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Opera has launched Opera One a new version of the browser that comes packaged with an AI-powered chatbot called Aria. Just like the Bing chatbot on Microsoft Edge, Operas AI assistant lives within the browsers sidebar, where you can have it answer questions using real-time information, generate text or code, brainstorm ideas, and more.

The built-in chatbot is powered by Operas Composer AI engine and connects to OpenAIs GPT model. To use the tool, you need to sign up for an Opera account if you dont have one already. Once thats done, you can click the Aria icon on the left side of the screen to start chatting. While Opera first started testing the revamped version of the browser in May, now its available to everyone who downloads it.

After trying out the tool for myself, I noticed many similarities to Bing on Edge but also a couple of key strengths. One of the nicest parts about Aria is that you dont have to open up the sidebar to actually use it. Instead, you can open up a command line-like overlay where you can quickly type in a question or prompt. You can also highlight text directly on a webpage, which opens up a menu for Aria to translate what youve highlighted, explain it, or find related topics on the web.

Even though Aria can do almost everything that the Bing chatbot can, it still doesnt quite stack up to the Edge assistant. Aria doesnt have the same type of menu system that lets you quickly select a conversation style when asking questions and also doesnt present any one-click options that let you choose the tone, format, and length of the text you wish to generate.

You can still tweak Arias responses in these ways, but you just have to request it manually. Of course, Aria is still a new tool, and Opera will likely keep updating it as time goes on. Maybe Opera will eventually incorporate image generation capabilities as well, which is something that Microsoft has recently added to its browser.

In addition to Aria, Opera One also comes with a couple of extra upgrades. That includes new tab islands that automatically group related tabs together based on their context, along with a new design and an upgraded browser architecture. You can try out Aria and the new Opera One browser for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

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Opera launches revamped browser equipped with an AI sidekick - The Verge

Outbound AI founders, clockwise from top left: Stead Burwell, Jonathan Wiggs, Kshitij Moghe and Justin Ith. (Outbound AI Photos)

Outbound AIannounced Wednesday $16 million in fresh funding to advance the rollout of its artificial intelligence tools that help healthcare teams interact with insurance companies and automate administrative work during the claims process.

The Seattle startup, spun out of Madrona Venture Labs in 2021, aims to improve the human experience for healthcare workers. The company recently launched its GPT-powered AI agent to automate elements of the medical billing process, including updates to claim status, benefits verification, prior authorizations, and denials.

The companys tools can communicate with human representatives, take notes, generate summaries for each call and transaction, and sense when the system reaches its limitations, prompting a worker to step in and take over the interaction.

Founder and CEO Stead Burwell said the new funding and product enhancements come as the US and other countries are bracing for a dramatic increase in patient volumes. He said factors such as the greying of America, expanding middle class, and nursing shortage will contribute to the strain on healthcare workforces.

This is why we have such a sense of urgency to bring these technologies to market, Burwell told GeekWire.

The startup said its tools are four to five times faster than humans and more cost-effective. They operate continuously, scaling as needed to manage any volume, letting workers offload rote tasks to focus on other work. Outbound said the AI is HIPAA compliant and built on Microsoft Azure.

Outbound declined to reveal its exact client count, but said that it acquired 15 new customers within the past four months. The startup targets small- and medium-sized healthcare groups, such as independent physician practices and the medical billing companies that support them. It generates revenue through a consumption-based pricing model, charging users based on the monthly usage in minutes of its products.

The latest round was co-led by Madrona Venture Group and SpringRock Ventures. Other backers include Epic Ventures, Ascend, Pack Ventures, Locke Capital, Tacoma Venture Fund and KCRise Fund. Outbound raised $7 million shortly after its founding in March 2021.

There are a growing number of companies using AI to ease administrative burdens in healthcare:

Our approach brings more scalability and efficiency, Burwell said of competition. Were able to deliver more extensive information relevant to a task, which allows our ML models to make better conclusions and recommendations on behalf of staff and supervisors.

Burwell is joined by three other co-founders:Justin Ith, a former product lead at Madrona Venture Labs; Saykara veteranKshitij Moghe; and chief technology officerJonathan Wiggs, who helped build the speech models for Apples Siri while at Nuance, and most recently was vice president of engineering and architecture at tax software giant Avalara.

Outbound has about 40 employees, up from 27 in September. The company said it expects to keep hiring if it continues to hit on its milestones.

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Healthcare billing and claims automation startup Outbound AI raises ... - GeekWire

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

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

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.

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