said the outlets must have "stylized" prompts they entered into Cohere's software to elicit portions of their own work, which sometimes included inaccuracies.

It argued nothing in the complaint filed by the outlets suggests that any real customer has ever used the company's software to infringe on the publisher's copyright.

Increasingly sophisticated deepfake AI-generated political ads threaten to unravel Canada’s social order

Increasingly sophisticated deepfake AI-generated internet political ads threaten to unravel Canada’s social order, experts warn, pointing to the successful war on truth U.S. President Donald Trump is waging south of the border.

Don’t like a columnist’s opinion? Los Angeles Times offers an AI-generated opposing viewpoint

In a colorful commentary for the Los Angeles Times, Matt K. Lewis argued that callousness is a central feature of the second Trump administration, particularly its policies of deportation and bureaucratic cutbacks. “Once you normalize cruelty,” Lewis concluded in the piece, “the hammer eventually swings for everyone. Even the ones who thought they were swinging it.”

Lewis' word wasn't the last, however. As they have with opinion pieces the past several weeks, Times online readers had the option to click on a button labeled “Insights,” which judged the column politically as “center-left.” Then it offers an AI-generated synopsis — a CliffsNotes version of the column — and a similarly-produced opposing viewpoint.

One dissenting argument reads: “Restricting birthright citizenship and refugee admissions is framed as correcting alleged exploitation of immigration loopholes, with proponents arguing these steps protect American workers and resources.”

The feature symbolizes changes to opinion coverage ordered over the past six months by Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who's said he wants the famously liberal opinion pages to reflect different points of view. Critics accuse him of trying to curry favor with President Donald Trump.

Winnipeg TV content delivery firm Taiv acquires potential Ontario rival Local Reach

A Winnipeg advertising technology company is one step closer to launching its product in Canada after acquiring a startup based in Kingston, Ont.

Taiv Inc. purchased Local Reach in a deal that closed last month. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Local Reach co-founders Evan Ferreira and Joseph Liao, who created the startup while studying at Queen’s University in Kingston, will move to Winnipeg and join Taiv’s staff. Taiv acquired some of the startup’s tech as part of the cash-and-stock transaction.

It’s Taiv’s first acquisition and a big milestone for the six-year-old company, according to co-founder and CEO Noah Palansky.

Michaels collaborates with AI in timely, tender new novel about art, poetry and life

In Us Conductors, Sean Michaels’ 2014 Giller Prize-winning debut novel, the Montreal writer skilfully entwined real historical characters and events into a story that spanned Jazz Age New York and a Siberian gulag.

His latest, the utterly lovely Do You Remember Being Born?, has a smaller scope but again incorporates real people — or a version of them — into a timely tale about art and artificial intelligence (AI) that, while asking big questions, never sacrifices smaller, more intimate pleasures to answer them.

Marian Ffarmer is a prize-winning poet who, at 75, has found a certain degree of fame, if not a commensurate amount of wealth. (The character is loosely based on American modernist poet Marianne Moore and shares her cape, tricorne hat and wit; like Moore, she is unusually close with her mother, sharing a bed with her in a cramped apartment as an adult.)

So when she is recruited by a giant tech corporation to collaborate with an AI machine named Charlotte on a poem, she somewhat reluctantly agrees; the astounding fee will allow her to help her son — with whom she has a loving but fraught relationship — put a down payment on a house. (Moore once worked with Ford to name a new car; they ended up going with the prosaic Edsel, but Michaels works in a joke based on one of her fanciful suggestions, Pastelogram.)