A reporter tries Lensa, but unlike her male peers whose avatars were astronauts, warriors, and the like, many of hers were “pornified”, with 16 of 100 topless (Melissa Heikkilä/MIT Technology Review)

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Sensor Tower: Lensa tops the US App Store charts with 3.6M installs in December; app saw 12.6M global installs in Dec. so far, up 600% from last 11 days of Nov.  —  Lensa AI’s popularity has had a notable impact on the App Store’s Top Charts.  The popular photo and video editing app recently went viral …

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
Alphabet’s DeepMind unveils Sparrow, an AI chatbot that learns from human feedback and searches Google for information to support its claims  —  The lab trained a chatbot to learn from human feedback and search the internet for information to support its claims.

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
A look at the privacy concerns raised by OpenAI’s GPT-3, Google’s LaMDA, Meta’s OPT-175B, and other large language models trained on troves of personal data  —  Large language models are trained on troves of personal data hoovered from the internet.  So I wanted to know: What does it have on me?

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
Artists say they risk losing income as people use their names as distinctive style prompts in text-to-image AI art generators for commercial purposes  —  Greg Rutkowski is a more popular prompt than Picasso.  —  Those cool AI-generated images you’ve seen across the internet?

Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta announces Horizon Worlds avatars are getting legs using an AI model to predict the body’s position, an avatar store, avatars are coming to Reels, and more  —  Meta’s Horizon avatars will be getting legs.  So far, the company’s avatars have weirdly just hovered off the ground …

Melissa Repko / CNBC:
GameStop partners with FTX on “e-commerce and online marketing initiatives” in the US and reports a Q2 net loss of $108.7M, up from $61.6M YoY; stock up 10%+  —  – GameStop said quarterly sales declined and losses widened, as its cash pile shrank and inventory swelled.