Elon Musk’s xAI sues Minnesota over law banning ‘nudification’ technology; Associated Press via The Guardian, July 29, 2026

Associated Press via The Guardian; Elon Musk’s xAI sues Minnesota over law banning ‘nudification’ technology

"Elon Musk’s company xAI has sued Minnesota over the state’s first-in-the-nation law banning “nudification” technology on websites and apps, potentially providing a test for how far states can go in constitutionally regulating the use of artificial intelligence.

Musk’s company sued on Monday in federal court, days before the law is set to take effect on Saturday and make Minnesota the first state to try to outlaw the increasingly proliferating technology that lets people use AI to create fake nude images of real people. The law was signed in May.

In the 38-page lawsuit, xAI – whose AI model chatbot and image generator Grok is available on the social media platform known as X, formerly Twitter, and elsewhere – said it does not contest the state’s interest in banning the distribution of AI-generated nude images of real people without their consent. But it said Minnesota’s law “extends far beyond that goal”, banning many constitutionally protected images and video and subjecting the company to a penalty of $500,000 for each violation."

Google Starts Scanning All Your Photos As New Update Goes Live; Forbes, April 20, 2026

Zak Doffman, Forbes; Google Starts Scanning All Your Photos As New Update Goes Live

"Take a moment to think before you dive in. That’s the best advice for Google Photos users, as the company confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation. That means Gemini seeing who you know and what you do. You likely have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re all exposed if you update.

We’re talking Personal Intelligence, Google’s latest AI upgrade path which lets users opt-in to connecting Google apps to Gemini...

This is the latest iteration in the ongoing battle between convenience and privacy playing out on our phones and computers."

ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines; Axios, March 28, 2025

 Ina Fried, Axios; ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines

"AI image generators aren't new, but the one OpenAI handed to ChatGPT's legions of users this week is more powerful and has fewer guardrails than its predecessors — opening up a range of uses that are both tantalizing and terrifying."

Should You Be Allowed to Profit From A.I.-Generated Art?; The New York Times, September 27, 2024

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times; Should You Be Allowed to Profit From A.I.-Generated Art?

[Excerpt]

"We attempt to attribute art whenever we can, and anything that’s only for purchase we either avoid or pay for. This particular piece seems to be available only in an Etsy shop, where the creator apparently uses A.I. prompts to generate images. The price is nominal: a few dollars. Yet I cannot help thinking that those who make A.I.-generated art are taking other artists’ work, essentially recreating it and then profiting from it. 

I’m not sure what the best move is...Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

There’s a sense in which A.I. image generators — such as DALL-E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — make use of the intellectual property of the artists whose work they’ve been trained on. But the same is true of human artists. The history of art is the history of people borrowing and adapting techniques and tropes from earlier work, with occasional moments of deep originality...

Maybe you’re worried that A.I. image generators will undermine the value of human-made art. Such concerns have a long history. In his classic 1935 essay, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ the critic Walter Benjamin pointed out that techniques for reproducing artworks have been invented throughout history. In antiquity, the Greeks had foundries for reproducing bronzes; in time, woodcuts were widely used to make multiple copies of images; etching, lithography and photography later added new possibilities. These technologies raised the question of what Benjamin called the ‘‘aura’’ of the individual artwork...

As forms of artificial intelligence grow increasingly widespread, we need to get used to so-called ‘‘centaur’’ models — collaborations between human and machine cognition."