Governor Gavin Newsom signed a flurry of AI bills—but not the most high-profile one

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.

This week, I’m focusing on the California legislature’s work on regulating AI. I also review Microsoft’s new Copilot features announced this week, as well as a new study about where AI models get their news.

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Newsom signs pile of AI bills as the SB 1047 deadline approaches

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a pile of AI bills into law on Tuesday. Two of those bills concern the rights of actors in a world where studios have the option to use an AI-generated version of an actor rather than the genuine article. AB 2602 requires studios to state explicitly in contracts with actors that they’re claiming the right to create an AI-generated likeness of their body or voice. AB 1836 imposes a 70-year requirement in which studios must get consent from a deceased actor’s estate before generating an AI likeness. (Both bills build on AI-related concessions that actors won during the writers’ strike.)

Another trio of bills signed into law by Newsom deal with the use of AI in politics. AB 2655 requires online platforms to remove or label deepfakes that misrepresent political candidates during election season. AB 2839, meanwhile, expands the time period around elections in which individuals are prohibited from knowingly sharing deepfakes and other AI-generated disinformation. And AB 2355 requires campaigns to disclose any use of AI-generated or AI-manipulated ad content.?

Tuesday's news is just as notable for what it didn’t include: SB 1047, which would impose a basic set of safety and reporting requirements on companies developing large “frontier” models. The bill intends to get the state more involved in ensuring that AI companies don’t create unsafe models that could cause or enable catastrophic harm (for example, the creation of a bioweapon).?

Click here to read more about the AI legislation Newsom signed—and the big one he didn’t—this month.

Microsoft rolls out the second “wave” of AI at work

Microsoft rolled out on Monday a new set of AI features within its productivity and collaboration apps. The showcase event,? called Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2, was meant to display the second phase of Copilot’s integration into modern business workflows. As demonstrated on Monday, the AI Copilot is ever present in the interface, and has become more adept at fetching relevant contextual information, including proprietary or company-specific information from a knowledge graph.

“Copilot Pages” is a good example. The tool is something like Google Docs, with the AI copilot acting as a coworker in a collaboration group. One demo video shows a user asking Copilot to fetch information about a potential project. The user can then chat with the AI, and finally move all the AI’s responses onto a “Page,” where other users are invited to weigh in. As the team iterates and fleshes out the idea, it can use the Copilot to pull in documents that might help advance the work, like proposal templates or project plans from the past.

Another feature, Narrative Builder, takes a similar approach, but within the PowerPoint environment. The tool starts by generating a sample presentation outline based on a small amount of information provided by the user, then pulls in presentation templates and art that fit the company’s style. The tool lets a user get to a reasonably good draft quickly, then begin reacting to it, instead of staring at blank pages. A new Prioritize my Inbox tool uses AI to prioritize emails based on the body of the email itself. For instance, it can glean from an email if an action needs to be taken by the recipient, and how urgently the recipient needs to act.?

Click here to read more about Microsoft’s latest Copilot features.

NewsGuard: Two-thirds of top news sites block AI crawlers

Large language models are trained using massive amounts of data scraped from the public internet without explicit permission—and without paying for it. As this has become better understood, many publishers have included a line of code in their websites telling the web crawlers “do not scrape.” In a new report, NewsGuard says that 67% of news websites it rates as “top quality” now block web crawlers’ access to their content. NewsGuard, which provides anti-misinformation tools, deduces that AI model developers must then rely disproportionately on news data from low-quality sources such as The Epoch Times and ZeroHedge, which may publish rumors or conspiracy theories, or have a political agenda. Among these low-quality sites, 91% allow the crawlers, NewsGuard finds. “This helps explain why chatbots so often spread false claims and misinformation,” the report states.

Click here to read more about NewsGuard’s report on websites’ anti-data scraping policies.

More AI coverage from Fast Company:

• Even with a $150 billion valuation, OpenAI is far from a sure bet
• Microsoft’s AI Copilot will now help you make pivot tables and write Python code within Excel
• New AI tools can dig up skeletons in politicians’ social media histories—and yours, too
• Generative AI promised limitless creation—instead, it’s all about summarization

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